Competition is Bullshit

So I guess there’s some guy on TikTok.

There’s always someone on TikTok. I’m not sure if this one is better or worse than the fourteen-year-old witches who decided to “hex the moon” to…IDK, prove some sort of point…and got half the occult internet to flip its collective shit while the rest of us snickered.

This particular TikTok guy–I hear secondhand, because I’m not really on TikTok, not for any vast moral reason but just because I can’t be fucked learning how to use yet another social platform–apparently went off about how other writers are competitors and we should all be as sharks within the ruthless sea of capitalism or whatever. 

He is, of course, made of bullshit, and there’s nothing bros don’t try to turn into a scarcity economy. A number of better and more idealistic authors have pointed this out by talking about community and solidarity and uplifting all of us, which is probably the better way to go, but to my selfish little heart the real flaw in his argument is the same thing that comes up in any gamer group.

(Yes, I’m relating everything to RPGs, as I do when I don’t relate it to sex, food, or video games. Film at eleven.)

Running a game is not the same as playing one. It has its own joys, but you’re not immersing yourself in a character, you’re not encountering surprises in the world or the story, and you’re doing a fuckton more work. If your group of geeks is big enough, chances are that there are multiple games going on and the GM in one is a PC in the other, or will be down the road. If one person always runs the games, either they’re the rare treasure that actually likes it better than playing, the players regularly buy them beer, or, ideally, both.

Most writers like to read. 

Most writers like to read in the same genre they write in–not exclusively, for most of us, but still.

To put it another way: I’m not writing my own spicy paranormal romance, I’m not fucking Amish. 

If I write a story, it’s often (market input aside) because I want to read that sort of story. If another author writes something similar and good, I’ll generally squeal like an anime schoolgirl and run out to get a copy in my grabby little hands. I would punch a nun if it’d get me more elf or angel smut with experienced heroines and heroes who don’t talk like fratbros, or fantasy set in the 1980s, or Victorian romance that actually involved occult stuff of the period but for real. 

Oh, but the heartless capitalist market means–yeah, yeah. 

You know what I do with my royalties, generally speaking? I spend them on other books. Or movies, or TV, or video games, or explicit Ferdinand/FemByleth/Dimitri fanart (okay, I haven’t yet, but if you point me toward some I absolutely will), or, in general, other creative work. The saying about passing around the same $20 bill is probably true in media, and it’s not all or even mostly because of solidarity. We create stuff because we like it, so if other people create similar stuff we’ll buy it.

(Also, as Juliet McKenna pointed out on Bluesky, many people read fast and read a lot. I have a bunch of favorite living authors, two of them are Ursula Vernon (who releases a couple books a year) and Stephen fucking King, and I’m still searching for new people to read half the time. Especially if I’m in the mood for a particular kind of story, which is often the case.)

Yes, there’s some competition on the traditional publishing side, because publishers have only so much money and time. (The fact that there are fewer big publishers every time I blink is a whole other problem.) On the other hand, it’s easier than ever to get self-published work out there, and every fellow writer in my genre who gets a Big Five deal makes that genre more well-known, which gives me a better chance of getting a deal in the future or otherwise making a profit.

Mostly, though, the more other authors like me write and get published, the more books are out there that I’ll probably enjoy. That’s important. I have a lot of train rides to get through and a fuckton of human contact to avoid.