A few years ago, I was working for websites that were churning out viral content. I had worked for several companies, and all I did was this: I would get to work, open my laptop, look out for viral content, repackage it and then get an editor to look at it. Sometimes, it involved stealing and taking images from creators (I’m not proud of this). I did this for pittance and these websites made money off ads. More views = more ad money, especially since many eyeballs would be looking at the ads alongside the posts.
I have left the industry since and have never looked back. Apart from stealing a creator’s work, we also had to sensationalise a story by humiliating people who were often victims of harassment and abuse in general. We were also exploiting a creator’s artwork for hits and the creators were getting nothing in return. Viewers also perpetuate this culture by clicking on clickbait and sharing it. Any time anything goes viral, news networks take it and don’t compensate the person who created the content.
The need to keep generating content now pervades publishing. We have many publishing houses, which is great (economically speaking) for competition, but many of these publishing houses churn out books. These publishing houses are especially good at churning out children’s books. The idea is to get children hooked to the series so that they keep buying the books. It is assumed that parents will buy the books because they want their children to acquire the language and the skills needed to write compositions and well, learn how to express themselves as human beings. However, the latter is secondary. (Here, exams are of paramount importance.)
The problem is that these publishers churn out work. Editing is not done properly. Manuscripts are just edited, if one can call it that, for grammar errors and sentence structure. They are then put out into the world with the publisher hoping that people will pick it up. Many of the books that I have read are not of good quality. The prose reads like a first draft and there is so much more that needs to be done to flesh the plot out. Sometimes, money is spent on designing beautiful covers or cover that will appeal to kids, all because publishers see this as a means of keeping afloat or at least attempting to make bank. For books that are in a series, I wonder how or why they can be released within months of one another or even within a year. It’s not possible.
Of course, publishers want to make bank because of capitalism. But this is bad because this is the quality of work we’re presenting to the world. If someone picks this up and remarks, “Huh. This is all this city has,” and puts it back, then we lose our audience. What editors and writers want to do is to get their work read by people, and if it’s not good, people won’t pick it up. Children may pick it up because they’re still developing taste, but if we can’t ensure quality, how can they know what good work is actually like?
There is a lot of talk about literature and art being the soul of a society, and what kind of soul do we have when we publish willy nilly? What kind of face does a city have when books, especially if they’re published as a series, is a rush job and a badly done one at that?
We’re letting kids read garbage if our local books are not well edited. We’re not going to be read by the public and people from other shores if we let plots go unedited. We have to do what we can to ensure that what we do is good.
Art goes against capitalism because we can’t keep churning. We have to work at it to ensure that there is something that isn’t corrupt and that something beautiful can endure even though there is misery and suffering. That is the least a writer and editor can do.