I wanted to invest in my writing, but an MA didn’t feel like the most effective use of my money. So what did I invest in?

I’ve gone back over six years of my writing journey to analyse what I did spend my money on. And I’m going to tell you if it’s worth it.

My debut novel is out with Penguin Random House in 2027. The first terrible draft was finished at the end of 2020, went through assessment in 2021, an 18 month rewrite and another assessment and edit. I didn't have a draft worth showing an agent until 2023, and didn’t secure that agent until I carried out a further rewrite in 2024.

So: six years, no institutional MA, and a lot of work along with investing in my manuscript and my writing that I never added up until now.

Here's where the money went, and whether I'd spend it again.

One thing first: I edit a literary journal that charges a submission fee. Folly has never been publicly funded — that fee is what pays our contributors. So when I tell you to budget for submission fees further down this page, I am one of the people that set submission fees. Being on both sides of the counter is why I actually think they work - and I’ll explain why.

So- here is where I’ve spent money on my writing journey:

1. Join your industry body

About $120 per year

When I started writing seriously I joined the New Zealand Society of Authors, feeling like a total novice. I've paid every year since.

It got me a partially funded StartWrite assessment in 2020 — my first proper outside read, from someone with no stake in my feelings. That was the thing that told me to keep going. The manuscript I sent became the one Penguin are publishing.

There's also the unglamorous part: workshops, contract advice, and knowing what's actually happening in the sector rather than what people say is happening on the internet.

Would I spend it again? It's the cheapest line on this list and it produced the most.

2. Buy the teacher, not the institution

$35 to $800 a go.

The first workshop I went to at a writers' festival was run by an author I'd been excited to meet for years. It was dreadful. That was my first lesson: not all brilliant writers are brilliant teachers.

But some are. A workshop with Paula Morris at a festival. Two days at a Kāpiti writers' retreat with Pip Adam. An eight-week mentorship with an Australian novelist through Faber Academy.

You get these people for a day, or two, or once a week. That's the trade — and it comes with the thing a course can't give you: you choose when in your writing life you need the help.

I still have the notes from Pip. They were crucial to the manuscript, and they ruled out several really terrible title concepts and unblocked a plot issue I’d spent weeks trying to resolve.

Would I spend it again? Yes, and I'd start earlier.

3. Pay someone to read the entire thing

Investment: $800 to $1,800, depending on wordcount.

And when I say this - I mean an actual manuscript assessment. From someone who is not a friend, not from your writing group, not anyone with a stake in your feelings. This is probably the most effective investment on the list - and one I regularly suggest to writers who send me undeveloped but promising work.

NZSA run partially and fully funded assessments. I applied for a fully funded one in 2021, didn't get it, saved up and paid for it myself in two instalments. Finding an assessor is the first hurdle — there aren't many, and the good ones are overbooked. You'll have to pitch.

And what do you get? Ha, ha ha. What you get is a thorough, terrifyingly honest report telling you how far off publishable you are, and how to improve the story. They take the book apart. Which characters are underdeveloped. Which arcs don't finish. There is some kind, flattering stuff in there. And then there is the work. Must of it will be work.

It took me eighteen months to rewrite after my first full assessment.

Here's what I've learned since, from the other side of the desk: most manuscripts that get rejected aren't badly written. They're badly built, and they'd take too much work to fix. The prose is fine but the architecture isn't.

Would I spend it again? Worth every cent, and yes, it hurts. You are paying a significant amount of money to be told everything that's wrong with your baby.

4. Pay for the structural edit

investment: Roughly $1,800 or by word count

The line item almost nobody budgets for: hiring an editor before the manuscript goes to an agent or a publisher.

This isn't a tidy-up, but usually comes after you've done the full rewrite the assessment demanded, and it's someone looking at structure, narrative and the whole shape — then working with you to make it better.

Would I spend it again? I think this is the step that got me an agent.

5. Buy the publications you want to be in

Investment: $10 to $50 each.

Entry level advice that almost nobody takes.

If you're submitting to journals, buy the journals. Many of the best charge $15–20 USD a submission — you may as well know what they publish before you pay to be considered.

I edit a journal. I can tell in the first paragraph who has read the publication they're submitting to and who has bulk-submitted to forty places. It isn't subtle.

Would I spend it again? Highest return, lowest cost thing on this entire list. Do this one first.

6. Budget for access

$15 to $25 USD a submission.

International journals charge reading fees in USD and pounds. It's normal. Add a few subscriptions and newsletters for intel and it's still a modest amount of money for knowing what's going on.

Somewhere in this you'll meet the writer who never submits anywhere that charges a fee or doesn't pay. I understand the principle. But it treats money as the only thing publication returns, and money is the thing writing returns least.

So — what does a fee actually buy? Honestly, higher acceptance rates based on what I see. And likely a writer fee if your working chosen.

What publication returns instead: being read by people who can do something for you, and a credit that gives you credibility.

I've had a lot of stories published. I paid to submit to most of them and was paid for exactly one — fifty dollars, from an American online journal, one of the least prominent names on my writing CV. Steve Braunias at ReadingRoom published my work in NZ, still the only person in New Zealand who has. I think he did it just for the fun of it, and I never read the comments but I hear he succeeded. I wasn't paid a cent and I really never cared.

None of which is an argument for working free for organisations that can afford you. A literary journal with no funding is not the same as a company with a marketing budget offering you "exposure."

Would I spend it again? This is about intel and access. If you want a chance of publication you have to be in the game.

So what is the investment ?

I added it all up and it’s thousands, but many thousands less than an MA.

And yes not everyone can afford to invest in their writing, but this post is for those considering dropping many thousands on uni fees. I could fund this because at the time I was running a nationwide consultancy full time and these costs are spread it over six years.

The time cost

The thing that did the most for my writing cost nothing.

I wrote most of the first draft by hand, in notebooks, while my twins were awake. Then I transcribed the notes onto my laptop while they slept. Nobody funded that and no institution supervised it and it was the only two hours a day I had, used consistently for long enough that a terrible first draft emerged.

Everything on the paid list is a way of finding out whether what you wrote is working - but none of it is a substitute for actually doing the hard work of writing.

What the money bought me was time. Because that was something over those years I simply did not have.

I bought dedicated one-on-one with experts, personalised advice, real feedback, and a much shorter path than figuring it out alone or workshopping in a writing group.

As a busy working mother I wanted the fast track approach - When I had free time, I wanted to write — and then be told what was working and what wasn't.

So here is my last tip - buy yourself time if you don’t otherwise have it. Bookmarked away, a residency or cut your work hours down if you have to. All of that costs money but it is also an investment.

in late 2021 I had 30,000 words to redraft on deadline ahead of an assessment and four year old twins. I took myself away to a hotel for three nights.

That book is being published next year. And all these steps helped this happen.

So no, you don’t need a MA to be a writer - that is one option - but there are many other ways to invest in your writing and all of them are cheaper.

Most writers have thought about their acknowledgements page, and have maybe imagined who they’d invite to a launch, should the day ever come. One writer only wanted a small event with close friends and family! Almost nobody has connected the daydream of their book launch to the actual economics of getting their book made.

At Folly, that list is the economics. Let me explain.

We want to publish you!

We’re planning our title list for 2027 and we have two places left. I’ve spent the last few weeks interviewing a shortlist of writers from around the world who’ve submitted to us through Folly — these are the handful of people whose work aligns with our ethos and with what I believe our audience wants to read.

