Dear Substack Subscribers

There are 33,334 of you.

Probably even more by the time you read this.

I do not ask much of you. I do not ask often. But I need to ask something of you now.

I need to ask you to buy my novel.

But, first, I want to say a few things about capitalism.

It has come to my attention that many of my readers believe that I am some kind of communist, or Marxist, or that I am opposed to capitalism, and free markets, and so on. Whenever I write about global capitalism, they write to me, these readers, and advise me not to do that. They suggest that I use other words to refer to the globally hegemonic ideological system that we live in, all of us, regardless of where we live.

I cannot do that. Things are what they are. Global capitalism is global capitalism. It may not be the kind of capitalism you want, but it is the kind of capitalism we have.

That said, I am not opposed to capitalism. Opposing capitalism is kind of silly. It is one big global capitalist world. Capitalism is the ideological structure of that world. “Opposing” capitalism is like opposing “reality.” To do that, you need an alternative “reality” from which to mount your opposition. But there is only ever one “reality.”

Capitalism is our “reality.” That is why I write about it.

I have written about it in my stage plays and essays, and I am writing about it now in my novels, not because I hate it, or “oppose” it, or want to replace it with some other “reality,” but because that is my job as an author.

If you’re an artist, you’re either questioning and challenging the “reality” of the times you live in or you are reproducing and reinforcing that “reality.” I have never had any interest in doing the latter.

So, please, if you’re one of those readers who get upset when I write about capitalism, relax, I’m just as capitalist as you are.

You don’t believe me? OK, I’ll prove it to you.

As I mentioned at the top of this column, there are 33,334 of you, currently. Substack subscribers. Mostly non-paying subscribers. Which is fine. That’s my business model. I do not paywall my Substack columns because (a) I want to reach as many readers as possible, and (b) I trust that enough of you who can afford to pay me for my work will do that, because you recognize the value of what you’re getting. Capitalists call that a “marketing strategy.”

It’s working fairly well, so far. Less than three percent of you are paying subscribers, but that’s enough to keep me in business. I’m grateful for all my paying subscribers.

And now I need the rest of you to do something for me.

I need the rest of you to buy my novel.

I need you to do that because … well, because of capitalism.

See, most people have been educated to believe that those of us in the culture industry—i.e., authors, visual artists, filmmakers, and so on—are engaged in creating works of art and literature that have some degree of “cultural” value. We are not. Because there is no culture. Not anymore. There is only the marketplace.

And the only measure of value in the marketplace is money.

Yes, there is a simulacrum of culture, but it is a soulless little narcissistic world where mediocrity and conformity is rewarded. There are whole academies where mediocrity is taught, where aspiring authors and artists have the last faint flickers of life hectored out of them. It is a world policed by sensitivity editors, literary agents, gallery owners, artistic directors, corporate publishers, foundations, culture ministries, et cetera. It is a delicatessen of sycophantic palaver patronized by the simulated aristocracy. A niche market peddling “sophistication” to the global-capitalist ruling classes, most of whom are glorified widget salesmen.

The only way unauthorized authors like me can subvert that simulacrum of culture, (and maybe even someday change how it operates) is if we sell enough books to force the so-called literary establishment to have to contend with us. The artistic quality of our novels is irrelevant. The market doesn’t care about artistic quality (except when it works as a marketing strategy). It cares about book sales. It cares about money.

If you don’t know what I’m getting at, well, here’s an excerpt from a recent piece by Mesha Maren in The Metroplitan Review. She’s referring to a book called Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, by Dan Sinykin.

Sinykin’s Big Fiction tracks the conglomeration of publishing and how editors went from talking jazz and pouring drinks with their writers in the 1950s to poring over profit-and-loss statements and how these shifts were caused by the buying up of independent, often family-owned, publishing houses by companies like RCA and other large corporations, and how the consolidation of these multinational corporations led to a risk-averse model with no room for low-demand commodities. What this means practically is both a refusal to publish books that do not mimic other recent, financially-successful books and the death of the long-range model wherein an editor like Albert Erskine could continue to publish an author like Cormac McCarthy whose pre-Border Trilogy novels never sold more than 2,500 copies each.

Maren’s essay is worth reading in its entirety, but don’t click away and do that now, because I need to convince you to buy my book.

It’s a new edition of my novel Zone 23, in hardcover, published by Arcade Publishing, the literary imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. It will be released in the USA on July 15, and in the UK and Europe on August 28. It’s available to pre-order now.

As I have mentioned twice, or … OK, three times now, there are 33,334 of you, which means you have the power to make it a bestseller. The power of the free market. The power of capitalism. All you have to do is buy a copy.

If you are as tired of being suffocated by “woke” culture as I am, if you are as sick of the sensitivity editing, the identity politics, the speech policing, the mediocrity, and conformity, of the culture industry … well, I’m asking you to do something about it.

I did. I wrote this big fat novel.

You can buy it wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, any of the major online booksellers, or you can pick up a copy at your local bookstore once it’s published in a couple of weeks.

Seriously, if you are one of my tens of thousands of free subscribers, please, step up, and help me rattle a few cages. Or think of it as a one-time payment for all the free Substack columns you’re getting.

That’s it. That’s my marketing pitch. How am I doing with the capitalism thing?

P.S. I realize a few thousand of you bought the original self-published edition, and I am grateful that so many of you did. But here’s the thing about self-published books. They do not appear on the shelves of bookstores. They do not get reviewed. They get ignored. So please buy this new edition if you can afford it. That old edition is out of print. Shrink-wrap it in cellophane and store it away somewhere. Who knows? If the gods of the market smile on us, it might become a collector’s item that we can sell on Amazon and make a profit!

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