What's the point of publishing?

advice, existential crises, and optimism

When I started this newsletter Andrew sent me a couple suggestions for posts based on what he’d been seeing around Substack; I answered some of the more straightforward questions in my query posts but this one was more existential. He phrased it a bit differently but I distilled it into this:

“Is it true that nobody buys books? Is it true that the publishing industry is tiny and nobody makes any money and publishers aren’t looking for interesting new voices, they’re just looking for easy money? Am I wasting my time trying to be an author? What’s the point?”