A utopian vision for fiction writers

Where might we be in 2030?

Simon K Jones

Jun 02, 2025

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If we fiction writers got everything we wanted, what would that actually look like?

The problems inherent with being a fiction writer are clear, and have been for decades:

It’s very difficult to find readers
It’s even harder to make fiction writing a financially useful endeavour
Fiction writers have always had very little agency, being at the mercy of editors, publishers or online retailers like Amazon

Despite all of that, still we write. Because we are compelled to, and because telling stories is a reward all by itself — but what would it mean if the surrounding infrastructure worked for fiction writers, rather than against us?

Getting published is already solved

We live in a golden age for publishing our work, and have many options: we can publish via a newsletter, or set up our own indie small press, or use print-on-demand paperback services, or crowdfund a fancy print run on Kickstarter, or submit to magazines or mainstream publishers. The menu is long and varied.

Each approach has its own challenges and opportunities, but for the first time in history there’s no need for any writer to remain unpublished, if they want to be published. If you want your work to be available, you can publish it to almost the entire world. That’s a wonderful thing, and wasn’t the case even twenty years ago.

None of those publishing options have fundamentally improved the problems I outlined above. A tiny, tiny percentage of fiction writers make a lot of money, while everyone else tries to support their writing with a day job or freelance work, to a greater or lesser degree.

The vast majority of fiction writers make no money at all from their writing.

The starving artist?

It’s not all about money, obviously. Most fiction writers are compelled to tell stories and will continue to do so even if there is only a single person reading. That was me ten years ago.

The suffering artist trope was borne out of necessity and reality: a romanticising of the economic catastrophe that is the publishing industry made it somewhat easier for struggling writers to get through the day.

When faced with the harsh realities of publishing, at least we could hold firm in our artistic integrity.

This has drifted sideways into an unhealthy fallacy: that to be a real writer you have to suffer, and that to make money is to sell out.

A plumber who fixes your house’s pipes and charges for their expertise is not a sell-out. An engineer designing cars doesn’t do it for free. An airline pilot isn’t expected to work for charity. An economist at a major corporation knows their worth.

Publishing has been such an exclusive activity for so many centuries, so full of failure and disappointment, that we taught ourselves a folk story to stop us going mad.

That folk story has become a trap, and has even contributed to the devaluing of writing itself. If writers don’t value their skills, why should readers? We see this in the race-to-the-bottom pricing on Amazon and the well-meaning calls for bundles and tip jars on Substack.

What would it take to move away from this self-defeating attitude?

The fiction writer’s utopia

What follows is the life of a made-up writer in 2030. Do note that this is just one example, and there would be many different ways of ‘being a writer’ in this imagined future. The point is that the surrounding infrastructure would make it easier for each individual writer to approach their creative work on their own terms. (with thanks to Alexandra in the comments for her feedback)

I’m writing a new novel. Readers of my previous books are eagerly awaiting its release, and are following its progress via my newsletter.

They subscribed after reading my earlier books — not to a publisher’s generic mailing list, but to my mailing list. It makes it easy for readers to follow me around, regardless of how or where I publish my projects. My first book was self-published. My second was published by a small press. There’s been some interest from a mainstream publisher, but they haven’t offered a compelling deal yet.

The newsletter is vital, bridging the gaps between releases. There’s a community connection there, and readers these days are a lot more than just customers.

Calling it ‘a newsletter’ is an oversimplification. It’s whatever I need it to be. A weekly journal. A test-bed to try out new ideas and short stories. A video channel for hosting livestreams and Q&As with other authors. It’s how I publish my podcast, which includes updates and audiobook-style readings of my work. It’s a main port of call for anyone interested in what I do. All of this is optional: I enjoy dabbling in a bit of everything, but many writers quite rightly only want to focus on the writing itself — that doesn’t really change the equation, though, and their readers are still more than happy to support their ongoing efforts.

My entire back catalogue is available to anyone who is interested. Short stories, essays, the books. If someone is a paid subscriber they get easy access to my library and can add any of my work to their digital bookshelf, alongside the work of other artists. It feels just like using Kindle, but neither of us are trapped inside Amazon’s high-walled garden.

If a reader opts to pay a little more to cover manufacturing and shipping they can order a paperback or hardback. There’s the novels, but I’ve also set up short story and essay omnibuses. There are even fancy collector editions with slipcases, bookmarks and posh gold leaf covers — originally crowdfunded and now available as print-on-demand, which these days is largely indistinguishable from major print runs.

There’s audio versions of everything, which is great for accessibility and for anyone on the move. I’ve recorded some of it myself, have hired a voiceover artist for the audiobook novels, and an automated computer voice fills in any gaps.

