There’s a stereotype that authors who self-publish aren’t good enough to cut it with the publishing houses. Personally, I have never once tried to submit a manuscript to anyone, and have always skipped straight to self-publishing instead.
I decided during my childhood that I wanted to be a writer, and as a teenager, I started paying attention to what sorts of manuscripts publishing companies would accept. I learned before I graduated from high school that “high quality” was not the deciding factor for what was accepted.
On the benign side of things, manuscripts get rejected for reasons like, “We’ve already published five mecha scifi books this year.” It doesn’t matter if yours is well-written with relatable characters and hard hitting philosophies, it’s going to get rejected the second someone sees the word “mecha.” Tuff luck. The position has already been filled.
But here we are in the year 2022, and everything revolves around The Agenda.
Which is why a novel that barely qualifies as English but has tons and tons of buttsecks is going to be published over literally anything “hetero-normative.”
I’m the sort of weirdo that doesn’t particularly care about who is and who isn’t having buttsecks. I’m not going to get preachy one way or the other.
However, I am very passionate about things like Divine Femininity and motherhood. I rant about how pregnancy is treated by society more like a biological defect than a sacred honor. Feminine characteristics are not inferior. I embrace philosophies that are shitcanned for being “hetero-normative” because they involve female fertility.
Figures.
So I self-publish.