But before I talk about who we’re looking for, I want to talk about a disconnect I keep running into. There is a major gap between what writers imagine a publishing house is, and what a publishing house actually is.

Yes, there are traditional publishing houses. Some have been around for centuries, they are institutions, and they’re sitting on long backlists of famous titles that generate revenue continually. There are indie presses, some lucky enough to receive grants, and many, like Folly, which run entirely on volunteers, donations, and whatever revenue our books manage to make.

Our anthologies sell well, they have enabled us to grow, to create more, to start distributing writer fees and stipends. And to consider publishing single author titles.

But most single author books worldwide sell less than 200 copies. (As an aside, if this comes as a surprise to you, read this article by US publishing commentator Jane Friedman).

What three years has built

We run a dual publishing model here at Folly, and it’s taken three years to get here. I’m incredibly proud of it.

We’ve collapsed the traditional publishing timeline to five months or less (conceivably three, if a manuscript arrives ready to go). And we’ve innovated a production method that’s brought the cost of taking a book to market down to roughly half what most publishers spend.

And we do this as a social enterprise. The whole point is, over time, to bring as many books to market as we can. But we only have so much money, which means we can’t fully fund every book we produce.

Our anthologies come first, because they platform the most writers in one go (over 100 people will add Folly to their writing resume this year) many of them getting their first chance to say the words “I’m a published writer.” Beyond the anthologies, we have a small amount we can reinvest in a single author book. That’s how we published Charlotte Bell’s wonderful debut, which made the Unity bestseller list and sold strongly through its first two weeks.

The launch list maths

Here’s where your hypothetical guest list becomes critical.

Say you can invite 100 people to your launch. We know about 70 will actually turn up. And we know about 80% of those will buy a copy of your book. That’s roughly 56 books sold on night one — which, with our compressed production costs, covers a serious chunk of what it took to make the book.

That completely de-risks the project. It means we can viably bring more writers to market, knowing each book is likely to cover itself. And if a book takes off and becomes a bestseller? Fantastic. That’s more money to invest in the next books, and more risk we can afford to take.

Because everything in publishing is risk, and small indie publishers don’t have the scale or the backlist cushion to absorb the risk of debut authors the way the big houses do.

An honest word about risk

So, what counts as high risk?

Short story collections. These are notoriously hard to sell, but we want to help you publish yours. For a collection, your ability to rally colleagues, friends, family and your wider community behind the launch is absolutely critical.

Novellas sit slightly lower on the risk ladder, but are still hard to sell.

So I’m working bespoke with each author.

Some come to me saying: “I know I can sell 300 copies. I know the bookstores in my hometown and I’ll introduce you. I’ve got a marketing background, strong social media, my own mailing list.”

Every one of those things de-risks the project and means Folly can invest more in it, or at least that the safety net around it gets stronger.

This is the part of publishing a lot of authors don’t like thinking about and I understand why. I’m a writer. I also wish I could just write and create art and that someone will come along and fund it, fund my life, and fund the cost of publishing it and bringing it to market.

I’m not in the privileged position of earning a living from my writing.

Yes, I have a book coming out with Penguin next year, but what I have and will earn from that is not liveable. For most writers it’s the same. Writing is an art, a devotion, the beautiful thing we do around our day jobs. And I acknowledge the writers who do manage to write and earn a living from their writing often don’t have the means to carry the risk of bringing a book to market.

So while we have offered two writers traditional publishing contracts, for most of the authors on our 2027 shortlist — especially those outside New Zealand, where my stockist and media relationships live — we are necessarily proposing hybrid deals. And even then we need to know each book will at least break even, in a world where most books very publicly sell fewer than a few hundred copies. That relies on the author knowing exactly who their audience is and who their first community of readers will be.

For those writers who understand the maths, the reality, and the necessity of hybrid publishing, here is what you get in exchange: much higher royalties.

If your book becomes a bestseller, you keep far more of it.

For an author who genuinely believes in their book and is willing to support sales and marketing, a hybrid deal is the better revenue stream. You have a real shot at earning your investment back and continuing to earn well beyond it.

Who we’re looking for

Our acceptance rate for manuscripts sits where it does for the anthologies: somewhere between one and five percent. Of those, a smaller number again are suited to or open to a hybrid model when a traditional one isn’t on the table.

A hybrid model won’t fit every author, I get that.

But if you’ve made something worthy and beautiful and aligned with us (and if you understand that publishing you is a risk we want to take and need help sharing) then I believe we’re offering something that doesn’t currently exist in this market: the speed we bring a book out, the premium quality of what we make, and the brand and following we put behind it.

Two spots for 2027.

Who’s on your launch list?

Submissions are open via Submittable.

This is not where I thought I would end up, and if it was a book of smut for the sake of shock, I wouldn’t feel comfortable about it. But it isn’t. This particular book, of what I would like to refer to as ‘literary erotica’, is a cultural statement about real human sex, desire and arousal. And what society considers taboo.

Nobody chooses what they desire, and we often have conflicting feelings about what arouses us because the imagery and thoughts that full our fantasies often aren’t ‘PC’. Fetish culture is more mainstream than it once was, but even this I would argue is dressing up something ordinary and common as something a bit ‘taboo’. Why is it that anything not socially accepted as ‘vanilla’ ends up being classed as fetish, or kink, or any other term that implies it is niche, unusual or a little outside the norm? Because what is the norm anyway? Going by the Folly submissions, it is entirely normal for women of any sexual orientation to, when in a state of arousal, deeply desire certain language and actions in the bedroom that pushes up hard against society expectations and feminism.

For instance, on Friday we filmed a series of pieces from the erotica issue, Smut, to camera in a dark moody bar in ballgowns and pearls. I read a piece from an international writer that plays into power dynamics, into the deep desire the narrator had to be ‘unhuman’, a ‘plaything’ and to be called such things as ‘a dirty little slut’ by her partner. This, being in a lesbian relationship too, which alongside the similar stories submitted by straight women raises whether this desire is anything about wanting to be fucked by the patriarchy at all. So perhaps, I suggest, it isn’t the patriarchy at all that plays into this good girl/ bad girl bedroom behaviour, but some deeper psychological desire for submission. I am not a psychologist, but I imagine people in this field have thoroughly researched this and would have thoughts (if so, please share them).

As an aside, the only way to watch these performances will be to buy the book. I won’t explain why.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. My point is, Smutis not simply a book of pornography. It is a book of real human sex, and as such the stories are frequently dealing with the discomfort and the reality of our desires. That our desires don’t always appeal in reality, and that the reality of our desire contradicts our morals and beliefs.

If you’ve read Folly before, you’ll know such philosophy falls squarely within the realm that we– finding the cultural and societal moments of discomfort and questioning them.

Most of the pieces in Smut are memoir and creative nonfiction and therefore nothing in the book should shock you. In fact, I hope most readers will recognise themselves and their darkest desires within some of these stories and feel less awkward or uncomfortable about the things that turn them on.

Or, if you read it just for the explicit photography and the titillation of reading other peoples sexy stories, fine. Enjoy the art and enjoy leaving a book titled ‘Smut’ lying around in public. I know I will.

I would like to end by stating that the bruhaha over Folly’s banning by Whitcoulls last year was never about the sex, the strong language, or the analysis of the ‘c’ word. It was, I suspect, over the honesty and frankness in which the content dealt with sex and language, and the presentation of this honesty on the page.

