“If your laws don’t include me, well then, they don’t apply to me either.” - Anita Crown, Bad Girls (1994)
I’ve spent years in the publishing world—as an author, an editor, and above all, someone who loves the craft of storytelling. For most of that time, I told myself the industry’s problems weren’t as bad as they seemed. Good work still found its way through. That if you just wrote something compelling enough, readers would find it.
That’s the power of social media, right?
Not really. I was wrong.
Not about the readers; they’re still out there, desperately looking for stories that keep them up until 2 a.m., even though they have work in the morning and they know—they know—they should put the damn book down.
It was the system I was wrong about.
If you had told me ten years ago that there would be popular novels with disclaimers on the first page, I’d have called you insane. “Warning, this book includes shit that’s perfectly normal in a thriller. Your mental health matters! Check the trigge…