Tariffied: Impacts on Publishing, Writing, & Creativity

Hello, Type M Readers & Writers:

Shelley here reporting from an island in the Philippine Sea and feeling very weirded-out by everything going on over there on the mainland. Guam is a far-away outpost of the USA. My husband works for the Department of the Navy. We've been on island since January, trying to get our bearings. It would have been difficult in normal circumstances. 

Now I don't know whether to be grateful to be off the mainland or terrified. 

I'm a worrier. When my husband decided to apply for this position, November's election hadn't yet happened. I voiced some concerns about what if things go sideways while we're there, but we decided to take a chance. Yup. We chose this, so I can't complain or say it was totally unexpected. That it's toward the worse end of the spectrum of outcomes I'd considered saddens and alarms me. It's not the absolute worst. Yet. But we are darn close to China here. 

One thing I can say is that all this chaos and uncertainty is impacting my writing. I'm trying oh so hard to build a creative sanctuary in my head and my home, but short of turning off the news altogether and living in a fantasy world of there's nothing happening lalalalala puppies and unicorns, I don't see how I can ignore the sitch out there and concentrate on fictional narratives. 

Perhaps I should consider it a challenge. If I can manage to flex these concentration muscles now, I might be able to continue to create no matter what happens in two weeks, three months, or four years. 

I mean, haven't some authors written works while actually jailed? 

A quick Google search pulls up a list of ten best books written in jail. These include Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and Justine by the Marquis de Sade. (Note 1)

Okay, so if Mallory could write while moldering in the not-so-cozy confines of a 15th-century prison, certainly I can write while holed up in an ocean-facing condo in the beautiful, tropical island paradise that is Guam. And honestly, diving into fictional worlds might be the best antidote to the news cycle if I can only get myself to ignore it. 

My new table, cushions, and pillows on the balcony

I'd love to hear how other writers are handling this. Feel free to comment. 

Publishing and Writing Community Impacts

I try to immerse myself in the literary life, but even the book world news is somber. I've somehow signed up for a ridiculous number of Substack newsletters, and one came in today from a new indie publisher of mid-life women's books, Empress Publications. They are just launching a new nonfiction book on mid-life women's sexuality written by a medical doctor. They contracted with an artisanal, women-owned press in China to create a pretty book on bamboo paper. (Note 2)

Now, because of the new tariffs and closing of the de minimis loophole, the book is going to cost a lot more to get into the hands of readers. Who wins here? Anyone? 

Maybe the environment? All this mail-ordering and purchasing cheap throw-away goods isn't so good for the planet. As someone concerned with sustainability and over-consumption, I take this as perhaps the only positive glimmer on a dark sea of awful. But books? We keep those. We pass them down. They aren't throw-away items. Not the good ones anyway. I digress...

The de minimis exemption was a bipartisan law passed by Congress that allowed shipments valued under $800 per person per day to enter the U.S.A. without duty charges or taxes. According to the National Foreign Trade Council, American small business plus consumers benefited from the exemption and provided low-income communities access to affordable goods...including books. (Note 3)

That's not the worst of it. Almost everything that is sourced outside the U.S., including paper and books and ink and parts for printing presses, etc. is going to have increased tariffs. That means production will slow or goods will cost more or both. I think the publishing industry at all levels is going to suffer. 

Between cutting funding to libraries and museums and now these new tariffs, one has to wonder if our country cares at all about readers, authors, booksellers, literacy, books, or the arts in general. Is America ditching reading and culture altogether? 

Some may protest: "It's not me that's doing this!" Well, I'm sorry, but we can't pretend we aren't part of the country that is making these decisions. When our country does something...WE ARE doing it. If we let these actions continue, we are doing it. If we don't gather together and tell our representatives to go in a different direction, we are doing it. 

😀 Maybe this will all turn out just fine, and I'm worrying about nothing. 

Some of you may sincerely believe this is just a small bump in the road and everything is gonna be okay. I sincerely hope you are right. If I'm worrying about nothing, that will be the best outcome. I'll have only grown some new gray hairs and maybe shaved a few days off the end of my life. I'll even give credit where credit is due. 

I may not be feeling the fiction writing right now, but I do seem to be capable of writing opinion essays. Maybe this is just where I have to dwell for now. Meanwhile, I'm researching for a potential series set in the 1960s, so I'm not completely wasting my time. I have books to read, notes to take, ideas to spin. 

Let's hope this chaos calms down before summer. 

