It’s Not Pie

And Other Math-Adjacent Content

C: “I don’t have my phone. Can you text me ‘it’s not pie’ so I don’t forget?”
D: “Sure.”
C: “What’s taking so long to send the text?”
D: “Looking for π on my phone’s keyboard.”

Not that kind of pi. I meant the good kind of pie, the kind you eat, which is delicious. Not the bad kind of pi, with which you do math; math is the worst.

I relate to H because I had trouble finding π in the character map. I admit I did not remember what it looked like, having not thought about the numeral pi in twenty-five years. I almost gave you µ by accident, because to me they look exactly the same. Not the good kind of moo, like what a cow says, cows being cute and sweet animals; but the bad kind of mu, with which you do math, et cetera, et cetera.

As I was saying: The good kind of pie. My ex-spouse once told me, “people will eat cake if it’s around but they’ll line up for pie,” which I think was supposed to be a decisive victory in favor of pie over cake. In my experience people will line up for cake as readily as for pie. Or for cupcakes, donuts, breakfast pastries, or even one time these baked oatmeal cup things I saw on Pinterest. Especially in a workplace. If you bring any kind of baked good to the workplace people are going to line up for that. Pie isn’t special.

Today’s Shelf Life is brought to you by the letter plagiarized in Sonya Larson’s “The Kindest” and the number π. I’m sorry, I know this is three in a row that reference the Bad Art Friend discourse. I can’t remember the last time something stayed on my mind for an entire week. 

True story: I just hit the word count button to see where I was, as I often do when I am wishing for Shelf Life writing to be over, and the count came up 314. Friends, that’s an entire portent.

Today’s Shelf Life is about pie, and things that are not pie, and thing that are pie.

If you had a pie and five friends to share it with, each of you could have one sixth of a pie. If you were sharing the same pie with eleven friends, you could each have one twelfth of a pie. That’s half the pie you would have had with fewer friends. More friends, if they are good friends, are worth having even if it means less pie. The purpose of having pie is to share it with others. It’s not the other way round—you don’t make friends in hopes of getting invited to eat pie. Or maybe you do, no judgment. Pie is great.

Success is not pie. When you share it with more people there is not less to go around. Except sometimes success is pie. When three people apply for a job and there is one position available, suddenly success is pie.

The publishing industry: Pie or not pie?

I could have called this essay “It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game” but pie is easier to digest and there was enough math already.

On one hand, the publishing industry is not pie in the sense that there is not a limited number of opportunities to publish. In any given span of time, the amount of publications that can occur is infinite. Traditional book publishers have a finite number of dollars to put into publishing new titles, true. But there is no functional limit to the number of titles that can be published in any span of time outside the trad publishing sphere. Anyone with access to a computer can self-publish a book. In 2018, the most recent year for which I could find data, almost 1.7 million ISBNs were assigned to self-published titles in the United States. And if that sounds like a lot, remember—you don’t need an ISBN to self-publish an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle. Most Kindle books don’t get an ISBN.

On the other hand, the world’s readership is limited. There are about 7.7 billion of us on the planet. Of those, about 1.35 billion speak English. Of those, only about 360 million speak English as their first language; the other almost-billion probably choose to do their leisure reading in another language when they can. Then, not all those 360 million English-speaking folks can read English. And not all those who can read do read. And those who do read don’t all read all the time. 

There’s a hard limit to how much reading gets done in English each year, is what I’m saying. There is a limited number of person-hours spent reading in English. And when people select something (in English) to read, they are not only selecting from the books published in the last six months, or twelve months, but from every book that has ever published that is still available today. There are around 50 million titles for sale on Amazon.

In that sense, yes, publishing is a pie. There is a limited amount of the publishing pie for all the world’s writers to split. Even if you do not limit yourself to trad-publishing opportunities and avail yourself of the limitless self-publishing opportunities out there, I think we all know that publishing your manuscript is the easiest hurdle. Getting people to read it is the hard part and also the meaningful part.

In relative terms, the logline is: Book sales have been stagnant or falling since 2007 while publications are exploding. So not only is the pie finite, but it’s also shrinking—and more people grab a plate every day.

If you’ve ever observed how people behave when they perceive a communal resource is running low, you know that some people will react by taking more than a fair share to make sure they have enough, while others will react by taking less than a fair share to make sure others have enough.

