Fiction as Fast Fashion

Once upon a time, self-publishing was a wonderland.

It was the promise that anyone who had a story could bring it to light. The dream was to wrench open the gates that were slammed shut by publishers. It was meant to give voice to those who were deemed “not enough” by the literary elites, not because of the quality of their voice and their writing, but because of their circumstances.

I believed in it. I had built a business around it. I helped authors to refine their work, shape their ideas, and self-publish stories that deserved to exist in the world.

For a while, there was magic hidden in the shadows. There was care in the process. Authors brought to me manuscripts that were truly their baby, grown and developed over the course of a year or more. They would build something worth reading. They’d bleed into their drafts, and I would lovingly carve that blood into the shape of the words that would later be printed. They’d agonize over a sentence, sword battle me in our interactions about why they wanted to keep that sentence, that paragraph, that sentiment, and I would pick up my own sword and show them how we could keep it, but in a way that would bring the manuscript to new heights. There was weight behind the finished book, because the act of writing one still meant something.

Then came the flood.

Our Dreams Became a Factory

The moment the gates blew open, everyone came flooding in. Not because they had something to say, but simply because they could. At first, the chaos was charming. The pieces may have had errors, the covers were awkward and weird. It was the indie charm. If it were a bad book, the reviews would flood in and warn other readers, and sometimes, there came a kind review with recommendations on improving the craft. If it were a good book, it would surge through the rankings.

Then the culture shifted.

Algorithms took hold, seeing the opportunity to reward speed over soul. “Write to market” became the all-consuming mantra. Authors stopped being storytellers, instead becoming content production machines in hopes of striking gold. They weren’t writing books anymore. They were simply manufacturing content.

Ads came out playing on the desperation of the economy telling everyone “I bet you have a story in you! Self-publish, it’s easy!” in an attempt to simply grab a little more revenue for their self-publishing platform. Vanity publishers made an absolute killing on people who thought that they may have found the road to riches.

Writing to market became the poison in the well. You could see it in every chart-topping release: the same tropes, the same formula, the same plots, the same paper-thin archetypes recycled like a fast fashion trend on Shein. The only change was the aesthetic. It was nothing more than the literary version of swapping summer florals for fall plaids.

Readers didn’t recognize the shift at first. They craved for the next development in the series, they consumed the stories so fast that they choked. Devour one, move on to the next. I’m trendy; look at how big my TBR pile is! When being a reader became commodified, authors answered in the masses. By the end of the year, barely one could stand out in the pile of books read, because they were all the same.

The Machines Took Over

The advent of AI was our destruction.

When AI entered the scene, I figured that it might be a helpful tool. Maybe it would help people brainstorm, maybe it would streamline editing. Instead, it gutted the world we had bled to build overnight. Suddenly, everyone and their dog could “write” a book in an afternoon. And they did: thousands of them. They went on to upload half-baked, auto-generated novels of complete and utter crap. Regurgitated phrases, factual errors that could easily be recognized with 12 seconds of Google searching, and cyclical plots that went nowhere.

I know, because I refused to edit them. I wouldn’t tie my name to it.

I can’t tell you how many “authors” came to me with manuscripts they had just finished prompting, having started just a few hours earlier, that I turned away. I told them all directly: for the amount of work it would take to turn this trash fire into a real, good book, I may as well use your AI-generated “book” as an outline to write my own book and publish it myself. At least then it would have substance, a plot, a life. I wasn’t about to effectively write a whole book from scratch just to have someone else publish it under their name. I was an editor, not a ghostwriter.

The market didn’t care. The cheap, shiny stories sold anyway. It didn’t matter if readers hated it; the self-publishing platforms had their 99 cents anyway. AI became the cheap polyester of publishing: glossy, smooth, quick, disposable. It’s easy to produce, but it doesn’t breathe. It has no heart. It has no substance. Once you’ve flooded the shelves with synthetic thoughts and feelings, it becomes harder to value woven fabric.

The Sweatshop of Stories

They call it “building a brand.” I call it exhausting.

What started off as a movement for creative freedom has turned into a digital sweatshop. Authors are chained to the algorithm, rather than to the standards and expectations of publishing, and the editors that hold that line. To stay visible, production has to be constant; long gone are the days when an author could sustain themselves on taking six months to a year to write a really good book. Now, if you take that long between books as a self-publisher, you need to make sure that you have a massive following, and that they’re dedicated enough to wait all that time for your book to move through writing, editing, formatting, cover design, and more. The creative process has been replaced by the assembly line.

Writers used to chase excellence. Now, the chase is following engagement. Burnout is worn as a badge of honor, a shining symbol of hustle culture. Meanwhile, the stories are hollow. They’ve been depleted to 70k word shells filled to the brim with what happens to be trending that week.

The result? There’s no longer an author who is telling stories that might define the generation. There’s no story of the decade. There’s nothing that stays; it’s simply instant gratification that is forgotten just as quickly as it was consumed. Even readers are experiencing the fatigue. Not because the themes are reflecting the world back to them, but because every story is the same.

The Cost of Cheap Stories

Fast fashion literature doesn’t just devalue the art. It devalues the truth.

When everything is written to be optimized for visibility, there’s no room for vulnerability. The humanity is stripped away. Nobody is willing to take the risk on a story that won’t sell, especially when they’re an author without a massive, social media influencer level following. So the stories become safe, flat, even empty. Even the covers have all become the same because “The data says…”

The tragedy hidden beneath the surface is that readers didn’t ask for this. Writers didn’t ask for this either. We all got swept into the grinding cogs of a machine that chews out the authenticity that we all carry as artists, and spits it out in the form of “content” grasping for virality. The literary world has been reducing to a landfill. Stories made to be forgotten.

The Slow Revival

Here’s the thing about real story telling: it survives. We’re a storytelling creature; the oral histories that built our stories prevail, and the authors who still strive for greatness will still create true, beautiful, literary artwork. No machine can imitate a human voice with intrinsic, genuine lived experience. No algorithm can fake the sentence that pulls you back from the ledge.

We don’t need a new trend. We need slow literature. The work that takes time to develop and be born. Writers who take their time. Readers that demand more than a dopamine boost.

Maybe the rebellion we need isn’t about faster production, but caring harder, loving harder, creating more vividly than ever before.

Because if fashion can see a resurgence in the slow beauty that comes with crafting with care, a return to the quality, the craft, and the conscious, then who is to say that writing can’t too?

Maybe it’s time we stop chasing the clicks and likes. Maybe it’s time to start building legacies again.