ESSAY: Minor, Minor, Minor Writer

A minor writer is a writer who sees the literary landscape for what it is: one where, at the end of the day, talent and interest win out, but those winnings are oftentimes fickle and/or delayed.

By Jeff Alessandrelli

1.

There’s a short section in Live from New York, the Saturday Night Live oral history biography, where Chris Rock is talking about SNL founder Lorne Michaels and his ego. “Is Lorne arrogant? Yeah—but hey, man, I know arrogant cab drivers. I know arrogant hot dog guys…So, you know, there’s arrogance with no reason to be, and there’s arrogance with plenty of reason to be.”

As an egotistical, even arrogant minor writer, I could really relate to that. I deserve, or think I deserve, what I might not possess.

2.

My definition of a minor writer is slightly different than the norm. A minor writer is a writer who sees the literary landscape for what it is: one where, at the end of the day, talent and interest win out, but those winnings are oftentimes fickle and/or delayed. Rewards are undemocratic, even if time hopefully parches the non-great and irrigates the great. But a minor writer is also someone who (consciously or subconsciously) does intuit that they are missing something in their work. This something could be living in the wrong place or time. Could be due to the wrongness of their sex or gender or sexuality. Having the wrong (or not right enough) publisher. Or the unluckiness of writing, in the right place but wrong time, or wrong place but right time, originally about topics that other writers, living in the right place and right time, are prominently writing about unoriginally. Themes or subject matters that, deliberately or undeliberately, represent scaffolding rather than the actual concrete, ever-lasting framework. Style over substance, etc. A limited or “diverse” artistic vantage point that, one is told, doesn’t appeal to the widespread masses. A lack of drive after an initial failure (or success) or a refusal to publish or to stop publishing.

Names names names. So many names are bound to arise in an essay like this. And each writer picks and chooses who they namecheck based on their own taste, education, and aesthetic affinities. Briefly, here I go: Ralph Ellison is only debatably (and it’s all debatable) a major writer, but Invisible Man is a major book. If Ellison had published just two more books of or near the quality of Invisible Man, his majorness would be ironclad assured. One Invisible Man is worth seven or eight Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates books. The only novel that Ellison published during his lifetime, however, was Invisible Man. “There is no question that quantity—added, of course, to genius—is what separates major writers from minor writers,” writes Cynthia Ozick in her essay “Our Kinsman, Mr. Trollope,” collected in her 1996 essay collection Fame & Folly. Similarly, as John Ashbery notes in his own book on minor poets, Other Traditions (2000), the first condition that Modernist extraordinaire W.H. Auden sets down when distinguishing between minor and major is, “[The writer] must write a lot.” Being that Auden published more than twenty-five different books in a variety of genres and that Ozick is, as of this writing, the author of seven novels, eight short story collections and eight essay collections, both of these statements say more about their own authorial outputs, I think, than anything else. Ellison’s sole novel nevertheless remains a lonely tree beside Auden and Ozick’s forests. My own conjecture: Although there are exceptions, most major writers don’t publish too much nor not enough. They exist in the sweet spot, where first-time readers might be able to easily find a way in. It’s the reason why, love him or hate him, the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has declared that he will only direct ten films, stating, “I want to leave you wanting more and not just work—and I don’t want to work to diminishing returns.” Similarly, Ocean Vuong recently noted his desire to release just eight books, then abstain from publishing, moving onto something else, the work living its own life. Less is more, provided that the less is of an exceptionable vintage. With regards to minorness, it could be due to all of the things previously mentioned or one of them or none—could just be the writer’s bad luck.

Ralph Ellison

Of course, the actual writing factors in too. The knowledgeable minor writer, though, understands that this is less important than one might initially think. Tastes change over time; forms and styles are, at best, fleeting. Genre as well—in an 1819 letter to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke, John Keats wrote, “I have no trust whatever on Poetry. I don’t wonder at it—the marvel is to me how people read so much of it.” That marvel of Keat’s is now non-existent, and his lack of trust in poetry, at least as a durable, of-the-people, on-the-pulse artistic genre, was a good one. The would-be major writer might do well to note this. What seems innovative today is old hat tomorrow is completely unrecognizable and unreadable in the future.

There’s also the question of posterity vs. aliveness. Most of the major 21^st century writers and thinkers today, no matter the genre, will likely not be the major 21^st century writers and thinkers one hundred years from now. (We can go down the list—Emily Dickinson was unknown in her lifetime. Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka were virtually unknown. Friedrich Nietzsche’s work was largely ignored during his lifetime. Ditto the work of authors as disparate as William Blake, Simone Weil, and H.P. Lovecraft. Although known while alive, Zora Neale Hurston’s work was significantly championed only after her death. Early in his life Herman Melville was celebrated, then forgotten, then pitied due to his forgottenness and previous celebration. And that’s just a start.) What scant few writers survive will need to constantly be made anew, generation by generation.

