More Is Never Enough

There is a strange thing happening in the book world where it feels like everyone is being asked to give more to everyone else all the time, and somehow nobody seems particularly happy with what they’re getting. Readers want more from authors. Authors want more from themselves, from readers, and sometimes from each other. Influencers are expected to give more to authors while simultaneously expecting more from the authors they work with. Social media platforms want more content from all of us. Publishing wants more books, more sales, more visibility, more engagement, more everything. We have built this enormous machine powered almost entirely by the idea that whatever anyone is currently doing cannot possibly be enough.

I feel it constantly as an author. It sometimes seems like simply writing a book has become the smallest part of being a writer, which is bizarre considering the book is supposedly the entire reason any of us are here. A book now needs character art and mood boards and teasers and reels and aesthetic graphics and bonus scenes and alternate covers and special editions and signed editions and sprayed edges and launch boxes and physical ARCs and digital ARCs and newsletters and behind-the-scenes content and whatever social media trend appeared twelve minutes ago. None of those things are bad. I actually love a lot of them. Anyone who has watched me become completely unhinged over character art knows nobody is holding me hostage and forcing me to make pretty things about my imaginary people. I genuinely enjoy it. The problem begins when something an author chooses to give becomes something people believe every author is required to provide.

The same thing happens with the books themselves. Readers want short books because nobody has time to read eight hundred pages, except another group is tired of short books because they want stories with enough room for deep character development and complicated plots. They want the romance to develop naturally, but they don’t want the slow burn to be too slow. They want spice, except when there is too much spice and then apparently the book has no plot. They want more plot, except when the plot gets in the way of the romance. They want emotionally complicated characters, but sometimes get frustrated when emotionally complicated people behave like emotionally complicated people instead of attending six months of therapy before chapter one. They want realism until realism is inconvenient, escapism until something isn’t realistic enough, beautiful prose until the prose becomes too flowery, accessible prose until it becomes too simple. None of those preferences are unreasonable on their own. People like different things. The unreasonable part is when “I don’t like this kind of book” becomes “authors need to stop writing this kind of book.”

That distinction has started disappearing in a lot of online conversations. There is a massive difference between saying, “I wish this book had more sex,” and saying, “Authors need to stop advertising romance books that don’t have enough sex.” There is a difference between saying, “I prefer shorter books,” and acting as though a six-hundred-page book is evidence that an author doesn’t respect her readers’ time. There is a difference between deciding you don’t like a cover and expecting the author to replace it because enough people in a comment section agree with you. A book can simply not be for you. That is allowed. There are more books available to us than any human being could read in several lifetimes. We do not need every single one of them to satisfy our individual preferences.

Social media has complicated this because the relationship between readers and authors has become incredibly intimate compared with what it used to be. You can finish someone’s book, open Instagram, and be inside her office thirty seconds later. You can watch her draft the next book, see her character inspiration, hear about her edits, watch her cover come together, know what she drank while writing chapter twelve, and sometimes know what her children ate for breakfast. That access can create wonderful communities. Some of my favorite parts of being an author have come from being able to talk directly with readers who care about these worlds as much as I do. But access can also create the illusion that because something can be shared, people are entitled to have it shared with them.

The current obsession with demanding access to an author’s writing process is probably one of the clearest examples. Artificial intelligence has created legitimate ethical and creative concerns, and I understand why readers care about whether the books they purchase were actually written by the person whose name is on the cover. What I don’t understand is the increasingly bizarre collection of supposed “AI tells” being passed around online as though someone discovered a literary blood test. Proper grammar is suspicious now. Certain punctuation is suspicious. Particular sentence structures are suspicious. Apparently if some random person on Instagram announces with enough confidence that a normal feature of written English “sounds like AI,” writers are expected to start opening their private working documents to prove otherwise.

I’m not doing that.

My drafts are not public records. My notes are not public records. My document history is not public record. My conversations with editors and other people involved in my books are not public record. If I choose to show readers those things, that is because I invited them into that part of my process. It is not evidence I am required to produce because somebody got a bad vibe from a semicolon. We can have serious conversations about AI, authorship, ethics, and disclosure without creating an environment where every writer is presumed guilty until she provides strangers with enough access to satisfy them.

Physical products have developed a similar problem because I don’t think people always understand what they actually cost. Physical ARCs are not free for the author because they are free for the recipient. Neither are PR packages, signed books, stickers, bookmarks, art prints, custom boxes, packing materials, postage, or the seventeen other cute things we sometimes shove into a box before mailing it across the country. Somebody pays for all of it, and when you are an indie author, that somebody is very often you.

