I think the most confusing thing to me that came out of this pitch wars debate is that there's a group of writers who seem to be making a genuine argument that this is a pay to play industry. ie that you need to be prepared to spend significant dollars to get published. If you're self-publishing this is true. Publishers will take a larger share of revenue for seed capital, resources, and access to legacy systems. Self-pub you're paying out of pocket for a ton of stuff but have total control. You're making a tradeoff of control vs investment.

It's Saturday, I just ate my body weight in pancakes so I have some thoughts on CRAFT and what makes a book Commercial Fiction vs Literary Fiction. Hang out or mute. You do you. OK, so in the publishing world we make a pretty distinct division between what is "literary" and what is "commercial." But rarely is anyone able to articulate what that actually means.

So many manuscripts I read are just... a sequence of stuff happening. A plot isn't just stuff that happens. A character isn't just someone stuff happens to. A book isn't an accounting of stuff that happened.

A book has to be *about* something. Plot derives from character. If your character isn't interesting then no amount of interesting stuff happening will make your story interesting.