With a lack of evidence of real readers to draw on, all we are left with is assumptions of who we perceive a reader to be. This is where I coined the phrase, "Perceived reader."
The whole promoting yourself part of "producing content" is not the same thing as writing.
Packaging, in the real world, gets us every time. It’s about making something look desirable. Desirable is not always the gauge we can reliably use to measure quality.
Sacrifice and suffering do not create art. There’s this idea that if you put enough suffering into your work a masterpiece will be the result. I think there’s more suffering in the world than there are writers for that to be true.
There was and maybe still is a marketing and publishing blindness to the idea that you could start publishing novels that will appeal to male readers. Where’s our new Fight Club? Or Catcher in the Rye? Or Catch-22? In the world I see you’re reading these books, perhaps in a carpool lane of some abandoned superhighways, regardless of your gender.
If you ever get to a point where you’re asking, ‘Who the hell am I to be writing any of this?’ you may as well stop.
I don’t always know why I choose the words I choose.
But I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter.
We don’t define books by what they are.
We define them by who we think will read them.
And that’s the problem
There is no “Why?”
We don’t write because we have a reason.
We write because we can’t stop.