This is because contemporary publishing will happily serve us violence and socially accepted sex by the mass-printed-paperback but anything honest gets stripped from shelves. This is part of the reason I have had Smut shrink wrapped in plastic, it’s for everyone’s protection, including ours. I believe in the art I am producing, but I know now that it makes some people deeply, deeply uncomfortable. I don’t want to risk our indie stores being questioned by the public, the morality police, or for it to be flicked through by youngsters in store.

Smut is available now, from Folly and from our participating indie stores. If you are New Zealand based, DM me or Folly on Insta, as we would love to celebrate real human desire with you, in real life, at our Auckland and Wellington book launch events.

Note: typed in bed by human hands on a Sunday morning with creamy coffee, and edited by thumbs prior to posting because all my photos live on my phone.

Bobbi is a friend Charlotte met in rehab. In the story she karate kicks out of the dark to surprise her as she opens her bedroom door — it’s one of those funny, weird little interactions you have with people when you’re forced together into an uncomfortable, unusual situation and it’s these small anecdotes that had me fall in love with Charlotte’s collection when I first read it five months ago in a treehouse in Mexico.

That’s right. Folly just took a book from submission to launch in five months. The traditional publishing runway is 18 months.

One Year Out is the first single author book Folly has ever published.

Addiction memoirs are almost always looking for something, with the writer looking back at what happened and explaining to the reader, from a safe distance, having arrived somewhere safely and Charlotte doesn’t do that. She isn’t judgmental about addiction or herself, she isn’t melancholy about what she lost, and she isn’t standing on the other side explaining what it meant. She writes her way through publicly funded rehab, mental unravelling and then an unexpected move to Bali where recovery collides with wellness coaches and influencers selling healing by the gram.

What One Year Out is, is very honest and quite funny.

Multiple people have messages messaged me laughing over one line which says something to the effect of: “I want to say, ‘Your once a week cocaine habit is dull and immature. You could do much better for a third of the cost’.” She also shines a light into a part of New Zealand that nobody sees unless they work in it or have lived through it : the institutions, rehab friendships, the social rejection (with one heart-wrenching account of standing with a fellow rehab friend in a supermarket line of judgmental shoppers). This is, as I write for the back cover blurb, a book about the small rituals of strangers keeping each other alive.

Charlotte is an unknown writer, writing memoir, which these days is only for the famous, the well known, the celebrities etc….for people who already have a platform to sell it from. And she has written a collection of about thirty thousand words which would be too small for a traditional publisher to take on. This is why Folly exists, to platform stories the industry can’t currently support.

The shape of her art didn’t fit the traditional machinery, but it fits Folly’s.

I’m not going to explain how we published in five months, but I will explain why.

Moving fast is Folly’s superpower and it is my superpower, and it is also one thing I have been criticised for more than almost anything else professionally (alongside expecting too much, being a bitch because I expect too much and generally being rather scary. Harden up, I’d say). Moving fast scares people. When you move fast, yes, you break things. You do things imperfectly and - most alarmingly for people - you do things differently.

Here’s the argument for moving fast, which almost nobody makes out loud yet this is the truth: when you move fast, you don’t have time to doubt yourself. You don’t have time to think about all the things that could go wrong, or all the things you should have done first. You don’t have time to craft a perfect comms plan, launch plan, media plan, marketing plan. You can’t second-guess, and you cant procrastinate, because your author is launching in six weeks and if you don’t pitch the media now, nothing happens and that’s not the way you want your author to land in the world.

The landing Folly has curated for Charlotte has been extraordinary and extraordinarily generous. Blurbs from Airini Beautrais (“a poets knack for startling imagery”)and Harry Ricketts. Wonderful social media shares, and we were fortunate to land two weekend papers, an arts section midweek, and a scattering of bits around the edges.

I am incredibly proud of Charlotte, who has done the hardest thing a first-time author can do, which is to publish something true about herself and then stand in a room and read it aloud.

This is also the beginning of something for us. Folly exists to find the work that wouldn’t otherwise be published and then publish it in a way that ignores how it’s supposed to be done. One Year Out is the first. There will be more memoirs, more novellas, more stories that would otherwise not be told.

We’re not waiting eighteen months for any of them.

Note: Dictated via Wisprflow from Christchurch airport Koru lounge and edited by human thumbs on an aeroplane above the Cook Strait.

You also have to invest in your writing.

Most people think this means investing time. Yes, time is important. But some is something else: money. By this, I mean backing your work to the extent that you would put some money behind its success.

If you want to learn guitar, you’ll probably pay for lessons, if you want to become a professional golfer, you’ll invest in coaching, if you want to be a legit artist you’ll be paying for lessons, your space at trade stalls and spending all your spare cash on art supplies. The great thing about writing is that it is - wonderfully - a very accessible and cheap art form to engage in. And while it’s true that some writers will succeed through sheer hard work and luck (and yes, some people are just naturally talented damn them), most of us need to invest in our skills and development as writers to succeed. And an investment of time and money will take you further, faster.

So let me be specific about what investing in your writing looks like. Before you go anywhere near an agent, there’s the step almost nobody talks about: You really should get your manuscript professionally assessed by an independent assessor.

WHY!?

An independent assessment of your manuscript provides instant third party verification that you can pass on to potential agents and publishers - showing them the manuscript is genuinely of a publishable standard and meets a specific commercial market. This isn’t your friend who reads lots, or your writing group, it’s someone with clout whose opinion actually matters. This person will tell you, honestly, what state your manuscript is actually in and whether it is yet ‘submission ready.’

My first assessment was a funded assessment I was fortunate to be awarded through my local authors society. It assessed the first three chapters of my manuscript, provided me a report and basically said ‘you’re on to something, keep going.’ My second assessment was a year later, of the entire first draft, and was carried out by a wonderful New Zealand author. I saved up and paid for it myself and it was the first real investment I made into my writing (visual artists will scoff - do you know how much a single tube of artist quality paint costs?).

We all value things we have had to pay for ourselves, and taking the giant step of doing this at the time felt huge, scary, risky to me. Yet I saw it as a sign of me backing my work. I think this is good enough, I was thinking. But also, if it isn’t I need to know how to make it better. And here’s what an assessment will almost always do: it comes back with structural things and suggested changes you won’t always agree with or want to do. But this is the stage where your art is turning from your art into a commercially viable product. And if you are serious about being published this is the stuff you have to think about.

After my first assessment i had to completely restructure my story, cut about a third of it and rewrite another third. It took about 18 more months. I was told to change the point of view to first person (it was originally drafted as third person with multiple characters viewpoints). I resisted because, as all writers know, changing a POV is basically AN ENTIRE REWRITE. (as an aside, I ended up having to do this anyway as a requirement to being taken on by my agent - who insisted). I should have listened to the assessor.

The draft that Penguin accepted? It is somewhere around version seven. And even that is about to go through another full round of editing.

A PUBLISHER’S PERSPECTIVE

As well as being a writer, I am now a publisher. I am scanning and making decisions about manuscripts every day and very few of them arrive with any third party verification. The few that do are - obviously - more polished, complete and truly ‘submission ready’. More so than an impressive bio, if a writer tells me their manuscript has been independently assessed, with a few quotes from the assessor and a report attached, I am far naturally more likely to prioritise their work - because I can see that the writer is taking their submission seriously and has been prepared to back their writing.