For others renown during one’s lifetime is, although not unwelcome at all, an ancillary goal. The most unrealistic of them crosshair names such as Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, maybe even Homer or Sappho. For those with a more calibrated scope of ambition, it’s Hemingway, Woolf, Borges, Morrison. These writers pride themselves on their “universal” themes and “durable” creative structures. They don’t read much contemporary work and, being mindful of eternity and its caprices, are more aloof and guarded. When questioned about their writing goals they hem and haw and then recite names such as Saint-John Perse, Henrik Pontoppidan, Selma Lagerlöf, maybe Eyvind Johnson. When met with the bafflement they hoped for, their response is soft, even demure, but forceful: “Nobel Prize winners in Literature, all of them. The biggest award, given to one of the best living writers. The best living writer. And who remembers those authors now? Who reads them? No one.” The implication is bald and overt: posterity is more important than literary fame in one’s own lifetime. Writing for the fences and beyond, into the deepest darkest corner of the graveyard, long after the author herself has perished. Good luck.

(Due to space, I’m leaving out here the fact that, circa 2025, authorial branding, social media usage, and one’s overall online-ness and/or general social savvy are a key component of the authorial “apparatus,” no matter the category of author one is or wants to be.)

Writing in The Rumpus some years ago, lamenting his lack of inclusion in The New Yorker’s once-a-decade Fiction issue, in which a career-making “20 Writers Under 40” list is included, the writer Steve Almond asserts his minorness in his pep-talk/essay “The New Yorker’s One Over 40” while also slow rolling it, trying to make sense of how one might choose to give their life over to something that is very hard and tedious and, at the same time, largely without reward—as well as staying power. (Here it’s worth noting that most books go out of print after or within ten years of their publication dates. That is, if the book had an actual print run. Via print-on-demand printing and e-books, it’s true that it is easier now than ever before to keep books in print, available to all readers. It’s far less easy to keep actual readerly interest at the same pace as technological innovation, however. Books actively and aggressively do not last. And if they do survive longer than those ten years, 99% of them are not going to make it to the end of one’s lifetime. No matter the quality or kind, writing is ephemeral above all else.) In his essay, Almond states, “I spend most of my life doubting my legitimacy as a writer, not feeling that I suck exactly, but often convinced that I’m your basic mid-list hacker who will never write anything enduring… The truth is, I recognize the limits of my talent and drive. That’s the whole problem. I’m just good enough – as a writer and a reader – to recognize my spot in the pecking order.” For the minor writer the problem is not one of attaining greatness and its attendant fame, inclusion, adoration, big sales, hefty advances, prominent bylines, cushy teaching positions, and vaunted writerly status holding. It’s being able to accept and exist within a largely invisible proficiency. Within an unseen or unrecognized competence. Existing inside this day after day, published poem after poem, essay atop essay, novel upon novel, year upon year, decade after decade.

Steve Almond

3.

As images continue to dominate everywhere, literacy rates are dropping in the United States. A 2025 article in Newsweek states that, according to data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the U.S. Department of Education, “21 percent of adults in the U.S. were found to be illiterate, while 54 percent of adults had a literacy below a sixth grade level.” A 2024 article in NBC News further asserts that literacy patterns are trending down, not up, with 28% of U.S. adults now at the lowest level of literacy.

We increasingly don’t live in a culture that values literacy and the written word. Whether static or in motion, disseminated via social media or a text thread, computer, phone or tablet, images are king, and their kingdom grows across borders, knowing no bounds. In 2000 Philip Roth, talking to The New Yorker’s David Remnick, proclaimed that “the literary era has come to an end. The evidence is the screen, the progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer.” Roth conjectures that “[e]very year seventy readers die and only two are replaced.” Whether they are or were true, Roth’s proclamations are of the kind that writers have been making since the early 20^th century, after the novel’s assumed golden age ended in the 19^th. Seven years after Remnick’s “The Fierceness of Philip Roth” was published, the first iPhone was released in 2007, ushering in the smartphone era of screendom. (Complete with Instagram, TikTok, and the like.) In the future the format might change, screens losing precedence to something else. But there’s little doubt that the ravage will continue.