It’s all tied together, too: buy a novel in print and you also get the ebook and the audiobook. You’re buying access to the story, not to a stack of paper.

Not everyone wants to commit to a subscription, so the books are available as individual purchases as well. Old school, but it gets the job done.

The top tier subscribers don’t need to wait for the official book launch. They’re reading a new chapter every week, as the story is serialised. I write and publish as I go, with my most enthusiastic readers witnessing the story coming together in real-time. At the end of the serialisation they have an ebook and optional print version to keep — and they’ll even have their name in the acknowledgements.

Although I have total agency over my writing and my readers, and can easily hop between services and platforms, I’m not in it alone. We writers aren’t in competition, instead being the best champions of each other’s work. I’m part of a loose network of writers, some genre authors like me, others writing in very different areas, or even in non-fiction. We get together on livestreams, put together ad hoc book festivals online and occasionally in person, collaborate on articles…it’s all very collegiate, and it helps readers find new authors and books. The old genre marketing boundaries are far more porous, and it’s entirely natural for, say, a sci-fi writer to be on a panel with a literary fiction author. It’s a far more pleasant and less onerous way to promote our work.

It was a slow build, but I’ve got to a point where I’m making a decent income from my writing. Not buy-a-yacht money, but enough to pay the bills. I’m just about at the tipping point where I’ll be able to quit the day job. It’s the magic combo of occasional book launches and regular subscription income. The fallow years in-between book releases no longer exist.

And the thing is, it isn’t just me. Fiction writers are doing well across the board. As always, there is a spectrum: blockbuster mega-successes, small beginnings, and everything in-between. The point is that there are more than enough readers to go around, and being a successful author is now the norm rather than the exception.

Write well, and success will come. With a little patience and a lot of effort, anyone can make it. It’ll start off paying for your coffees, then your grocery bills, then your household bills, then your mortgage. It doesn’t happen overnight, but stick with it and the trajectory will be clear. And then, suddenly, you hit financial escape velocity and can choose to become a full-time author.

Occasionally, mainstream publishers do get in touch. Those deals can make sense if you’re working on a project that will thrive in a mass-market environment. If you want to get into airport bookshops, or have a fancy coffee-table book or a cookery book, then a big publisher can help. But the power hierarchy has flipped: publishers have to make a pretty good offer to match the regular annual income of even a middlingly-successful indie author.

All of this is a means to an end, of course: the point remains to tell great stories. Everything else is in aid of that ambition. One thing is for sure: it’s never been easier or more satisfying to be a fiction writer.

How can we make this a reality?

Right, back to the real world of 2025. I actually think we’re much closer to this version of the future than we might assume. Many of the pieces are already in place. Let’s take a look:

Distribution

Getting your work into the world and the hands of readers has been easy for many years. Absurdly easy — although whether anyone then chooses to read your work is another matter entirely.

At one end there is a mainstream publishing contract: hard to acquire but, once you’re in, you know you’ll be looked after to some degree. They’ll suggest edits, proof the manuscript, sort out the cover, manage the interior design, send it to reviewers, and hopefully even put it on bookshelves and do some marketing.

On the other end of the spectrum is the indie author DIY process: you handle every aspect of publication, either literally doing it yourself (if you have the skills) or hiring professionals on a specific, freelance basis. This will usually be more expensive up front, especially if you’re working with a hand-picked team, but you have full control. Print-on-demand helps to keep costs down and avoids the calamity many self-published authors bumped into in the early days, their houses full of their own books and no way to shift stock.

And that’s only considering the traditional concept of ‘a book’. Factor in authors who publish newsletters on Substack or Ghost, run YouTube channels or produce a podcast and there are all sorts of other ways to distribute your work. Forums, social media, personal websites and blogs, zines, Wattpad, Webtoon, and on it goes.

Payments

We’ve been able to put writing and other creative projects online for decades. We’ve even been able to charge for some of it, but until recently that’s always been about fitting into a much larger ecosystem, or otherwise erecting awkward barriers for customers to jump over.

Amazon’s self-publishing tools are easy to use and have made a huge difference to many writers, but you’re entirely in thrall to Bezos’ empire. You don’t have any control over your audience or your readers. You can’t leave Amazon and take all your existing customers with you, because they’re not your customers: they’re Amazon’s. If Amazon tweaks the rules or their algorithms, your overnight success can transform to overnight failure, through no fault of your own.

The Amazon model for authors is very old school, very late-2000s, representing a version of the internet we could do with leaving behind. It’s when the massive corporations took over and walled everyone in: Amazon, Google, Meta, Twitter.