A small number of other writers, whose work arrives in a promising but unpolished state, receive this advice from me. Generally it will go something like this: I love the vibe/ tone/ premise of the story. However it appears to me to be an early draft and still requires a significant amount of work. If you feel you have taken it as far as you can alone, i strongly suggest you get an independent manuscript assessment carried out. I would love to hear from you, and view a later draft, once you have been through this process.

An assessment is not cheap, but then again it is one tangible, specific cost you can invest in yourself and your story which until now has probably cost you nothing to create. And I guarantee, the results of the assessment will support your professional growth as a writer, your chances of success landing an agent and - ultimately - push your story to be the best it can be.

Note: My first partial assessment was funded through the New Zealand Society of Authors, who also provide a limited number of full manuscript assessments. Outside of your local society, there are many reputable assessors who provide this service - but be sure you do your research and approach one who is most suitable for your work. Be aware your chosen assessor will make a choice to take you on, it is not a given. They value their time too and will be looking to see that you have truly taken your manuscript as far as you can before you ask them to put their heads into your story.

The choice of what to publish and what not to marks one as a gatekeeper. Last month I likened the submission of one writer, in my rejection note back, that their detective novel submission to Folly was like ordering a steak in a vegetarian restaurant.

I think about gatekeeping a lot because the gatekeeping instinct that kept Nabokov out of American bookshops for three years is the same instinct that has always governed what gets published, what gets stocked, and what gets buried in a stationery dungeon chainstore alongside the printer paper and glitter pens.

We’ve turned down work for our erotica issue this year we were not brave enough to publish, after an Australian author ended up on the sex offender register in April for writing an adult character pretending to be underage. To one Lithuanian author, I said while her work was beautiful we are just in such highly moralistic times. To another writer in Australia, who wrote a story with his girlfriend I’ve had to suggest a raft of subtle edits to also avoid their play fantasy getting us into trouble.

Personally, if an adult couple want to call each other Daddy and Baby in the bedroom I really don’t care.

You can read all about it in the book, and make your own judgements or get turned on.

Much of the writing is literary, much is memoir, some is filthy. So I playfully named the title Smut.

Part of the point of the erotica issue is to show the spectrum of human desire. We can’t control what turns us on, it’s deeply psychological. Whips, body flesh, infantilising ourselves, feet, gloves or anonymity. Human desire is a censor’s nightmare. Which is precisely why art has a role to play in exploring it.

Smut: Erotica and Desire is available by preorder now through Folly, Unity and Enamoured books. Out on 5 September. Currently triggering content warnings on Meta.

What is interesting about this is the way the digital world, the internet, the swiftness of digital publishing, has flipped this around. The internet does not want a windowpane. The internet wants confessional, intimate, bikini shots and personal opinions. We want to see the writer. Personally, I am all for this, I like Hunter S Thompson style writing and have increasingly veered towards this gonzo ‘insert myself into the story’ myself - the fun being the way in which the writer becomes a character and reveals themselves to the reader as the story unfolds. But, what I am noticing this year in particular, as Folly submissions closed this week, is the influx of nonfiction essays that are not actually essays at all. They are blogs, newsletters, ramblings. They are topical, yes, but largely uncrafted and unpolished ramblings that only have a place in digital format.

Writing an essay is as difficult as fiction and poetry. It’s a more accessible form, yes, but that doesn’t mean that is doesn’t require craft and effort. Three years ago, in 2023, we ran an interview with Professor Harry Ricketts who runs the nonfiction course at the MFA programme at Victoria University. The piece was titled —  The resurrection of the essay. Ricketts, three years ago said: ‘There has been a huge resurrection in the form of the essay this century, particularly over the past twenty or so years.’He also said the essay had spent most of the twentieth century in the basement: "Oh, you are writing nonfiction? You must have failed as a poet or fiction writer." He said it was coming back because the literary hierarchies were loosening. Because novels are hard. He said he used to judge Agatha Christie, then he tried writing a novel. The essay, he said, ‘is a more egalitarian form." Because "you are allowed to write about your own life in an essay." Because — and this is the line I keep returning to —   "You get drawn into somebody's world, into consciousness."

Apparently Substack creators in 2026 are crossing a quarter of a million dollars a year on subscriptions alone. A single viral essay can drive twenty thousand sign-ups in seventy-two hours. Derek Thompson left The Atlantic. Paul Krugman left the New York Times. Both went to Substack. Last October Jia Tolentino — the same Jia Tolentino who declared the personal essay boom over in 2017 — published her edit of The Best American Essays 2025 and wrote in her introduction: "The essay has taught me how to live." So Ricketts was right, and he was right early. The form is alive. It is more than alive — it is the asset class. So two things: 

One: the essay form has come back to public attention. Two: the platform on which it has come back rewards a particular kind of essay — the fast one, the confessional one, the one that hits publish before it has cooled. Anyone who reads my Substack will know I’m clearing writing on the fly - proofing sloppily and leaving typos. This is modern digital essay writing. Nothing I publish on my Substack would be fit for publication in Folly in its current form. The McGill Daily said most of what's filling Substack "lacks research, depth of insight, or literary skills needed to elevate an essay from mediocre to memorable." They were being polite, because yes there is a lot of content, but even I admit - most of it lacks form. The form, when it works, does what Ricketts said it does. It draws you into a consciousness because you can’t skim it. Helen Garner said something like: when writing is doing its job, it shows you the world from someone else's vantage and at the same time turns you back toward your own experience. So you finish the piece feeling slightly less alone. The word she used was comradeship, I think. Maybe comradliness. This again from The London Magazine article by Zoe – anyway the idea is the point. Nonfiction as we require it in Folly is the slowest commodity on the internet — because the editor's job is to make the writer wait until the work is good enough to deserve the reader's attention. Substack lets you publish in the hour you finish writing it. We will not. At Folly we will sit with you for six months and ask difficult questions about what the point is of your essay - what are you teaching the reader?

We turn down a lot of beautiful writing because it is not yet the form. We will turn down sloppy writing because it is sloppy. We mentor a smaller number of writers who are nearly there. And we publish what we believe will hold up in print — meaning, will be readable in five years, in ten, on paper.  The cultural moment is real. The personal essay is having its hour. The risk inside the moment is that everyone forgets what an essay actually is and starts mistaking newsletter for literature. 

Don’t.

Tulum was full of smart international, entrepreneurial polyamourous eccentrics. This, I am suddenly recognising with the throat clogging sense of doom, is that feeling one experiences when walking into a swingers party full of people you don’t want to fuck. I immediately walk up to the AirNZ counter and request a recognition upgrade hoping this might make for a more pleasant 12 hour flight.

‘I’m already feeling light headed, one of the eyelash girls says from the bar behind me.

‘It’s all the bubbles,’ her friend replies. ‘Have some rum.’

The loud speaker announces that our gate has opened, along with a warning that it is a 15 minute walk from the lounge. The girls groan, lifting their phones to take selfies as they pull duck faces and swig their cocktails.

