Too much space for publishing…?

In 2014, Rupi Kaur published her first poetry book, Milk and Honey, which quickly gained widespread popularity across age groups. As social media continued to rise, it fueled conversations about her book and expanded its reach. As a self-published author, Kaur faced considerable backlash, with critics labelling her work as simplistic, shallow, and even disrespectful to poetry. While her work is intended to be abstract, exploring personal growth across various stages of her life, many question whether it deserves to be published at all.

But since 2014, there has been a rise of self-publishing from authors through platforms such as Amazon. Previously, traditional publishing houses would manage marketing campaigns to target specific audiences, but social media now offers self-published authors a low-cost, or often free, marketing channel. Tik Tok especially has created a platform where you can advertise any work you have written and cater it to the target audience successfully using trends and buzzwords. Self-publishing and using social media marketing can offer all writers a platform to write and increase the accessibility for people to enter the world of writing and earn an income from their writing.

But is the ease of self-publishing affecting the quality of work produced if it bypasses the rounds of editing and perfecting of content? When everybody is able to publish their writing and make it available for purchase, they are inevitably going to miss out on some of the criticism that can take a book from good to brilliant.

Are writers becoming so confident in their own voices that they resist constructive critique?

Are writers becoming so confident in their own voices that they resist constructive critique? Does self-publishing empower authors or create a blind spot, leading them to overestimate the strength of their work? Self publishing brings about these questions and the critics of many self published work discussed on social media argue that work is now basic and lacks the depth but it is so commonly found, that this is what we have come to expect.

Our expectations may have become lower as quality decreases but many of us are still captivated by classic works like The Great Gatsby or Keats’ poetry which contain rich imagery and metaphors that are studied across curriculums and are peoples’, myself included, favourite works. Part of the reason why what are being called ‘basic’ self-published works become so popular, is because of the accessibility of reading them. There is no need to sit with a highlighter annotating metaphors to understand the meaning as instead they can usually be understood instantly which can also be beneficial for people who want to read relatable texts in a relaxed manner. Reading should be accessible and available for anybody who wants to read, no matter what that is and if these texts succeed in that, then this can only be beneficial. Simple, relatable texts play an important role in making literature approachable, allowing more people to enjoy reading.

Writing and reading should broaden people’s perspectives and thoughts; offering new ideas to explore

Writing and reading should broaden people’s perspectives and thoughts; offering new ideas to explore. Self-publishing may lose aspects of this if they are writing for the masses on Tik Tok and losing the eloquence that we see in classics. I believe everybody should have the opportunity to write and share their work which places self-publishing as beneficial in so many ways. But, to truly explore the variety of writing that is out there I think we should also take the time to question what we choose to read and ensure that some work does offer us opportunity to think further and challenge new ideas.