There is a persistent idea that published authors are making far more money than many of us actually are. I would love to invite that idea to come look at one of my approximately two-hundred-dollar royalty months, particularly one where I had just released a book and hadn’t even made back what I spent producing it. I assure you, Bezos has not secretly made me wealthy. There is no Scrooge McDuck vault of Kindle money underneath my house. By the time editors, covers, formatting, art, ads, websites, software, printing, shipping, event costs, retailer percentages, and every other expense involved in running an author business take their turn, sometimes the money left for the person who actually wrote the book is almost comical.

That doesn’t mean readers are wrong for wanting affordable books. Books are expensive. Everything is expensive. I want my books to be affordable too, because I would rather someone be able to read them than stare sadly at a price tag. But “I wish books were cheaper” is different from expecting individual authors to absorb every increasing production cost so prices never change. A twenty-dollar paperback does not put twenty dollars in an author’s bank account. Depending on how and where that book is produced and sold, the author may see a surprisingly small fraction of it. Lowering a price can eventually mean there is no sustainable business left behind the book at all.

PR has become another strange intersection of generosity, business, and entitlement. I genuinely enjoy sending things to people. There is something ridiculously satisfying about putting together a beautiful package for a release and watching somebody open it who is genuinely excited about the book. Influencers also provide real value. Good book influencers spend enormous amounts of time building their platforms, reading, photographing, filming, editing, writing captions, engaging with their communities, and maintaining trust with their audiences. I absolutely believe creators deserve to be compensated for their work when they are providing a paid service.

What I don’t believe is that a follower count automatically entitles anyone to an author’s money or products. A PR package is a marketing expense, not a trophy awarded at a particular follower milestone. Paid influencer work is a business transaction, and like every other business transaction, it needs to make sense for both people involved. Someone can charge more than I can afford without being greedy, and I can decline without being cheap. Someone can have hundreds of thousands of followers and still not be a useful marketing fit for my books, while someone with a much smaller audience may have exactly the readers I’m trying to reach. My books are part of my brand and my business, and I have to make decisions based on whether a partnership aligns with that brand, my values, my audience, and the amount of money I actually have available to spend. “But I have X followers” cannot be the entire business proposal.

Authors participate in this culture too, and sometimes I think we may be the people most brutal about demanding more from authors because we do it to ourselves every fucking day. There is always another thing we are supposedly supposed to be doing. Write faster, publish more, post consistently, make videos, send newsletters, answer comments, build a reader group, maintain a website, learn ads, understand SEO, attend signings, create merchandise, make bonus content, network with other authors, interact with influencers, follow trends without looking like you’re following trends, and somehow remain authentically yourself while strategically turning that authenticity into a marketable brand. Oh, and somewhere in there, please find eight uninterrupted hours to write the book that supposedly started this entire career.

Then we look sideways.

That might be the most destructive part. Another author is posting every day and her engagement is incredible, so maybe I need to post more. Someone else sent elaborate PR boxes and everybody is talking about them, so maybe I need to do that. Another author released six books this year, so maybe my two aren’t enough. Someone has beautiful character art for every book. Someone is at every signing. Someone’s newsletter has fifty thousand subscribers. Someone went viral. Someone hit a list. Someone appears to be doing everything I’m doing plus twelve other things while maintaining perfect hair and presumably sleeping at some point, although I have no evidence of that.

It is incredibly easy to turn another person’s success into evidence that you are not doing enough.

I have done it to myself more times than I can count. I have looked at numbers that disappointed me and immediately decided the solution was more. More posting, more graphics, more marketing, more ads, more books, more money spent, more access, more of myself. Maybe if I work a little harder, give readers a little more, show up a little more often, make everything a little prettier, I can finally reach whatever invisible point exists where an author has officially done enough.

Except that point does not exist.

That is what I think is underneath so much of the entitlement I see in the book world. We are all living inside an economy of more. Platforms need more content because content creates engagement. Authors need more engagement because engagement supposedly creates sales. Influencers need more reach because reach creates opportunities. Readers are constantly shown more books, more merchandise, more special editions, more access, and more ways to participate. Everyone is being encouraged to want more while simultaneously being told to produce more for everyone else.

Eventually somebody says no, and suddenly no feels offensive.

An author says she isn’t sending physical ARCs this release. Someone takes it personally. An influencer quotes a price an author cannot afford and the author thinks she is unreasonable. A reader says she cannot justify the price of a special edition and someone questions whether she is really supportive. An author refuses to show her drafts and people decide she must have something to hide. Someone declines a collaboration, doesn’t respond to a message quickly enough, chooses not to make character art, doesn’t offer signed copies internationally, or simply says something is outside her budget, and what should be a completely ordinary boundary gets interpreted as a statement about how much she values another person.

Sometimes no is just no. Sometimes no means I cannot afford it. Sometimes it means this doesn’t make sense for my business. Sometimes it means I don’t have the time. Sometimes it means I don’t want to. That last one is allowed too.

