The Echo System
Everything in publishing talks to everything else. Here’s what to do about that.
Someone told me recently that they felt like they were “doing publishing wrong.”
They had written a book — a real one, a good one, years in the making. They had an agent. The book was on submission. And instead of feeling excited, they felt like they were standing in the middle of a crowded room where everyone else understood the rules, and they had somehow missed the orientation.
I know this feeling. Most writers know this feeling. And the reason it’s so disorienting isn’t because publishing is complicated — though it is — it’s because publishing is an ecosystem. A living, interconnected thing where every part responds to every other part. And most writers don’t find this out until they’re already inside it.
What the Ecosystem Actually Is
Let’s map it, briefly, without the jargon.
At the center is the work itself — the manuscript, the essay, the newsletter, the poem. Around it: the editors who shape it, the agents who represent it, the publishers who release it, the publicists who (sometimes) promote it, the critics who have opinions about it, the algorithms that decide who sees it, the readers who either find it or don’t.
But here’s the part nobody tells you at the beginning: all of these players are in constant conversation with each other, and very little of that conversation involves you.
Publishers follow what’s selling. Agents follow what publishers want. Editors greenlight what agents can sell. Readers find what the algorithm surfaces. Critics write about what’s visible. And underneath it all, trends cycle through like weather — autofiction, then memoir, then autofiction again; “elevated genre,” then “cozy,” then something else that doesn’t have a name yet but will in six months.
It can feel, from the inside, like an echo chamber. The same voices, the same aesthetics, the same books about the same experiences winning the same prizes and appearing on the same lists. And writers — especially newer ones — can start to wonder: Where do I fit in this?
The honest answer is: wherever you decide to stand.
The Part That’s Yours
Here’s what the ecosystem doesn’t control: the work itself.
I know that sounds obvious. But writers lose sight of it constantly, because publishing moves fast and it’s loud and there’s always someone online explaining what the market wants right now and why your last idea was fine but have you considered pivoting to something more like that?
Your job is not to chase the echo. Your job is to create the original sound.
This doesn’t mean you ignore the market entirely — that’s a different kind of naive. It means you understand the ecosystem without being consumed by it. You learn how it works the same way you learn the rules of a form you’re writing in: so you can break them intentionally, not accidentally.
Here’s the thing about ecosystems: they need biodiversity to stay healthy. They actually need things that aren’t like everything else. The publishing industry, for all its homogenizing tendencies, has always — eventually — made room for the thing that didn’t fit. Often reluctantly, sometimes too late, but it gets there. Because readers are tired of the echo too.
Navigating It Without Losing Yourself
A few things I’ve learned, having been inside this ecosystem in various capacities for a very long time:
The rules change, but people don’t. Publishing trends are genuinely unpredictable. What doesn’t change is that readers want to feel something. Curious, understood, delighted, gutted, seen. Write toward the feeling, not the trend.
The ecosystem rewards persistence in weird ways. A book that doesn’t find its readers today might find them in five years. An essay that goes unnoticed on its original platform sometimes finds its audience somewhere else entirely. Things circulate. The ecosystem has more patience than it appears to, as long as you do too.
Your platform is actually your insulation. A newsletter, a Substack, a small but loyal readership — these things matter not just for marketing (though they do matter for marketing), but because they give you a direct line to your readers that bypasses the ecosystem entirely. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.
You are allowed to opt out of parts you hate. You don’t have to be on every platform. You don’t have to play the game on every front simultaneously. The writers who last are the ones who found the version of this that they could sustain — not the ones who did everything and burned out trying.
The Echo You Actually Want to Create
There’s a version of the “echo system” that I find worth thinking about.
Every piece of writing creates an echo. It goes out, and if it lands, it bounces back — in the form of a reader who reaches out to say yes, that, a conversation it starts, an idea it unlocks in someone who passes it on. That echo is slower and quieter than the publishing industry’s version, but it lasts longer.
The writers who have shaped me most are not necessarily the ones who were loudest in the ecosystem when their books came out. They’re the ones whose words found me anyway — via a recommendation, a used bookstore, a friend who pressed a book into my hands and said I don’t know why but I think you need this.
That’s the echo I’m trying to make. Something that keeps traveling. Something with enough signal to cut through the noise.
You can be strategic about publishing and still want that. You can understand the ecosystem and still refuse to be defined by it. These things are not in conflict.
The ecosystem is the terrain. The work is the map. You decide where you’re going.
Tell me: where are you in the ecosystem right now? Just starting out, mid-journey, or somewhere you didn’t expect to land? I read every reply.
A Fiction Break
by Liz Dubelman
Of Course
Her mother had been dying for eleven months. The doctors said six weeks. They were bad at math.
When it finally happened—a Tuesday, three in the afternoon, while her brother was in the cafeteria getting a sandwich he didn’t eat—her aunt called to say she couldn’t believe it.
She couldn’t believe it either, which was the problem.
She had googled the stages of dying. She had read Being Mortal. She had sat with a hospice nurse who explained what the breathing would sound like at the end, and she had listened, and she had nodded, and she had written nothing down because she thought she would remember. She didn’t remember. She had to Google it again at 2 am when the breathing started.
And still. Still.
She had gone to the hospital every day for eleven months, and still it felt like something had gone wrong. Like a mistake had been made. Like someone was going to come in and say, actually, we’re very sorry, we made an error, here is your mother.
At the funeral, a man she didn’t recognize told her he was so sorry for her loss. He said it twice. He had the look of a person who had never considered that this could happen—that people could be there and then not there—and his surprise was so genuine she almost believed him. Almost believed it was surprising.
She thought about the conversation they were going to have. The trip they kept meaning to take to Greece. The thing her mother had wanted to tell her, waiting until she felt better to say it. She didn’t feel better. So she never said it.
She thought about the sandwich her brother didn’t eat. It was a BLT on sourdough with Mayo wrapped in cling film, now rotting in a garbage bin.
She stood at the edge of the grave in shoes that hurt her feet and thought: of course. Of course. I knew this. I have always known this.
And still.
YOU are so smart!
This is a great read. Yesterday, I read it in my emails and wow, okay! Thank you, Liz✨