Since we’re talking about this: one of the things the publishing industry could do quickly and easily to change what kind of work is submitted to them and from whom is to think very carefully about the messages people might be getting about publishing via social media.

For several years now I’ve watched in total bafflement as all sorts of people set themselves up as advice-givers on the art of writing and the business of getting published.

This advice tends overwhelmingly towards the conservative, and is shot through with all sorts of assumptions about what literature looks like.

It emphasises craft and structure over life; it pushes a series of numbing rules and templates for fiction; it makes sweeping assertions about what “great books” have in common; it presumes a universal experience and approach to writing that can be replicated.

Worse, it almost always emphasises a series of social codes around writing and in particular around communicating with the publishing industry.

This is a discourse obsessed with how an introductory letter is formatted, whether people sent three chapters or four, how people address agents and editors, whether they list comparable titles, whether the writer has researched the market etc.

This advice is well intentioned, but the toxic side effect of it is that it achieves the opposite of its intention: instead of demystifying publishing and writing, it enforces the impression that publishing is a strange kingdom accessible only through secret codes...

... and profound, painful self-erasure. It is deeply alienating.

Now the publishing industry seems baffled that this discourse of pointless complexity and totally uninterrogated assumptions about etiquette does not seem to have done enough to encourage the approach of new, original, powerful voices.

Well no, because the overwhelming message you would have received by following a lot of publishing notables on social media would have been one of overwhelming compliance and conservatism both in terms of how you should write and how you should comport yourself.

What I’d like to see now is a total abandonment of all these ridiculous ideas about what a novel looks like, what prose sounds like, how to write and, most of all, how to represent yourself when doing something as simple as emailing an agent or editor.

I’d also like to see a rapid de-emphasis of the significance of people “approaching” the publishing industry and a far greater emphasis on... going out there and finding the people paralysed into inactivity by the apparent complexity and harshness of the publishing system.

As a side note if I never hear the words “query letter”, “pitch”, “comp titles”, “approach” or “bio” again I’d be perfectly happy with that. Why not abandon all those things completely.

Fiction writing is not a professional activity and the endless attempt to professionalise it and the people who produce it harms its collective vitality and limits the scope of the fiction that emerges.