I think we need to get much more comfortable distinguishing desire from obligation. Wanting something does not mean another person owes it to us. Readers do not owe authors reviews, purchases, promotion, loyalty, or endless praise. Influencers do not owe authors free labor because we mailed them a paperback. Authors do not owe other authors promotion, introductions, blurbs, connections, or access to audiences they spent years building. None of us gets to decide that another person’s time, platform, money, labor, or resources belong to us because having them would be useful.

And authors do not owe readers unlimited access in exchange for buying our books.

I don't owe physical ARCs. I don't owe PR boxes. I don't owe gifts tucked into packages. I don't owe character art, bonus chapters, alternate covers, a particular page count, or a particular amount of sex. I don't owe anyone a tour of my writing process because someone on social media has developed a theory about my punctuation. I don't owe strangers my drafts or notes, and I certainly don't owe the internet access to my family, private relationships, health, finances, or every detail of the life happening behind the books.

That does not mean I don't want to give readers things. Quite the opposite. I love doing extra things when I can. I love making art and graphics and talking about characters. I love sending packages when the budget allows it. I love sharing pieces of my process when I think they're interesting. I love the community around books, and I think readers being able to interact with authors is one of the coolest things modern publishing has given us.

But there is a difference between something I give and something that is taken for granted.

A gift stops feeling like a gift when the absence of it becomes evidence that I have failed someone. Generosity stops feeling generous when it becomes another required deliverable. Access stops feeling like connection when saying no to that access makes someone angry. Eventually, if every extra thing an author offers becomes the new minimum expected from her, there is no incentive to keep offering anything at all. More importantly, there is no joy left in it.

I don't want to resent the things I currently love giving people.

I don't want to resent readers because I spent every last dollar trying to satisfy expectations I could never actually meet. I don't want to resent influencers because I convinced myself I had to participate in collaborations I couldn't afford. I don't want to resent other authors because I compared my output to theirs until I burned myself into the ground. And I definitely don't want to resent writing because I allowed everything surrounding the books to become more important than the books themselves.

At some point I have to remember what my actual job is.

I am an author. My job is to write books.

When I sell someone a book, I owe her the book I represented to her. I owe her my best effort to make it a quality product. I owe basic honesty and professionalism in the same way any person selling something owes those things to the person buying it. I want to create stories I am proud to put my name on, and I take that responsibility seriously.

I do not owe everyone the book they personally would have preferred me to write.

Some of my books will be long. Some will be shorter. Some will have an obscene amount of sex. Some may take their sweet fucking time getting there. Some readers will adore them and other readers will wonder what the hell everyone else saw in them. That's art. That's preference. That's the reason thousands of authors can write romance without all of us producing the same book.

My responsibility is not to satisfy every possible reader. It is to write the book I intended to write as well as I can.

Everything else—the character art, the graphics, the packages, the glimpses behind the curtain, the ridiculous things I create because I got excited at two in the morning—is something I choose to build around that.

I want those things to stay choices.

Maybe that's what I want most from the book world right now: for all of us to get a little more comfortable hearing no without turning it into rejection, disrespect, greed, dishonesty, or evidence that somebody is a terrible person. An author can say no to a PR package. An influencer can say no to unpaid work. A reader can say no to an expensive special edition. An author can say no to sharing something personal. Nobody needs to make a crying video about it. Nobody needs to rally the troops. Nobody needs to turn a completely normal boundary into the discourse of the week.

Sometimes we cannot give each other what we want.

Sometimes we simply don't want to.

And that has to be okay if any of us are going to survive this industry with the parts of ourselves that loved books in the first place still intact.

Because more will never be enough. There will always be another platform, another trend, another package, another edition, another piece of content, another expectation, another person asking for something we could theoretically give them. If I measure whether I'm doing my job well by whether everyone has finally stopped asking me for more, I will work myself to death waiting for a silence that is never coming.

So I have to decide what enough looks like for me.

I have to protect enough money to pay my bills, enough privacy to still have a life that belongs to me, enough energy to be a person when I close my laptop, and enough creativity to actually sit down and write the next book. I have to be able to give something because it brings me joy and say no when giving it would cost more than I have.

And other people are allowed to do exactly the same thing.

We can want things from each other without believing we are entitled to them. We can be disappointed by a no without turning the person who gave it into an asshole. We can support creators without expecting ownership of them. We can run businesses without forgetting that there are human beings on the other side of every transaction.

Most importantly, maybe we can remember that the book was never supposed to be an admission ticket into the author's entire life.

You bought the story.

I hope you fucking love it.

Everything else is something I invited you to share with me.

xoxo, Lila Grey