because i am asking

Uncontacted Indigenous peoples reject contact with outsiders, as an active and ongoing choice. Survival International has calculated that there are 196 uncontacted groups worldwide; some of these are entire peoples who are uncontacted – such as the Sentinelese in India. Some uncontacted groups – such as the Ayoreo Totobiegosode in the Paraguayan Chaco or the Amahuaca in Peru – are sub-groups of bigger tribes with whom they share a language and often a territory. All are aware of the outside world, and reject it. They are self-sufficient and resilient. They live independently in forests, sometimes on islands. They resist intrusion, and thrive when their rights are respected. Uncontacted peoples may encounter outsiders sporadically, or not at all. They are aware of neighboring Indigenous peoples, who may be closely or distantly related. The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in Indonesia have family members who have left the forest, mostly under duress. The uncontacted Pirititi occasionally encounter their contacted Kinja neighbors in the Brazilian Amazon. The Massaco, also in Brazil, were for decades known only by traces in the forest, including booby traps sharpened with rodents' teeth and placed on their hunting trails to warn off outsiders. Uncontacted peoples’ rejection of contact is often rooted in memories of devastating past contact and invasion, which brought violence, epidemics and death. Their denial of contact is a clear expression of their autonomy and self-determination.

“But there are dark, untouched corners within all of us. Sex can be very exciting in one moment and barely tepid the next. It can feel like love but not be love. It can feel like possession and then the person walks away. You can’t possess another person. You can’t make another person not die. If nothing else, at least my vomit fetish is mine. It’s mine and it’s real.”

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?

My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.

Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!

Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).