Why Talent Isn’t the Only Thing That Matters Anymore

Originally Published on Medium

Would Stephen King Get Signed Today?

That sounds like a strange question, until you think about it for more than a moment.

Not Stephen King now. Not the brand. Not the name that sells millions of copies on sight. The Stephen King who was unknown. The one writing stories full of fear, violence, ugly characters, racism shown without explanation, and people behaving badly because people often do. Would that writer get signed today?

I use Stephen King as an example because I’ve been reading him since I was twelve, starting with Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot, and because his early work shows what publishing once allowed.

And while we’re asking, would Cormac McCarthy? Would a man writing spare, brutal novels filled with violence, despair, and no interest in comforting the reader make it past a modern publishing meeting?

These aren’t questions about talent. They’re questions about money.

Forty years ago, publishing decisions were mostly editorial. An editor read a manuscript and asked whether it mattered, whether it said something worth saying, whether it might last even if it didn’t sell fast. Publishers understood that some books took time to find their readers. Risk was part of the job.

That has changed.

Today, most large publishers and literary agents are businesses first and cultural institutions second. Houses that were once editor-driven are now part of large corporate structures, places like Random House, where decisions pass through marketing, sales forecasts, and financial projections before a contract is offered. This isn’t evil. It’s business. But business changes what gets picked.

The question is no longer “Is this good?”
The question is “Can we predict this will sell quickly and safely?”

That one shift explains almost everything else.

It explains why books by celebrities dominate bestseller lists. A celebrity book arrives with an audience already built in. The risk is low. The return is fast. From a financial standpoint, it makes sense. These books don’t have to be discovered. They don’t have to grow. They just have to launch.

But that also means unknown writers are no longer competing only with other unknown writers. They’re competing with actors, athletes, influencers, and public figures whose names already guarantee attention. In that environment, a risky novel by an unknown author isn’t just a creative gamble. It’s a financial liability.

That’s where the Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy question matters.

Their early work wasn’t polite. It wasn’t safe. It didn’t come with built-in audiences. It relied on editors willing to say, “This might matter later.” In a system driven by short-term returns and fast reactions, that kind of patience is hard to justify.

So where does that kind of writing go now?

Often, it goes to self-publishing.

Self-publishing can be a great thing. It gives writers control. It removes permission. It allows work that doesn’t fit corporate comfort levels to exist at all. For some writers, it’s the right path.

But it comes with a problem no one likes to talk about plainly. When anyone can publish anything at any time, readers lose a reliable way to tell what’s been carefully made and what hasn’t. Over time, the label “self-published” starts to feel like a warning instead of a promise, not because all self-published books are bad, but because there’s no filter most readers trust.

That’s where small independent publishers enter the picture.

When Beyond the Fray Publishing offered me my first contract, it mattered. It wasn’t about money or scale. Someone read my work. Someone said yes. Someone believed it deserved to exist as a book. That kind of validation changes how you see yourself as a writer, and it should.

Later, I came to understand more about how modern publishing works. That Beyond the Fray, like many good independent presses, uses modern tools like print-on-demand and Amazon distribution because the old ways of warehousing and large print runs can sink a small publisher. That didn’t erase the validation. It added context to how the world of publishing has evolved.

What presses like that offer now isn’t mass reach. It’s signal. A sign that a book cleared a bar and wasn’t just thrown into the void.

If you step back and look at the whole picture, the system starts to make sense.

Big publishers focus on financial safety.
Celebrity books bring predictable sales.
Self-publishing brings freedom without a filter.
Independent presses try to preserve curation without taking on crushing risk.

None of this means publishing is evil or broken. It means it changed.

The world of getting published used to ask one main question: “Is this worth reading?”
Now it asks a different one: “Is this safe to bet on?”

Those are not the same questions, and they don’t produce the same books.

So, when people wonder why it feels harder to break in, or why so many books feel similar, or why serious writing seems harder to find, the answer isn’t complicated. It’s not about intelligence or taste. It’s about incentives.

There are no classes available for common sense.

If Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy were unknown writers today, bringing in their early work, they wouldn’t be judged only on what they wrote. They’d be judged on how risky it looked on a spreadsheet.

And that single fact explains more about modern publishing than most insider explanations ever will.