I am In Bali to write, as this months Artist in Residence at Ketemu Residency near Ubud. The last time I headed overseas alone was sevens years ago, when my twins were infants and I went off to Port Douglas in Australia to cry by the pool and try to reclaim some sense of self. This time, I am in a small Balinese town called Batubulan, with a goal of completing my second novel which has been languishing at third draft and 60,000 words for almost 12 months. I sent it off to my agent ecstatically last year, receiving a kind reply from her saying quite bluntly that – no – it’s still a while off. The story explores desire and motherhood, yet I was stuck in the plot, in the characters without a clear sense of whether the ending I had drafted was actually right. As usual there are too many men. My female protagonists always seem to have too many men. And so I landed in Bali with what felt like huge expectations to finish his damn story, amplified by the staff at my residency who then post a photo of me in sequins splayed across a pink velvet curtain with the caption ‘Cultural Curator – Emily Broadmore’ along with an outline of my residency project; ‘Blending narrative, confessional fragments, AI dialogue and philosophical reflection, the work explores questions of identity, control, fidelity and the stories we tell to survive.’ Goodness, I thought, when this post went live. I had better get writing. There is one thing to write your summary, synopsis and first draft – quite another to see the lofty goals of the project written on the internet for all to see.

The problem with being a writer, and the writing life, is that you must wait for the creative muse to cross your path. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about this in her book on creativity – saying when she passes you must grab her or that idea will be lost. This is exactly how creativity feels to me. I have to go looking for it. Fortunately, the residency had organised me a research assistant with a  scooter to drive me, ‘we are going to have some adventures.’ I told him. But not until next week. This week I am going to the beach to stalk the tourist scene.

When I said this to my residency hosts, I was self consciously aware that as their first writer-artist, my process would be very different to the visual artists and photographers who usually frequent the residency, creating physical art whose progress can be viewed visually. ‘I will be coming and going,’ I said. ‘I won’t be here a lot because my inspiration comes from people and observation, but when I am, I will be writing.’ I worried they thought I was just using the residency as a holiday, but they didn’t seem to care. ‘That’s’ fine,’ they said, ‘it’s easier for us.’

Some people, I presume, need a lot of care.

And so I took off to Uluwatu for the weekend, hoping that three days of rest and exploration would send the muse my way and give me the headspace to shuffle the plot and character issues into shape.

The villa in Uluwatu that I am staying at is on a tiny jungle lined street, with a private pool and daybed. The price per night is less than a 60 minute massage back in New Zealand. To the right of the complex is a Reformer Pilates Studio, to the left is a huge open air gym built into the tropical forest pumping Eminem, the walls emblazed with block letters saying things like ‘Feel the burn’ and ‘Never give up’. Fortunately I can’t hear this music from my villa, although it cascades down the tiny jungle streets which are deserted except for the occasional moped. The beaches at this town are down a steep cliff, and I am very lazy, so I have opted to pay the equivalent of $80NZD )most of which is redeemable on food) to frequent a beach club called Sundays. There is a cable car down the cliff and a clientele who favour g-strong bikinis and such large amounts of filler that many an upper lip sticks out a full inch over the bottom. Once at the bottom of the cable car, I discover I have already lost my entry card and panic, shoving my hand into my handbag and pulling out a fistful of cash, but no entry card. The cash in my hand is probably only $300 NZD worth of rupee, a relatively modest amount for international travel, but the staff look at me like I am a drug dealer as I frantically scramble with wadded piles of $100,000 bills held together with rubber bands. ‘It’s too much money Miss Emily,’ the waiter says in horror. ‘I know,’ I say wailing, ‘I only just arrived. Please, let me in!’

I am allowed in, and promptly order a platter of sashimi that I thought was $6.50 NZD but turns out to be $65 NZD. It arrives with two sets of chopsticks and I look in horror at the vast amount of food I have just ordered for myself, before thinking ‘fuck it’ in a manner I wouldn’t have a decade ago, and hoe into it before throwing my bloated body into the ocean. It’s there, as I bob about amongst the beautiful and preserved international tourists that the muse arrives. I am a little drunk, too full, and have a developing hrat rash extending over my torso. The story, the muse tells me, isn’t about desire. It is about intimacy, and the fucked up ways we have ruined intimacy through modern technology. It’s almost dystopian, except its reality.

With that sorted, the work begins.

 I

I was deep in the Mexican jungle, taking a short trip to Bacalar, when I opened my laptop to discover a thin crack through the LED screen, triggering several days of a dark, dark mood. Wasted time, I cried! Because I was 60,000 words into a manuscript and time away from life, family, responsibilities had been long waited for to finish this project. For in my life I spend a lot of time enabling other people's writing, leaving little headspace or time for my own. And so, in Mexico, with two weeks to go, I found myself a writer without a laptop.

Yes, I had notebooks, and I scribbled away thoughts and ideas. But the manuscript I was in Mexico to work on was locked away in the Cloud and I could no longer edit it.

Except, I could.

I lay in a hammock, in my foul mood, and opened the Word document on my phone. The text of my chapters filled this tiny screen - I was looking at my writing with an entirely different perspective. Having struggled with the opening, suddenly, with my thumbs and this new minimal view, I started cutting and copying and pasting and tapping and completely rewriting large portions of my manuscript. But as anyone who knows me will attest — I am incredibly lazy at thumb correspondence. I tend to send one line or one word responses to long, well crafted text messages. My texting tends towards bluntness and voice memos. So beyond editing, working on my manuscript with my thumbs wasn't a great solution.

In my professional life I teach creativity and innovation, and so I mulled about the jungle for another day telling myself: surely I can innovate my way out of this. As it happened, at this same time I was deep in conversation with nomadic artists in Tulum — musicians, DJs, digital nomads — living a simple life of affluence through their technology work to support their creative lives in Mexico. Some of these people work in the dreaded world of AI. 'Do you use AI in your art,' I asked one DJ. He looked horrified. 'No! There is a bridge between technology and art and I do not cross it.' Others disagreed — they were introducing technology into their art and saw it as experimental, testing boundaries and opportunities. My writing, as art, is a line I didn't want to cross. Yet here I was, a writer yearning to write, with a manuscript locked in the Cloud and no way to type and time to experiment.

It occurred to me at this point just how silly typing is. How slow. How archaic. For if I can find a way to write in my voice, with my intonation and cadence, my words and structure…. might there be a better way than using my thumbs right now?

Joan Collins wrote most of her novels through dictation, I recalled.

And so I started experimenting. I transcribed my handwritten stories into my phone through dictation as I waited for my tacos to arrive at lunch. Talking away surreptitiously, editing on the fly by voice. Because reading our work aloud always leads to changes — any writer will tell you this. Well here I was, forced to read my work aloud in order to get it swiftly into the Cloud for thumb editing.

I thought of the playwright Arthur Meek, who had been a member of the Wellington Writers' Studio several years before. He had led an entire workshop called 'Voice Writing' in 2024 to a full house of writers who found the concept revolutionary. His dialogue, he said, changed when he walked while writing via dictation. 'Have you ever noticed how the beat of the words change?' he had asked. I hadn't. And I had never tried it. Another writer at the Studio — a fantasy writer — told me she writes by dictation walking around the streets. Suddenly here I was, a luddite, forced years later to get off my bottom and away from the tappity tapping of a keyboard to move these words flowing through my brain onto paper.

Do not change my words, I told the software. Keep all my sentences exactly as I spoke them.

I then suspiciously went back over the transcription to confirm that yes, they contained my sentences exactly. Even the dirty words and sex scenes.

Do you want me to tidy these up? asked the software.

No, I said grumpily, settling in with my thumbs to edit the transcript.

Charity Norman wrote on Instagram recently that she asked an AI model to write in her voice, and how traumatised she was to discover that it actually managed to do this. To an extent. But it is our humanness — our experience — that we bring to the writing, and that no computer can replicate. I am not brave like Charity. The idea of asking AI to write as I write is terrifying.

