Dear Book Community... I Quit

I quit.

I quit the social media is everything and you need it to market mindset.

I quit the trends and the quick clicks and the fast fashion of books.

I quit the cancelling of authors immediately after seeing a sentence online from an ARC with no context of what is actually going on in the book.

I quit cancelling authors at the drop of a hat just because they exist online.

I quit cancelling readers for liking books that other readers didn’t like. Because why are we cancelling people for something that’s supposed to be subjective?

And I’m done worrying about every author’s opinions on any given topic just to read their book. If they are anti-AI or didn’t use AI in their work, then I’m fine and I will read it. I don’t care anymore about their personal lives or beliefs. If we keep caring so much about what authors are doing, we are going to run out of books in this world and that’s kind of what the enemies want. And that’s why there’s always a controversy.

If an author does or says something that I do not want to condone or I do not feel inclined to read their book, then I will personally not read their book. I will not go on social media and threaten the livelihood or even the life of the author just because of that.

What are we doing?

Remember before social media, when we didn’t know the ins and outs of people’s lives and everything was a bit more mysterious and if we wanted to know what authors thought, we read their books? Yeah, I’d like to go back to that.

I’m tired of social media in general and the way it has fed so much hatred. I really don’t mean for my platform here to be so anti-social media because it does have its uses, but everything is so hate filled and messy and people take things so far out of context.

I’m tired of cancel culture and the fact that it’s come back to life.

I’m tired of the AI-witch hunts. And I’m so anti-AI that I will definitely never purposely read a book written with it or from an author that has used it in some capacity.

But it’s time to stop with all the dog-piling that has happened.

I think a lot of topics regarding most things are a lot more nuanced than we allow them to be.

I think a lot of readers are going to run authors out of the industry and then readers will have nothing left. And frankly, a lot of readers these days actually deserve that. Because their behavior has been nothing short of disgusting.

But as an author, I don’t WANT to be run out of the industry. I started writing because that is what fueled me. I was fueled by pure love of the craft. I didn’t have social media, I followed a few writing blogs (because back in the day, blogs were the place to be), and I read a lot of books.

I don’t think the book community started out this way, but we’ve allowed too many imposters and performers into the space that have altered it so much that it is unrecognizable. We’ve allowed cheap fiction and terrible writing to be amplified which has created the situations we find ourselves in with genuinely bad books being published every five seconds.

I no longer want to take part in any of that.

I am a writer.

I am a reader.

I love literature.

I will not allow those passions to be taken from me due to the amount of bad actors on the internet who want to create drama for clicks and likes and follows.

I will not be hopping on anymore cancel trains.

I’m done with this side of the book community. And I think a lot of us would do good to break up with that side as well.

So, read lots of books. Write lots of things. Invest in good literature. (Which means read what you want to read, it doesn’t have to be super educational or deep if you don’t want it to be, but also challenge yourself sometimes please.)

This is not meant to shade anyone specific or shade any type of book. I just want to do better within the internet space and that starts with me choosing to forge my own path away from this toxic environment.