Tell me, has this ever happened to you: Your friend sends you a link to some nondescript WordPress or neocities-style blog, or an untitled pdf, or maybe a self-hosted website you’ve never heard of before, and tells you that, despite its appearance, inside lies a generation-defining work of art? 

Excited, you start to read, only to swiftly realize why you’ve never heard of this ‘hidden gem.’ As you sift through paragraphs littered with typos, grammatical errors, and unchecked masturbatory prose that makes you realize why editors are so important, the only feeling the text is evoking in you is anxiety that any honest review you give might break your poor friend’s heart. 

I’ll be the first to admit I approach art with a more critical lens than most people. Maybe that’s just a nicer way to say I’m a snob, but maybe some degree of snobbery is necessary to ensure literature is a medium that explores the breadth of human experience rather than a collection of Dan Browns or Colleen Hoovers ad infinitum. 

Does it really make me such an asshole to look at a piece of writing and think “maybe there’s a reason this wasn’t published”?

But does that really make sense? I just mentioned Dan Brown and Colleen Hoover, two authors who—despite being critically panned—are not only published, but bestselling. Much to the chagrin of starving artists everywhere, literature is first and foremost an industry, and the explicit goal of publishers is not to promote mastery, but to make money. 

Wouldn’t it then make sense that writing unfettered by those goals could have the potential to achieve a greater artistic vision? “Potential” is the key word here; to find those hidden gems, you have to sift through a whole lot of slop.

So does a piece of writing being published say anything about its quality? 

Well, yeah, obviously. I’m hesitant to draw a one-to-one parallel between fiction and non-fiction since the standards of the two mediums are so different (I’d be a lot less likely to side-eye awkward sentence construction in a human rights exposé than in a poem, for example), but the standards of journalism seem helpful for illustrating my point. 

Fluff pieces on Hollywood stars and quizlets that tell you which House of the Dragon character you are might be published regularly, but major news outlets still have a reputation to uphold, meaning you’re a lot more likely to find well researched and fact checked news from them than you are from the median Substack user. 

Sure, there are outliers, but seeing the banner of an established publication can help you separate articles about why Sandy Hook was a false flag from serious news stories, like investigative reports on January 6th, or articles that consistently use the passive voice to refer to genocidal violence, or the eighteen thousandth op-ed from the Guardian about why trans women are actually the cenobites from Hellraiser.

So, about those last two… Maybe there’s a reason they were published.

It’s time to address the elephant in the room. Published media, fiction or nonfiction, is inevitably sullied by a hefty slant towards the perspectives of those already in power. 

Whether that slant is directly weaponized to the detriment of marginalized groups like the aforementioned examples, or exercised through a more passive omission of their perspectives, like in Harold Bloom’s western canon of literature, it is pervasive and undeniable. 

But the rest of what I’ve said about publication is still true. It does legitimize writing through a combination of editorial standards and wider accessibility. We can’t solve this problem of biased perspective by just telling everyone to read that damn WordPress. So what can we do?

Let me ask you again, has this ever happened to you? 

Once again, your friend sent you a link to some unknown, unpublished work of writing, promising a masterpiece. Once again, there are some typos, some awkwardly written bits that could have really used an editor. But this time, you get it. 

You really really get it. 

Maybe you get it so hard it brings you to tears. 

I’ve been there before.

The first story that brought me there made me get it was Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones by Torrey Peters. I’ll be honest, I was initially planning to contrast it with some fluffy queer YA novel I had read beforehand, but I genuinely think this was the first time I had ever read a story centering around a trans woman; the first time I had read a story about someone like me. 

Even in the years since, I’ve seldom come across a story that portrays the messy, complicated, visceral reality of being a trans woman in the same way.

The novella centres around a trans woman finding solace in the community she had once rebuked after setting off an apocalyptic event just to spite the people who hate her. I tore through it in about an hour. I distinctly remember reaching the last page of the pdf right before my phone died, having been too engrossed to find a charging cord.

Almost immediately after, I downloaded and read Peters’ other novella, The Masker, about a crossdresser caught between comfortably exploitative fetishization and the unthinkable horror of transition. It contains multiple graphic scenes of transmisogynistic sexual violence. The Masker made me sick to my stomach, yet I wouldn’t give up the experience of reading it for the world.

I can tell you the exact reason these stories weren’t published. 

Incidentally, both of these novellas will in fact be published—along with two new stories—in a 2025 collection entitled Stag Dance. 

It’s telling that both stories are only being published following the success of Peters’ 2021 debut novel Detransition, Baby. The issue with Peters’ writing was never what it was about (Fifty Shades of Grey depicted the interplay between trauma, kink, and complex power structures in a considerably less thoughtful way, and it topped the bestseller list half a decade before The Masker even came out) but who it was about. 

Complex stories rife with imperfect characters and immoral behaviour have always been popular, but when those stories are about weird outsiders who a lot of people see as disgusting perverts just by virtue of their identity, the suppressive tendencies of mainstream publishing start to kick in. 

So how did Detransition, Baby eventually get published? It’s not that the general public suddenly decided that trans people are normal and okay actually between 2016 and 2021. Sure, Detransition, Baby was more accessible to a cis audience than Peters’ earlier work, but it was still messy and raw. The truth is, as the cult trans literary scene grew, publishers started to realize this growing market of potential customers might be worth investing in. 

This sounds cynical because it is, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hopeful. After establishing herself as a rock star in her own small but passionate community, Peters got her foot in the door just long enough to convince the broader public that she had stories worth telling. Who knows which self-published authors might be next if we fight hard enough?

You can’t escape from the fact that published works are regarded as more legitimate than self published ones. You can’t deny the majority slant of the publication industry. You can’t convince the world that your favourite fanfic clears the New York Times bestseller list. What you can do is keep on reading the stories that really make you feel something, keep showing them to your friends, and keep supporting their creators in the hopes that one day the world will understand your perspective as much as they do anybody else’s.

And you can tell any nerd who says your favourite web-novel has “masturbatory prose” to fuck right off.