But here I am, back in New Zealand, with a working laptop, sitting outside tappity tapping away. My forced innovation hasn't stuck, but it has unlocked something. Garbled messages and snippets of dialogue and scenes now fill my phone — moments of what I hope to be genius, captured in supermarket aisles and at school pickup before they could shoot away and be lost. Ideas don't wait. When they come, you have to grab them. Grab that beautifully formed sentence running through your mind and get those words down, for when you have time later to wrangle it into form.

That is what writing is. The physical presence of words captured from moments of inspiration and pinned to paper.

At Folly this year we have added an AI disclosure to our author contracts, confirming the works to be authored by human. Whether you wrote it by pen, typewriter, word processor, laptop, thumbs or via dictation isn't the point. The art of writing lies in the human who strung the sentences together.

Submissions to Folly are open until the end of April via Submittable.

But what strikes me most, is this: he never appears to expect comfort from his artistic life. He takes a euphoric joy from the extent of suffering (indeed, it fuels the work). There is self disgust, but no self pity. There is hunger and lust, and squalor and beauty — but not a single sentence that asks me to feel sorry for him.

Increasingly on socials I am being fed writers and people on social media attacking their government for the lack of artist funding. Blaming their struggles on not having rich parents or a rich spouse etc etc. The tone was one I’ve encountered before in the literary scene: a deep, righteous grievance that the world does not adequately compensate the writer for the act of writing.

And I thought: when did we decide art should earn?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not against arts funding and Ireland runs the gold standard. But from what I can see, the funding follows the sacrifice. It does not precede it. What I’m seeing is a belief that the right to create should come bundled with the right to be comfortable while creating.

Miller would have found this absurd.

He pursued his art from a position of total destitution and produced works of art. He understood something that the contemporary writing community seems to have forgotten: no one owes you the conditions for your art. You may inherit the conditions (lucky you), or you make the conditions, or you make the art without them.

Consider, for a moment, professional sport. Athletes sacrifice their bodies and their youth for the possibility of making it. Most don’t. Those who are eventually backed by sponsors or teams or national programmes have usually already demonstrated extraordinary commitment, unpaid training and shift work to support their sporting lives. And yet we don’t see wannabe athletes on social media whining that the establishment has failed them. Wah I could be a professional golfer/rugby player, but I had to get a JOB to earn a living!!!!!! The pursuit of excellence at anything requires sacrifice, and that the sacrifice is the price of the pursuit.

Why is writing different?

It isn’t. Or it shouldn’t be. Some writers will succeed. Some won’t. All will suffer for it, in one way or another (financially, emotionally, in the hours stolen from family and sleep and the social life you might have lived). That’s not a systemic failure. That’s the cost of choosing a life devoted to something most people will never pay you for. And the energy spent resenting that reality - resenting the government, the publishers, the market, anyone who appears to be doing better - is poisoning the art itself.

So, non Miller options for funding your artistic life:

• - Your parents (apparently nepotism is high in art. My own parents refused to fund my art and I was in my thirties before I could fund it myself)

• - Your spouse (a gamble, what if you break up?! But a legit arrangement for many and one I’ve heard many successful authors claim as critical to their work)

• - A patron (I know many an artist with a patron/rich lover/philanthropist - although this is more common in hot lusty climates and Europe than the antipodes).

• - Yourself, by slugging away the first decade or so of your adult life in corporate capitalism in order to focus on art later in life (this was my route).

• - Grants or funding - this is the fastest way to breed resentment and anger.

• - Moderation and hard work- many artists build a professional life around their practise that enables them to do their art. It’s hard (personal experience!) it’s 4am wake ups and saying no to social life in order to scribble away alone.

Note: from what I have read, things picked up for Miller after he began his relationship with Anais Nin, who partially bankrolled some of his work and paid his rent with the help of her husband. With regards to those who take exception to his treatment of women, you have only to read his love letters to her to see his other side.

Every literary journal in the world is currently doing one of three things about artificial intelligence: banning it entirely, ignoring it entirely or writing a policy so hedged and bureaucratic it could have been generated by the very technology it’s attempting to regulate.

At Folly, we’ve gone with a fourth option. We’ve written down what we actually think.

The problem with blanket bans

A blanket ban on AI in publishing sounds principled but it is unenforceable, and actually (this is the part no one wants to say) - petty and punitive towards writers worldwide who use AI tools responsibly, and for accessibility reasons. Or, you know, because they’re making a million bucks a year using it to meet their audiences desire of Romantasy fiction - and good on them (but Folly doesn’t publish that stuff no matter who or how it was created).

The point is, a blanket ban lacks the nuance required to understand what AI actually enables.

The idea that a writer who uses AI to brainstorm structure or check their grammar has committed some kind of creative fraud is absurd. Writers have always used tools. We moved from pens, to typewriters, to dictation and computers. We moved from thesauruses to the internet. AI tools are part of an evolving toolkit. What we care about is authorship.

The question has never been whether you use tools. It’s whether the work is yours. It is about authorship.

The other problem with blanket bans is that they position publishers and journals as morality police rather than curators of quality.

We’d rather be the latter.

What we believe

The value of literature lies in its humanity. Not in the mechanical process of how words got onto a page, but in whether a human being was genuinely at risk in making the work and genuinely felt something as they put their idea to the page. Did you sit with embarrassment and discomfort, or experience joy and flow as you created something from your own lived experience that no machine could replicate?

If yes, we want to read it.

If the work required nothing of you, we don’t want it. Regardless of how it was made.

Folly’s Position on Artificial Intelligence

So here it is, our new policy:

Folly publishes human art. We do not accept work that has been generated by AI. We do accept work from writers and artists who use AI tools in their creative process, provided the submitted work is fundamentally theirs - conceived, crafted, and shaped by human intelligence, experience and intent.

We trust our contributors to understand the difference. We also trust our editorial and reading team to recognise it.

What We Will Not Publish

- Work that has been substantially generated by AI - meaning the creative and intellectual labour of conception, drafting, and shaping the work has been performed by a machine rather than a person

- AI generated visual art, photography, or illustration submitted as original work

- Work where AI has been used to produce the voice, perspective, or emotional architecture of the piece

What We Consider Acceptable Use

- Using AI tools for research, fact checking, or brainstorming during the creative process

- Using AI for grammar, spelling, or readability refinement of your own writing

- Using AI to assist with translation where the contributor is working across languages

- Using AI to help with accessibility needs (e.g., dictation, structural assistance for neurodivergent writers)

- Experimental or hybrid work that interrogates AI as subject matter, provided the creative authorship remains human and this is disclosed

Disclosure

If AI tools have played a role in the development of your submission beyond basic grammar and spell-checking, we ask that you note this in your cover letter. This is not a trap. We are genuinely interested in honest, modern and transparent creative practice.

We would rather have a difficult conversation about a grey area than discover undisclosed AI use after publication.

For Our Operations

Folly uses technology including AI in its marketing and operational workflows - because this is the best software available to run a commercially viable art project. We are transparent about this. Our editorial decisions, curation, and the creative direction of the journal remain entirely human led. All submissions are read by our human team of readers. We trust their judgement.

Why This Matters Beyond Folly

The literary world has a habit of treating technology as a moral question rather than a practical one. AI is not going away. The writers who will thrive are those who bring the thing it will never have: the human touch.

That’s what Folly publishes. That’s what Folly has always published.

