The Writer

For decades I have kept myself up at night telling myself stories.

It was inevitable that I pursued traditional publishing, eventually nailing pitches at conferences, and working with agents and editors-in-chief at big six publishing companies.

But the more I was in it, the more I learned I didn’t want to be.

Traditional publishing is a business. What is trending, what is marketable, and what will sell are all considerations publishing houses must keep in mind. Understandably so. Yet with those considerations as the guide behind what is published, we see discrepancies behind what is sold and why.

It isn’t uncommon for us to hear of authors who write of experiences that aren’t their own, alongside other issues plaguing the publishing industry. Perceval Everett’s Erasure (recently made into the film American Fiction) and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface are a few novels that explore this issue and others related to it. I’m a gay woman and stories about queer people, like me, are trending. However, they often aren’t written by queer people.

While we may be discussing publishing houses, these places of work still operate by corporate America mentalities (consumerism, capitalism, exploitation). As writers, we want to share our experiences—the way we see the world—as a way of connecting with others. If our books aren’t written to market, or they don’t fit into a societal perception or a stereotype, it doesn’t matter what we have to say. We’re saying it wrong.

Publishing hasn’t always been like this. Books weren’t always viewed through this lens of trend and marketability, entertainment more than art. In fact, if you go back far enough, stories weren’t written at all. They were told. Around fires, before battles, across tables. Popular wasn’t whose publishing house had enough pull to manipulate best seller lists by paying Barnes and Noble to encourage their employees to sell a certain title. And it certainly wasn’t contingent on how many followers a person had on Instagram. “Popular” happened because someone heard a story and retold it. Some of them enough times that we’re still retelling them.

Isn’t that the wondrous beauty of art? It isn’t a formula, but the voice of a stranger asking—from however many years ago—, “Have you felt this, too?” A friend found between pages.

That is my publishing. That is how I got here. I saw and heard the many stories of writers’ experiences in the industry and decided, while this industry does help people’s dreams come true (and that is no small thing), I don’t want to be part of something that exploits people for profit and turns our voices into imitations and caricatures of ourselves. I would rather be myself and write what is asking to be written, and send it out into the world as a port in a storm.

I’m putting publishing back into the hands of the people.

Welcome to my website. My name is Mackenzie Hofmann. I’m doing publishing differently. No agent. Certainly no Amazon. And no hashtags on Instagram either. If you like my books, great! I hope you share them with others, and I’d certainly love to talk with you about them. (At the end of the day, I am and will forever be a book nerd.) Either way, I hope this serves as inspiration: even something hundreds of years old like publishing can be done differently. All we have to do is be the change.