The Comfort Myths of Indie Publishing

A clear-eyed critique of indie publishing myths: why “the cream rises” fails, how quality, packaging, distribution, and luck interact—and what to do instead.

Publishing is a slog. People burn out. People quit. People look at what the attention economy asks of them and decide they’d rather be obscure than become a full-time carnival barker. So when I read John A. Douglas’s “The Gems Are Worth It,” I recognized the mood immediately: tired, candid, trying to offer something sturdier than despair.

I share some of his instincts. But a few of his most comforting claims don’t survive contact with reality.

And comfort myths are not neutral.

They don’t just soothe. They shape behavior. They make writers confuse morality with mechanics.

Here’s the model I trust more than folk wisdom: Quality is necessary and rarely sufficient. Packaging (cover/title/blurb/category fit) translates quality into a click. Distribution (platform, partnerships, ads, timing, social proof) makes the click happen. Luck multiplies everything and never asks permission.

If you don’t separate those, you end up treating outcomes as verdicts on your worth. That’s the hidden cruelty inside his “encouragement.”

Bottom line: the system isn’t fair, but it’s not pure roulette either. The levers are real, just unevenly distributed.

1) “The cream rises to the top” is a dangerous illusion

“The cream rises” sounds like wisdom because it’s old. It’s optimism with plausible deniability. It implies a kind of moral physics: quality naturally separates, floats upward, gets noticed.

But the world of publishing isn’t governed by “culinary laws.” It’s a crowded room where everyone is playing their own speaker at once. And the loudest signal isn’t the truest one.

The marketplace is governed by category fit, platform mechanics, distribution, and—yes—luck.

Quality matters. But it doesn’t come with guarantees. And turning “quality tends to help” into “quality will rise” creates a trap: when your work doesn’t rise, the story pressures you into one of two useless, even harmless, conclusions:

• I must not be cream. (self-harm disguised as realism)

• The world is rigged. (cope disguised as insight)

Both stories let you outsource agency to fate.

The more honest metaphor isn’t cream. It’s signal in noise. Being great is not the same thing as being heard. Meritocracy is a religious idea disguised as career advice: be good and you will be seen.

Because if you take “cream rises to the top” at face value, then when you are not seen, you start doubting whether you are good. Instead, you should be asking how to build your own spotlight.

2) “Most indie books are just fine” — I don’t agree (and the distinction matters)

Douglas says most indie books are “fine.” I get the intention: defuse elitism, normalize competence, stop treating every book like a sacred trial. Everyone gets a medal.

But “fine” is the wrong diagnosis.

Not because indie is secretly all masterpieces, but because indie is less average than it is uneven. The useful distinction isn’t only quality, it’s intent (art swing vs product swing) plus execution.

My experience isn’t a bell curve of mild competence. It’s peaks and pits: passion projects that swing hard and sometimes whiff; strange little gems that shouldn’t work but do; polished products that feel engineered rather than authored.

There’s also a slippery ambiguity here:

• “Fine” as baseline (readable, competent) is real, and it’s not a sin.

• “Fine” as strategy is a trap, because forgettable is the default outcome.

Readers don’t remember “fine.” They remember specific. Voice, obsession, weirdness, precision, delight, dread. Anything with a pulse.

The goal isn’t to avoid being bad. The goal is to avoid being politely ignored.

“Fine” is teflon. It’s not offensive. It doesn’t stick.

3) The take on AI slop is sane, but let’s not pretend nothing changed

Here I’m with him: the panic about AI slop “drowning” human writers often assumes we were previously living in a curated paradise. We weren’t. There has always been slop: rushed drafting, derivative trend-chasing, unedited uploads, industrial-speed content mills staffed by humans. AI didn’t invent low standards; it changed the rate and scale at which low standards can be produced.

Slop is not a technology. It’s a temptation.

But it’s also true that AI changes the economics of “okay.” When “okay” becomes cheaper to produce, it becomes less valuable. The ceiling didn’t drop. The floor fell out.

So the response isn’t moral hysteria. Bad work is as old as work. The response is differentiation: choices slop usually can’t make because slop avoids commitment. It avoids specificity. It avoids consequences.

AI may increase the volume of “okay.” That’s not a reason to panic. It is a reason to stop aiming for okay.

The upshot of the AI churn is that quality becomes more valuable as a differentiator. Still not a guarantee, though.

4) “Indie is the author’s voice at its most pure” — I don’t buy it

“Pure” is doing too much work here. It’s a romance word. It makes indie sound like untouched nature and traditional publishing like a chemical plant.

Reality is uglier and more useful: indie can be freer in some ways and more constrained in others. Yes, you can ship without a committee. You can be weird. You can take swings that would make a cautious acquisitions team break out in hives.

But indie can also be aggressively market-shaped. If you’re chasing tropes, optimizing blurbs, writing to algorithmic incentives, watching category tags like a hawk, then your voice is not necessarily “pure.” It’s priced. Sometimes that pricing is smart. More likely is that it hollows the work out.

Traditional publishing can sterilize a voice. It can also sharpen it. Indie can preserve a voice. Indie can also blur it into trend-soup. I have seen too many indies devolve into adjective-filled paragraphs of nonsense to believe in indie purity.

Voice isn’t purified by a business model. Voice is forged by choices: what you refuse to do, what you refuse to imitate, what you keep even when it costs you attention. “Purity” isn’t a toggle you switch on by uploading a file yourself.

5) His tone is a classroom sensibility (and why that matters)

This is what made me smile, because once you see it you can’t unsee it. The piece has that classroom cadence: validate feelings, normalize competence, encourage persistence, end with a list.

That tone is appropriate for morale; it breaks when it starts describing markets.

I don’t mean this as a jab at teachers or the listed works. I mean it as a critique of what that tone does when the subject is a market:

It makes the system sound cleaner than it is. It teaches writers that persistence is strategy, when persistence is fuel. Strategy is steering. Saying persistence is strategy turns structural forces into personal virtues. It smuggles in myths under the banner of kindness.

Sometimes writers don’t need comfort. They need an accurate map of the battlefield. Because the map is ugly. Sometimes the honest truth isn’t “keep going, you’ll be fine,” but: this is unfair, and you’ll need leverage in addition to craft.

Encouragement has its place. But encouragement becomes a problem when it makes people mistake hope for a plan.

So what’s worth keeping from Douglas’s piece?

Two things. Well, one thing and another with amendments.

First: the refusal to panic about AI. That’s rare and healthy. Moral hysteria doesn’t help writers write better books.

Second: the reminder that not every book needs to be a life-ruining masterpiece. True. Entertainment matters. Pleasure matters. A book can be “just a good time” and still be art.

But I’d add one correction, and one demand.

Correction: not every book needs to be a gut punch. But every book needs to be somebody’s specific obsession—something only you would make in exactly that way.

Demand: stop relying on comfort myths to do the job of strategy.

And if you still think “fine” is good enough, remember this: “fine” is where books go to be politely ignored.

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Thanks for reading! Here’s the companion piece: The Indie Reality Audit