Submissions for Issue 004 are open. Visit www.follyjournal.com

Several years ago a short story of mine was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It was then picked up by an esteemed, internationally regarded, institutionally funded literary journal (the kind of publication that carries genuine prestige in the literary world). This is always an exciting moment for a writer. Knowing your work is going to be in print, and not just in print, but in a highly regarded journal with a long history and serious literary credentials. Whoop!

I waited months while my contributor copy made its slow journey to the bottom of the world. And I remember opening the package and holding it in my hands and feeling this deep sense of…well, not disappointment exactly, but realisation. The writing inside was wonderful. The journal was doing exactly what it set out to do: publish excellent literary work, affordably, at scale, backed by institutional funding. That’s a model that has sustained literary publishing for decades.

But it isn’t what we are doing with Folly.

Most literary journals are built to serve the writing. The physical object is a vehicle, it’s functional, affordable, designed to get the words into readers hands without burning through a budget that’s already stretched thin (because that’s one thing we all have in common in this industry - major budgetary constraints. This is art people!). There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and the literary eco system depends on them.

Folly however operates in a different niche entirely. We sit at the luxury- consumer end of the market, a space where very few literary publications are working because we are creating each issue with our end reader in mind. Rather than as a self congratulatory nod to the authors (although this also occurs - due to the success of Folly and their part in creating the art). Publications like Noon Annual in the US come to mind as a comparison- beautifully designed objects where the physical form is inseparable from the literary content. But Noon isn’t aimed at the average non literary (albeit intelligent) consumer reader.

Hence, we are in a tiny corner of publishing, and it’s not better or worse than the institutional model. It’s just different.

From Issue 001, we’ve treated the physical journal as a cultural artifact designed to take readers on a journey. The paper stock, the design, the weight of the thing in your hands. People display Folly on their coffee tables. They give it to friends for Christmas. They read it cover to cover at restaurants, alone, beside their dessert (we have proof!). They collect it.

And that moment, holding my contributor copy from this respected journal and then looking at what we had built with Folly, wasn’t about one being better than the other. It was about understanding, viscerally, what our niche actually is. We are creating a luxury consumer driven product in a space that doesn’t traditionally think in those terms.

We are heading into production for Issue 004, and every year the curation of Folly becomes more refined as more people figure out what we’re actually doing. Our community is growing. Contributors are finding us from all over the world, sending work that is braver, stranger, more alive than anything we’ve received before. Yesterday I was sitting in an airport lounge reading erotica submissions (much of it written by men) we are also creating a Folly Erotica offshoot.

Yes, there is a commercial angle — we need to sell this in order to keep funding it. We’re not institutionally funded. We don’t have the luxury of an annual locked-in budget from a university. *Folly* runs on personal philanthropy (I pour a significant amount of my own earnings into keeping it alive), on sales, and on a small but growing subscriber base through Press Patron. Every issue that sells out funds the next one.

Who knows what will survive the internet. What is the point of creating extraordinary writing if it vanishes into pixels, or is printed in a disposable way? Equally, there’s no point creating a beautiful object if the writing inside doesn’t earn its place.

Issue 004 is coming. We want you to be part of it. We want writers who understand this ethos — that the writing and the vessel are the art form.

Submissions are open. Come find us.

Last Sunday I didn’t send a newsletter.

I was four days into what I can only describe as a gonzo journalism experience - out of cell reception, surrounded by several thousand people in varying states of undress and intoxication, in an environment of such thorough human depravity that writing a coherent Substack was not only impossible but would have been beside the point. Where we were will be revealed in Issue 4. For now: some stories require you to disappear into them.

Thompson’s quote has become something of an unofficial motto for Folly and I’ve been thinking about why. It’s not the drugs or the alcohol or even the insanity - it’s the absolute ‘fuck off’ raw honesty. It doesn’t preach or moralise. It just says: this is what happened. This is what it felt like to be human in that moment.

And at Folly, that’s what we’re after. The raw human condition that exists at 3am - rather than the polished version we present at dinner parties and on our CV. ‘There’s some really depraved people here,’ one woman observed last weekend. Humans are messy, contradictory, hungry creatures. We want things we’re not supposed to want. We do things we can’t put our names to. And the writing that reson​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ates - the pieces people message me about months later - is almost always the work that captures that truth and frequently feels editorially terrifying at the time. I’ll be making a call to publish something while people around me are warning me not to (and I always regret when I’m not brave enough to go against advice!). The writer will be using a pseudonym because they can’t have their name attached to what they’ve written. And yet these are the pieces that land. Because they describe what it actually feels like to be human, rather than what we think we’re supposed to say about being human.

This isn’t ego-driven writing. It’s the opposite. It’s ego destruction.

In Issue 3, I had a conversation with Kirsha Kaechele about ayahuasca as ego destruction - how the medicine forces you to confront the reality of your own self. She also talked about online trolling as a form of ego destruction, which is a more disturbing thought: the way public shaming strips you down to nothing.

Recently I’ve been thinking about a third form. Love. Specifically, the destructive nature of love that isn’t fully yours to own - unrequited love, or love for someone who belongs to someone else. There’s enormous ego destruction in learning to love that person, to love yourself, and to sit with the jealousy and grief that come with something you cannot possess.

Maybe it’s all about ego destruction. Maybe that’s the thread.

When I launched Folly, I deliberately kept my name off the website (no name, photo, bio)….no personal affiliation. I didn’t want ego involved. But we learned quickly that for writers to feel safe sharing their most vulnerable work, they needed to know who we were. One of our first contributors - she writes under the name Snakes - told me later: “It was only after I Googled you and read some of your writing that I thought, this woman, I can trust this woman. She’d get it. And I felt safe to send you my writing.”

That landed hard, and yes - I do get. Because there’s real vulnerability in having your own work out in the world. People interpret your writing and make assumptions about your life, about what would lead you to write whatever you’ve written. It’s exposing. But it’s also what makes the space safe for others.

There’s a tension here, and I haven’t resolved it. I have to plaster myself across the internet to advocate for what Folly is doing - to bring along stakeholders, some of whom genuinely don’t like what we’re doing (and that’s its own form of ego destruction: knowing people find you divisive or brash or difficult). But I believe in this. I believe we’re making something that matters.

Chill Subs had named us as one of the best lit msgs in the world, and last week listed us as one of the literary journals with the most engaged audiences globally. We don’t have a huge following as that hasn’t been our focus, but the people who read us read us, and engage. I’ve realised that by growing our profile, we can actually support the profile of the incredible writers and artists we publish.

Which brings me to this: submissions for Issue 4 are now open. Short form, as usual. Everything you need is on our website and Submittable.

Send us the stuff that makes you nervous….. stuff that requires a pseudonym.

We’ll take care of it.

Promise.

This year we are also doing things a bit differently. We are curating for Issue 004, but we are also looking for additional special pieces for individually curated books. Collections of stories or essays, novellas. Things that would be too sexy or unusual for traditional literary journals.

Last night I mentioned to a few people who expressed their journaling habits that some of the best content arrives at Folly from people who have never considered writing or being published. There is a naive and raw energy from such art, unblemished by the sector cliques, gatekeepers or knowledge of what is considetes ‘appropriate’ publishable content. This approach is what caused us to be banned from a nationwide chain store last year. I believe honestly, especially sexual and sensual honesty, written as fact not fiction is confronting for some people. We seem to be living in a publicly sanitised age, and at Folly we want to platform the reality.

Get writing, don’t be scared.

The worst you’ll get is a polite ‘no thank you.’