Humans are also bad at equitably sharing unpartitioned resources. If you divide a resource evenly—for example, slicing a pie—and then let a group of people at it, they’re more likely to take the appropriate amount of it than if you turn them loose on an undivided resource—for example, a tureen of ice cream.

“Readership in English” and “publishing opportunities” are abstract ideas so they’re neither neatly divided into portions nor transparent for us to know meaningfully how much there is available. 

In addition to those above, here are some other finite quantities in the publishing industry:

• Available annual marketing budget dollars at a trad publishing house

• Words available to go into the next issue of a literary journal

• Paper to print books and journals on right now due to supply chain issues

• Hours in a literary agent’s work week to represent new authors

I think this is how you end up with a community of literary fiction writers like Sonya Larson’s Chunky Monkeys wrecking someone’s social reputation and undermining their writing career for the cardinal sin of (checking my notes) donating a kidney and for the subordinate sin of (let me see now) being kind of annoying about it.

Listen, if you donate a kidney performatively, like for the purpose of establishing kindness credentials (which by the way is not what I’m saying happened here, I’m saying if), somebody still got a kidney. You might be an annoying type of person but the end result of your annoying performance was somebody’s life got saved.

Kidneys, as it happens, are not pie. Most people have two kidneys while about 1 in 750 people is born with only one kidney and 1 in 10,000 people is born with four kidneys but people only need one kidney to live a healthy and full life so the population of earth actually has tremendous surplus wealth in the form of human kidneys.

In Britain they put kidney in pie, a disgusting concept. I’m sorry I’ve danced so near it.

A performative act of kindness still results in an act of kindness being done. If someone achieves a success and you celebrate their success performatively, a celebration still happened. Their success was celebrated whether you were genuinely happy for them or whether you were angry and jealous that they received a piece of some metaphorical pie and you did not. Most of the time, another person’s success doesn’t snatch an opportunity for success directly from you. Most of the time you don’t lose because someone else gained. 

What about when you do? What about when your work friend gets the promotion you both wanted or when your good-bad-or-any-disposition art friend gets an accept letter from someone who rejected you? I’m not going to lie and say it’s still as easy as pretending to be happy for someone in your same community who snagged an opportunity you wanted for yourself. You don’t have to perform kindness; you don’t have to pretend to be happy for somebody when you’re not.

Learn to recognize the difference between feeling jealous of someone else’s success and feeling deprived because something you wanted for yourself went to someone else. These are not the same thing, though they often feel the same and are easily mistaken for one another.

If there is a concrete opportunity that you lose out on and that goes to another person you know or interact with, that’s not the same as a nebulous opportunity that you would have liked to have going to another person.

For instance, if my friend Sally and I both submit similar manuscripts to Jane Q Literary-Agent and she signs Sally and does not sign me, then that is a concrete opportunity that Sally got and I did not get and perhaps—but only perhaps—Sally’s getting it means I did not get it.

It’s also possible that Sally’s getting the opportunity means Jonathan didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t the first runner up. Maybe if Sally hadn’t gotten it, and then Jonathan died in a fiery car wreck, then it would have gone to Amanda. Maybe I wasn’t in the running at all for reasons that have nothing to do with Sally. Probably in this scenario I would not have any way to know. It’s easy, then, to assume that Sally’s gain is my loss. The piece of pie that went to Sally might have otherwise fed me.

On the other hand, consider: An art friend of mine publishes something and it is nominated for a Hugo. I’d like to be nominated for a Hugo, too, but I didn’t have any eligible publications. I might feel jealous of this person’s success, but their success didn’t take anything from me. Their nomination didn’t take a spot that could have gone to me. In this case I know for sure that their success cost me nothing. No matter who got those Hugo nominations, I wasn’t going to get one. That pie was not for me no matter how it was sliced.

It’s easy to shelter behind the belief that everyone else’s success in an area where you want to be successful takes an opportunity from you but in most situations that isn’t true. Even when a concrete, specific opportunity goes to another person, the reason is almost never that they took it from you. Someone who applies for the same promotion as you and gets it does not take the promotion from you; the person who made the decision about who to promote takes the opportunity from you. If Sally and I both submit to the same agent, it is not Sally who decides my unlucky fate but Jane Q Literary-Agent. An opportunity might go to someone else but that doesn’t mean they take it from you.

At the end of the day, success is a non-zero-sum game. It’s not a pie. There’s enough success to go around. Remind yourself of this if you find you are coveting someone else’s success to the point you are treating them badly. Go pursue your own.

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