Hand in hand with falling literacy rates, writers of literature have been, paradoxically, able to put themselves in a position where, chiefly via social media, they are able to pretend that people, maybe many people, both read their work and care about it. Published by big and small magazines alike, new poems, essays and stories might receive hundreds or thousands of likes and retweets. Engagement seems to be happening, across platforms and perspectives. BookTok exists. Goodreads exists. NetGalley exists. Readers care. People care.

As someone who used to be a heavy drinker, lines from the French Situationist Guy Debord’s autobiography Panegyric (1989) have resided in a narrow corner at the back of my head for many years:

“Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.”

I used to romanticize Debord’s mindset. But I don’t drink anymore. What I’ve replaced alcohol with is ego and determination, with a thinly filigreed vein of humility as a chaser. Day in, day out, I think about myself and my work more than other people think about themselves and their work. In caring so deeply I have, over time, errantly assumed that others care as well.

I’m not alone in this deception either—far from it. On a lark a few months back I signed up, via the publishing industry website Publishers Marketplace, for a BookScan account. Every month, at a cost of $25, I could look up the sales of five different books, new or old. According to its website, BookScan “is the gold-standard data service that tracks actual weekly retail sales of trade print books in the US. The service utilizes direct reporting from most major chain retailers and over 800 independent bookstores, covering approximately 85 percent of the country’s trade print sales.” Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop—all provide their book sale data to BookScan, along with dozens of other retailers. The service certainly doesn’t track everything, but it does give worthwhile insight into how many copies of a book have sold and when.

Jealousy garlanded by acute curiosity is why I signed up for BookScan. A friend of a friend of friend, a writer I did not really know but knew about, had recently published a short story collection, with a well-known and well-respected independent press. The author’s previous book, a novella, had been published by a different, slightly less well-respected mid-level independent press and received a goodly amount of attention and praise. Written in a similar vein and focusing on trusted subjects such as drugs, infidelity, and exotic animals, the new collection was dumb and fun in a way that might appeal to many readers, particularly men. Early reviews championed the short story collection’s it-ness, how the author and his book didn’t pull punches, didn’t pretend, had no interest in trying to be what they weren’t. (The way, it was subtly implied, so many other writers and their books did, pretending and trying too hard.)

My curiosity in this text, though, had nothing to do with merit, form, or writing style. Even the press focused on it was somewhat ancillary to me. My curiosity had everything to do with the author’s personality. Let’s just say I found him…challenging. Although I’d only met him once in-person (where, in the course of a three-minute conversation after a reading that he did not read at, he mentioned his latest book four times), online, across multiple social media platforms, he regularly posted short, sterile think pieces debating “hot button” topics such as AI, driverless cars, and cryptocurrency, while simultaneously cajoling any and everyone to read, review, and rate his new book! Sporting an Egon Schiele-esque symmetrical haircut and occasionally rocking a bow tie, he also cosplayed “alternative” types online, while actually making a living as a small business owner, the co-creator of, I kid you not, an organic pita chip company that seemed to be flourishing; chips could be purchased at Whole Foods, New Seasons, and other crunchy, expensive spots. At the time of his book’s publication the short story writer had recently divorced his first wife and begun his “middle-aged, open-minded experiment” in polyamory. As all his fans and followers knew, the short story writer was not looking for anything serious, but he was looking for something. Thus he posted about his dates and trysts, keeping the specific details confidential but the broader confines very public. Promoting his new book, the short story writer did an interview with one of his situationships, parsing through his dating history and freshly opened mind. In this interview two of the questions revolved around the short story writer’s “indie lit fame,” something that he accepted and seemed to take as a given. That he actually believed such a thing didn’t surprise me. It might have even been true. But it made me wonder how many copies of the short story writer’s new collection had actually been purchased. What did 21st century indie lit fame translate to exactly, at least in terms of sales?

I am a naïve man. 4,000 copies? Or maybe 2,500 or nearabouts. That is what, prior to BookScanning, I would have guessed the new collection had sold.

Just under four months after its publication, the short story writer had sold 319 print copies of the new book (paperback; no hardback was printed and no information was available regarding digital copies). After seeing that number I went, over a period of six months, on a small, slow rampage, looking up a variety of different books from a variety of different writers and publishers. The only real connection between them was their classification as literature.