Note 1: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/19/books-written-in-prison

Note 2: https://open.substack.com/pub/alisajones/p/zippers-tariffs-and-the-price-of

Note 3: https://www.nftc.org/de-minimis-a-vital-tax-exemption/

 

Tik Tok, Facebook, and the Intersection of Social Media and Book Marketing

This is an excerpt from a longer post on ShelleyBurbank.com published Jan. 24, 2025. I'm currently living on the island of Guam with my husband. We've been apartment-hunting and trying out local cuisine. Writing fiction has taken a back seat, but hopefully we'll get settled soon. Meanwhile . . .

The recent TikTok ban (then the non-ban) provoked much discussion and downright angst in other corners of the literary world, but I have to wonder why it came as such a surprise to some people? For as long as I've been learning about platform-building, the smart people in the room gave the same advice: Don't count on social media platforms entirely because you never know when they might fail, change, or become unusable. Build your own website and gather an email list.

I remember feeling frustrated every time I read that advice because everyone knew that nobody read blogs anymore, and getting people to sign up for a newsletter was so much harder than getting them to click that "follow" button. Why should I waste so much energy when Twitter was obviously the way to go?

And then there was BookTok, which took some backlist titles and blew them up into mega best-sellers and made huge names of some authors and created new genres, most notably, Romantasy. Good for them, I thought. It's tempting to follow suit, but do I need to jump on every trend? MUST I go on Tik Tok in order to give my books a chance?

Nope and nope. I just didn't want to go there, and I already hated Twitter, though I had an account as a kind of place-holder.

Now I'm glad I didn't waste my time and energy on either Twitter or Tik Tok. I used the X switch as an excuse to delete my barely breathing Twitter account, and I stuck to Meta products Facebook and Instagram for the past few years. Still, I had this constant feeling of irritation about the whole notion of being obliged to use social media just to reach readers. It felt performative. Maybe a little desperate. And crowded.

I liked the old Facebook. Friends and family sharing photos and recipes and funny little daily things. Then they changed the algorithm, making it increasingly less likely that I'd see the personal posts while throwing paid posts and advertising in my face along with weird meme accounts and bot-run accounts and anything inflammatory that kept eyeballs on the screen.

Recently, I ran into some horrendous, misogynistic rant pits, dumping on women's abilities and basically saying they had one, and only one reason for being alive on this planet, and I thought, This is so not where I want to spend my time.

Still, Facebook had its uses. The one time I ran a Facebook ad, my book sales did increase. Instagram helped me find reviewers who wrote lovely posts about my two mystery novels. Unfortunately, these socials are fraught, once again, with politics, and I'm ready to exit this highway to nowhere.

Plus I think it's ruined a generation of young minds and our collective society.

There. I said it. Without social media, all the Big Crazy (what I call the monster we've collectively created) would have no place to spew its venom, to spread its lies, to stew in its own acidic juices while somehow getting meaner and stronger for it, ruining any hope of factual and polite public discourse again.

I hope they all fail.

Do I feel any empathy for the influencers and creatives and artists and crafters who use social media to make money? Yes, actually. I do. It was a cool new way to make a gig income, or even a full-blown massive one, but can you say we weren't warned? Were we just hoping against hope nothing would change? Ever?

The thing about our current tech-driven life is that change happens faster and faster. What's in one year is out the next. It's not like social media arrived in a vacuum. It disrupted older industries. People used to make money writing for magazines and newspapers. Remember those? The quaint things that arrived in the mail and had a crisp turning sound when you went to the next page?

Print media began a slow decline and then took a big tumble as social media gained traction. In fact, I had just broken into the paying confession magazine market (with a 98-year history, btw), when the confessions suddenly folded and were gone. My very new source of writing income evaporated after I sold only four stories to them. Did anyone weep for me? For the other short story writers who used to make a good, steady income selling to that market?

It wasn't just writers, either. Other people once made money buying and selling ads in those publications. Others earned salaries editing, copy-editing, proofreading, typesetting, and printing them. Stores sold them. Every newspaper that died or cut way back, every magazine that disappeared, represented loss of income for creators and production people and retailers.

So, I have to ask myself, did influencers and BookTok celebs mourn for all of those people who lost their livelihoods when the new platforms left print in the dust? Did they even spare those people a thought?

I doubt it.

_________

For more like this, go to ShelleyBurbank.com  Remember to subscribe to my 1 x per month, free author newsletter where I opine about creativity, living your best life, goal-setting, books, literary life and more. Check out PINK DANDELIONS at https://shelleyburbank.substack.com/