Two Cultures in Publishing: Hustle Culture Versus the Literary Academy

Authors and editors will likely encounter two tendencies when moving across different parts of the publishing world. In today’s blog post, I’ll introduce them.

I call them hustle culture and the Literary Academy.

Hustle culture links closely to the corporate and business world, while the Literary Academy links to the academic world.

Crudely put, hustle culture claims to be inclusive and emphasizes profitmaking, while the Literary Academy is elitist and emphasizes the accumulation of prestige. (Side-note: If you’re into Pierre Bourdieu’s work, you might call these economic capital and cultural capital.)

What comes next is a caricature, but it’s a useful one for navigating these different tendencies and figuring out where you stand in relation to them.

My goal here is not to pit two cultures against each other or make you think they really exist. In reality, they’re two tendencies that are constantly in flux, and you have probably internalized bits of both.

The London Book Fair

Hustle culture

At heart, this is a culture very comfortable with selling products and services. People in this environment will use a bunch of psychological tricks to increase their sales and profit margins. Common techniques include the creation of false scarcity or a false sense of urgency, for example.

Those deep in hustle culture pay careful attention to web design and user experience. Many are digital marketers, copywriters, business coaches, etc.

The language they speak is of “leads” and “conversions,” and while they may try to quantify their sales and be data-driven, some of their approaches involve jumping on bandwagons and fashions (Hello, ChatGPT?) to sell the latest gimmick and gain a competitive advantage.

They use simple, emotional language that connects.

Many in this culture focus on B2B products and services because it’s easier to sell to clients who have been disciplined into functioning as a profit-making business than to customers who may have very little in common. If you see slogans like this, then you know you’re among them:

“Grow your Instagram audience in 3 months and launch a six-figure coaching business.”

At its worst, I’ve seen pyramid-like schemes that involve getting clients into debt, with the people at the top of pyramids promoted like lottery winners.

At its best, I’ve met wonderful copywriters, digital marketers, PR people, etc. who have amazing skills and care deeply about their clients and team.

In the publishing world, self-publishing is often closer to this culture, especially initiatives like 20 books to $50K that focus explicitly on writing for profit, to market.

Some creative writing courses that target aspiring authors have a hustle culture vibe. They make big promises of quick fixes, like “Learn the six types of story that exist and master the perfect story structure for your novel.”

It’s easier, after all, to sell an intuitive simple formula than to sell doubt and encouraging the student to learn a critical approach to storytelling.

The Literary Academy

At heart, this is a culture grounded in accumulating prestige through publishing in certain outlets, winning renowned prizes, and so on. It’s elitist in that it gatekeeps access and emphasizes prestige over financial reward. It therefore often attracts people who do not need to live off the income from it.

The Literary Academy has a superiority complex and looks down on the crude commercialism of hustle culture. Watch out for unpaid “opportunities” and writer residences that work out at little over minimum wage.

This network has much in common with how academia operates; you can expect elite awards and prizes decided by small committees with opaque processes. For the sociologists among you, this is distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense. People with more prestige, regarded as having good taste, decide on which novels win awards, prizes, spots in literary magazines, etc.

In the publishing world, literary translation is especially close to the Literary Academy than to hustle culture, and I’ve seen people boast about earning little and not doing it for the money.

At its worst, I’ve seen minimum-wage reader positions (NOT an entry-level position) in prestigious lit mags and minimum-wage writer residences or unpaid opportunities for “exposure.”

At its best, I’ve seen awesome people working hard to undo some of the elitism in the system, promoting diversity of background and decently paid work in these areas. And having some kind of vetting is not inherently bad—it's arguably necessary, especially when AI-generated content is now flooding the internet.

A Literary Academy-style course targeted at aspiring authors will draw attention to its exclusivity, perhaps with an elite publisher, university, and teachers.

Creative writing MFAs at elite universities are closer to this culture. The courses may have strict criteria for entrance and focus on the great outcomes of its attendees.

As a rule of thumb, I would expect relatively little emphasis on process and craft. It's usually tacitly assumed that you know your way around the nuances of POV, character arcs, pacing, etc. But this isn't always the case, particularly for literary writers dabbling from academia.

Finding your way as a writer or editor

Both of these cultures can be damaging, but it’s impossible to sit outside them both. And sometimes one can be an antidote for the author. Quite a few copyeditors, for instance, come to the profession from an academic background and are very uncomfortable with the idea of promoting or selling their services. They can learn a trick or two from the hustle culture world of coaches, digital marketers, etc.

Personally, I love initiatives that keep a healthy distance from these two cultures, but take what is positive from each of them. Mythcreants is a great example of that. Here’s one of their principles, which rejects an assumption common in the Literary Academy (and they’re not at all hustle-y either):

​Fiction writing has a long cultural legacy of rejecting intellectual understanding in favor of relying on the subconscious to generate “great” works. This culture of Romanticism sets writers up to fail, and it makes us feel that when we do fail, it’s because we aren’t good enough. Mythcreants seeks to dispel such ideas by showing that stories can be understood intellectually and that storytelling is a craft everyone can learn.​

Another great example is the Taco Bell Quarterly, a lit mag with a punk ethos that critiques the Literary Academy:

We welcome writers and artists of all merit, whether you’re published in The Paris Review, rejected from The Paris Review, or DGAF what The Paris Review is.

Figuring out what matters to you

Thinking about these two cultures has helped me get clear on what principles and values I’ll apply to my business.

Separating out these tendencies is useful because it’s easy to get confused if you hang out a bit in both of these environments.

To sum up, from hustle culture, I embrace the anti-elitism and relative inclusivity, and I appreciate the craft of using no-nonsense, simple language that connects with a wide audience. It’s important to recognize that publishing is an elitist industry and self-publishing can be very democratizing. Self-published books have lifted authors out of poverty and have struck a chord in areas that traditional publishing hasn't taken many risks (for instance: queer speculative fiction or spicy romance).

But I reject the idea of offering quick-fix solutions to problems that take lots of time and effort to solve, and the use of emotional tricks that encourage people to buy without fully thinking through the value of what they’re buying.

And from the Literary Academy I embrace the idea that there is value in applying filters for quality and looking for prestige, but I reject the elitism and lowball rates that closes this space off to many people.

Figuring out where you stand in relation to these tendencies as an author or editor will help you get some perspective on what kinds of action you’re comfortable with.

If you found this useful, let me know how in the comments!