Published by a crème de la crème independent press, a widely-lauded, professional-wrestling-inspired memoir by a critically acclaimed multi-genre writer had, two and a half years after its release, sold 1,418 print copies (paperback) and 182 digital copies. Published by a new small press that did not have widespread distribution, a LA-based poet’s debut novel sold, according to BookScan, 74 copies a year and a half after its publication. Released by a Big 5 press, an acclaimed poet’s fourth collection sold 262 copies in paperback, a year after its hardback release. In hardback, 867 copies, two-and-a-half years after publication. 1,129 copies total. (When I mentioned this number to a friend of mine, someone who has worked in publishing for 20+ years, including 12 years with, based in Minneapolis, MN, one of the most well-respected independent presses in the country, he responded to this number positively—what a success! At his press a contemporary poetry collection that sold 1,100 copies would be “wildly successful.” Most of the poetry volumes they put out weren’t nearly that high, selling between 400-700 copies. A few more than that; more than a few less.) 293 paperback copies of the sixth collection by one of my favorite contemporary poets, published by a respected press that publishes mostly poetry. Released by another press specializing in poetry, 187 paperback copies sold of the big contest-winning debut collection by a close friend of mine, an amazing poet.

A well-known Southern writer in their early 50s, the author of several previously transgressive and championed volumes, sold, a year and change after its release, 629 hardback copies of their latest novel, released by a Big 5 imprint. 855 hardcover copies and 1,551 digital copies sold of a noted editor-writer’s debut essay collection, one focused on disability and published by a highly-regarded indie press. Eleven months after it was released, 488 paperback copies sold of a young, social media savvy author’s hybrid lyric essay collection, published by a canonical independent press. Feted by The New Yorker and Bookforum, among several others, 1,044 print copies (hardback) and 934 digital copies sold of a thirty-something author’s breakout novel, published by a Big 5 imprint.

Other books I looked up had higher sales. Seven and a half years after publication, almost 39,000 (paperback) copies sold for an essay collection focusing on anxiety by a widely-championed Irish author. Fourteen months after its publication just over 13,000 (paperback) copies sold of a harrowing memoir about depression by an established novelist. 7,164 hardcover copies and 4,099 digital copies of a buzzy novel, the author’s third, about sisterhood and domestic abuse. The second essay collection by a staff writer for The Atlantic with a large social media following had, four and a half years after its release, sold 4,847 copies (paperback) and 974 digital copies. All four of these books were published by major presses, complete with publicity departments and, I assume, specific marketing plans. That said, major presses also publish dozens upon dozens of books a year, and in-house attention can, perhaps paradoxically, be hard to come by. Simply getting one’s book published by a Big 5 press does not guarantee either sales or reviews. It certainly helps—but it is no guarantee.

BookScan might be “the gold-standard data service” tracking retail book sales, but it doesn’t account for everything. Namely, direct to consumer sales, ones made directly by the press, aren’t tabulated via it, nor our conference, tradeshow or non-bookstore event sales. Course adoption sales aren’t tabulated through it either. Any sales figures that BookScan thus provides are worth thinking about, but they aren’t the be-all and end-all by any means.

Still, the retail numbers on the books that I looked up surprised me, both for what they were and what they weren’t. Prior to signing up to BookScan and looking up each text I knew that books didn’t sell much, at least not ones literary in origin. That’s nothing new. (In her essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” published in 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick notes, “Alice James wrote in her diary that her brother, Henry, was asked to write for the popular press and assured he could do anything he pleased “so long as there’s nothing literary in it.”’ I think strides have been made since then, but only incrementally.) Cookbooks sell. Self-help books sell. Romance, fantasy, YA—they all sell. Capital L literature is wavier, far wavier. It certainly can sell, of course, but it just as easily cannot and does not.

What the sales numbers on the books I looked up told me was that, yes, certain texts that, on the outside at least, one might guess are big sellers actually aren’t, not at all. That did intrigue me, particularly because many of those books were widely reviewed and/or critically acclaimed. But such surprise was tempered by my steadfast belief that, as mostly a poet, and as a frequent reader of difficult, eccentric, oft-not widely read or known books, published by big and small presses alike, sales don’t matter. How many books did Bruno Schulz sell while alive? Or Robert Walser? Or Alice Dunbar Nelson? (The latter wrote in her diary, "Damn bad luck I have with my pen. Some fate has decreed I shall never make money by it.”) Moreover, looking up the sales data on BookScan made clear to me something that, like or not, I already knew: literarily, as a writer, as an active, working writer, I am very very very small.

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Jeff Alessandrelli lives in Portland, OR, where he directs and co-edits the non-profit book press/record label Fonograf Editions. His latest book is And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024). “Minor minor minor minor” is an excerpt from an essay that will be included in a forthcoming collection to be published by Autofocus Books in late 2027/early 2028. His new Substack is https://substack.com/@jalessandrelli

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