Peter M. Ball

One of the most useful parts of Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is the breakdown of the five modes of capital used in the publishing industry and its adjacent fields. I’ve used these to build a publishing company, guide my writing career, and solve all manner of problems.

But I also see a gap, born of Thompson’s focus. He specifically calls out Financial Capital as a key form of leverage, encapsulating all the cash-on-hand resources as well as the ability to generate credit, financing, and investment. It’s a key part of any artistic organisation, as very little happens without it. 

The missing element — based on my experience — is probably time, which doesn’t appear anywhere else on his list. Traditional publishers default to the velocity models, focusing on a short, hot burn with sales — they generate interest, release the bulk of their stock into the world, and expect to sell the most copies in the first month. Failure to do so means using financial resources to warehouse books, using connections and marketing to keep books alive after the rest of the industry has set them aside, and tying up human capital managing the unsold books. That’s only viable for the evergreen titles, which generate so much interest there is constant demand.

Indie publishers can work slow, because the books are always there. The financial cost of storing an ebook or print-on-demand title is negligible, so it doesn’t matter if they sell tomorrow, next week, next month, or in five years.

If you wait long enough—and keep your costs low—every book is profitable.

And you can overcome a lot of financial resources by thinking long term and embracing the time to DIY and build your skills. 

When you’re an indie publisher, every book is evergreen. And that means you can take chances, step away from the status quo, and do something surprising with utter confidence that one day—maybe months, maybe years— it will pay off.

You can write the book of your heart and eventually it will find its people. Maybe slowly, a reader gained here and there, but they will come.

The Wellness Industrial Complex has does a pretty good job of co-opting the idea of self-care and turning it into an aspirational lifestyle choice rather than ongoing maintenance of physical and mental health. The whole idea of self-care is now associated with affluence and privilege, or a kind of low-budget hedonism where pizza and Netflix where folks who can’t afford spa days and wellness make do with the small, ironic pleasures afforded to them.

And it’s not surprising, because actual self-care starts with small things that are incredibly hard to do when you’re actually in need of self-care.

Case in point: going to bed at a reasonable hour.

For me, this means getting my shit together at 9:30 and being in bed by ten, preferably without a screen nearby to distract me and keep me awake. That affords me a good eight-hour window in which I can sleep prior to my six AM “get up and write” alarm, even if I’m going to wake up after five or six hours because eight hours’ sleep seems beyond me.

I know this, and I know my life is smoother when I stick to the ten PM bedtime, and yet it takes effort to actually achieve it. It’s always tempting to stay up later—one more TV show, one more chapter, just a little more fucking around on the phone.

I pay a price for every hour I stay up past bedtime—a price in the amount of work done, the state of my mental health, and my trust in the routines that keeps things moving forward—so it’s almost never the right choice long-term, but humans aren’t built for long-term thinking. It’s not our default.

Real self-care is hard and incredibly goddamned basic and requires sacrificing the pleasures of now for the long-term gains. It starts with simple choices:  Go to bed at a reasonable hour, eat enough vegetables, do the stretches that help ease the lingering pain, stick to your routine.

All basically free—no affluence required—but it’s not as fun as self-care as lifestyle brand and incredibly hard to do.

I’ve got nine minutes to write a post this morning, because the fiction writing went long. Ordinarily, that would be enough—I can dump a rough idea here, wander off to work, then come home and redraft the concept into a couple of hundred decent words. 

But today is not an ordinary day. There are meetings at work—which take their toll on my socially anxious brain—and pans later this evening which wipe out my night shift. Finishing a reasonable post means giving up sleep, or accepting what’s possible today is out of the ordinary and reshaping my expectations. 

On days like this, I set aside my expectations and go back to the core principles: what is the most useful thought or idea I can put out into the world today?

Today, it’s this: success starts with surveying the landscape and figuring out what’s possible from where you are right now. Nine focused minutes can deliver upon your core goal, if you’re clear about what that is. 

Or it can be the time you spend faffing around, wishing things were different. 

Faffing is the easy option, but it’s not always the best.