Newer infrastructure has shaken loose some of those corporate shackles. The earliest pioneers here were the likes of Patreon and Kickstarter, which gave creators the necessary scale and secure customer experience to fund individual and ongoing projects. Critically, Kickstarter is about enabling projects, without trying to control them. At the end of a Kickstarter campaign, the creator receives the contact details of the backers, and off they go. Patreon provides similar agency.

That model has been embraced by Substack, which began as a newsletter/blog platform and now encompasses long and short form video, podcasting, Twitter-style micro-blogging, livestreaming and more besides. The tools are good, but the quietly revolutionary thing is that Substack does not tie creators down: it’s not a fully ‘open’ platform in the maximalist sense of the word, but creators own their content and their subscription lists, and have independent control over the payments backend.

Substack is arguably the best toolkit in town right now for most creators. The reason I happily recommend it to everyone, perhaps rather counter-intuitively, is because it’s so easy to leave. Sure, it would be a pain in the arse, but you’re not trapped. If need be, I could take my Substack subscribers and articles and move over to Ghost, without losing or confusing readers. Similarly, someone currently on Ghost could come over to Substack with their readership intact.

Payments are built into these platforms, but without the usual chains. For the first time, creators are free to create and experiment with various forms, without binding themselves forever to an untrustworthy partner.

One only has to look to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to see how dangerous it is to rely too heavily on platforms which don’t care for their users. They don’t offer proper foundations for anyone who takes their work seriously. No serious business would let another business keep a secret list of their customers.

As creators, we now have the tools to build. We can grow our readership, or listenership, or viewership, without having to worry about it all being taken away (as long as we remember to back everything up…).

The other thing about Kicksarter, Patreon, Substack, Ghost and other similar platforms is that the value exchange is very clear. The payments are not obfuscated by increasingly confusing group metrics, like on Medium. They’re not reliant on the shifting tides of paid advertising revenue share, like on YouTube.

Customer pays, creator receives the payment. Creator either pays a clearly defined service tax (10% in Substack’s case) or separately pays a simple fixed amount (as with Ghost).

It makes sense, and is simple, and gives us something concrete to build upon.

Author agency & independence

I’ve touched on this a couple of times already, because it’s central to everything, but it’s worth stating again and again:

These newer platforms are about empowering creators. As long as you’re able to extract your lists, that remains the case. An author who owns their own reader list is taking control of their writing career.

I might not be using Substack in 20 years, but I’ll probably still have the same mailing list. The foundations I’ve built over the last four years matter, because they will propel me forwards to whatever comes next.1

Be wary of platforms that don’t offer the freedom to leave. By all means use Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube etc as potentially useful marketing tools to point people towards your main HQ, but none of us should ever again lean wholly into walled gardens with no emergency exit.

The advertising models that have built the likes of Meta and Google are also their weakness. It’s what makes them mostly useless to independent creators, and undeserving of the public trust generally. They design addiction machines, because the platforms are themselves addicted to advertiser revenue. They have no choice.

Reader experience

Here’s the missing piece of the puzzle. This is the part that is preventing us from reaching that fabled utopian future.

Back in 2023 I wrote about how to improve Substack’s fiction experience. We’re still waiting for most of those features. It’s currently very awkward for readers to actually read a serialised project on Substack, as it’s almost impossible to keep track of ‘a book’. The platform is great for fiction writers, but there are many tiny annoyances for fiction readers.

A change is coming, I sense, given the noises from Substack’s leadership team. Most notably,

Chris Best

spoke at length about the potential for fiction over on The Generalist podcast, and it’s come up in conversation in other interviews and over on Notes more than once in the last year. Hell, there were at least two fiction writers at the Pubstack meetup in London last month, lurking amongst the politics, economics, food and health writers.

I use Substack for the newsletter that you’re reading right now, and for sending out chapters of my weekly serial Tales from the Triverse. Despite it being a far from ideal reading experience, readers have still shown up. They’ve had a good time with the project, as far as I can tell. They’re eager for this form of fiction delivery!

Imagine how many fiction writers would flow into this ecosystem if it properly embraced them.

Substack has already been transformational for many journalists, business analysts, economists, historians, cultural commentators, fashion writers, food writers: anything that fits into a single essay or a magazine structure.

So keep being visible, keep arguing for the value of fiction, keep politely poking

Chris Best

and

Hamish McKenzie

and

Mills Baker

so that they know we exist.

Primarily, keep writing.

I’m increasingly convinced that it’ll soon be our turn.

Meanwhile.

I wrote more words on all that than I’d intended. It’s an exciting topic, though! It may never quite come to pass, but my theory is that if we all keep THINKING it, we’ll at least get some of it.

I’m sure I’ve missed some obvious points — for and against — so please do hop into the comments to correct me.