It sounds like the book is waking up, I thought before asking ChatGPT about 16th century bookbinding. Learned more about rag paper and linen fibres than I ever needed to know. The short version: when you open a book that’s been shut for centuries, the paper absorbs moisture from the air. The fibres relax. The pages respond to being touched again. And they will probably stay that way, even with the care of an expert conservator.

The book is reacting to the present.

Which got me thinking about Folly.

About what it would be like for someone -aliens, future humans, whoever’s left - to find a copy in 400 years. To crack it open and feel the pages shift and wonder at this bizarre object full of strange things.

An interview with the Reserve Bank chief economist about why the New Zealand economy is fucked. Immediately preceded by a story called At Least My Pussy’s Smooth with a snake draped across a woman’s nether regions. Travel writing about Barcelona tourists. Cocaine poetry. Photos from a rave where people played Russian Roulette with breastmilk. Essays about dick pics and sexting and Fieldays.

They’d flip through thinking: What the actual fuck were these people on about? The plant was going to hell and they’re all obsessing about….thy neighbours wife?

And that’s the point. Because we assume the internet is archiving everything and future generations will crack open some digital vault and understand what it was like to be alive in 2026. But the internet doesn’t work like that.

Links rot. Platforms collapse. File formats become obsolete. MySpace is gone. How much of early internet culture just… evaporated? And even when things survive, they lose their meaning. Try explaining to someone in 2426 why the nation became obsessed with Tiger King for three months in 2020 or why being wealthy was suddenly an offence worthy of trolling (and then having to explain trolling).

The internet preserves stuff. But it can’t atmosphere. Try explaining the phenomenon of Jagged Little Pill by only playing someone one song, rather than the entire album.

Books are different. If aliens found Folly in 400 years, I want them to understand what consumed us in 2026, for Folly to capture what it felt like to be culturally alive right now, with all the contradictions and obsessions and arguments we couldn’t let go of.

The internet will preserve our tweets and Instagram stories and LinkedIn hot takes.

Folly preserves something weirder: proof that we thought Reserve Bank policy and pussy poetry belonged in the same publication. That we threw literary raves and served absinthe at book launches. That we were simultaneously very serious about art and deeply unserious about everything else.

That we contained multitudes, often at war with themselves, and somehow thought printing it all on expensive paper was the answer.

In 400 years, maybe those pages will warp and crinkle too. The ridges will form. The creases will appear, faintly unnerving.

But the book will still be there, insisting that this mattered. All of it. The chaos and the contradictions and the things that seemed important in 2026 even when we suspected they might not be.

Proof that we were here. While the planet is decaying and AI is taking over.

That we were complicated. And still obsessed with the sensual side of life.

That this is what it felt like.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Submissions open 18 January, via Submittable. Visit us at Folly Journal

In the visual arts, patronage is an accepted infrastructure that enables artists – who operate alongside galleries, institutions and buyers - within a commercial world. There is a relationship between artist and collector, an open acknowledgement of the symbiotic relationship between the two.

The result: An artist sells a painting for thousands of dollars, shakes the buyers hand, pays the gallery their commission and continues creating art.

Literary culture is different. Small cultural scenes are status-conserving machines and I reckon there is an unspoken rule: seriousness must look poor. Literary work, and those creating it, is meant to appear perpetually underfunded. Money is tolerated and approved only when routed through universities, government grants or institutions. But there aren’t enough grants, and there isn’t any profit in authorship or writing (publishing is largely a zero profit industry; advances are shrinking and royalties won’t pay the mortgage). The literary world also doesn’t have the same easy symbiotic relationship with patronage as the visual art world has. It is suspicious of money.

As an outsider coming into the  scene several years ago, I was surprised by how resentful and angry people were. Whinging was an accepted part of the performance, with constant angry comparisons with better funded institutions, and the government (any colour of government) is blamed for a structural problem that isn’t its making.

We can’t expect taxpayers to prop up every commercially unviable sector without clear return. Sometimes, we just need to get on with it and make some tough commercial decisions about how art can exist.

At Folly, we take financial and reputational risk ourselves and this has been destabilising for parts of our tiny literary scene. ‘It’s very commercial,’ some literary types said (well, yes, because we need to be able to sell it) and ‘everyone’s wondering how you are funding it’ others said (ourselves, because we believe in what we are creating). This isn’t benevolence or virtue - it is simply how the project is structured because we are not waiting for institutional approval and taxpayer funding.

In the visual arts, this would be unremarkable. But in the literary culture, it is read as transgressive. What, they fund it themselves? What pretentious wankers! Cue suspicion and nasty messages.

For these people to accept us, they would need to revise their deeply held beliefs about art, money and the ability to just get on with it and fund your own damn art.

The publishing industry, as it currently operates, is broken. I’ve heard stories from authors about publishers attempting to recoup losses by billing their writers for books that would otherwise be pulped. Ethically questionable. Commercially incompetent.

Publishing operated one way for years. That model is dying, and whinging about it won't resurrect it. We can wait for institutions to bless us with funding, or we can fund our own art - ensure it’s curated for an audience who will buy it.

When I hung my grandmother's gift on the wall, I didn't feel guilty about buying it. The artist wasn’t resentful of selling it. Money had exchanged hands because the artist had invested in her own work, and created something I was willing to pay for.

Folly operates on the same principle - applying commercial logic alongside traditional patronage to literary publishing. And if that makes us transgressive, so be it.

Submissions open January 18th.

My point is - there are so many creative people who made professional choices based on other skills, on the desire for a certain lifestyle, or maybe like me they had financially focused parents (and also like the ability to buy fancy shoes and a block of Brie when they feel like it, I’ll admit to enjoying the gains of a well paid job).

I wanted to be an artist, switching to a BA after my first year at art school because of parental pressure (‘An artist?! But you’ll never make any money!,’ they kept telling me). So my creativity went into creative problem solving - my twenties spent working insane hours in parliament as a political advisor and press secretary. I had no idea writing was even a talent worth investing time in until I was 27 and a policy wonk from MPI pointed out that an oped I crafted for a government minister (that appeared under her byline) was published in the NZHerald. ‘You’re a very good writer,’ this person said to me. I recall thinking, Well yeah it’s my job. It was five more years before I had the time and desire to try creative writing. I wrote a novel during the long days of early motherhood. And it’s since found a home with a publisher.

Some call this wise. If you love your craft, your art, your creativity, then forcing it to pay for your lifestyle is to the detriment of that thing you love. In saying this I am speaking to both those creatives who have a day job, and those professionals who have never had the privilege of time to explore their creativity.

And my larger point is, people often hold an ideal of a writer in mind which makes it impossibly scary for anyone who isn’t published to claim the term ‘writer’. When I first started writing, I stopped talking about it. Because the first question I’d get was ‘do you have an agent?’

Would you ask someone who makes passable watercolours for fun if they are represented by an art gallery?

It’s bloody hard to get represented, I’m lucky enough to have an agent for my writing now but it look me five years of hard work, of getting short stories published and hitting my head against a wall during revisions for her to decide to take me on.

So to all those who are considering their creativity, their profession, their ability to make art - you have it in you if you have the drive to foster it.

And you don’t need anyone’s permission to quietly send your writing to Folly, to any literary journal. The worst you’ll get is a polite no. And your first rejection can often be just as thrilling - if it creates the desire to pursue a craft.

At Folly we open for submissions in January. We aren’t looking only for ‘writers’ - we want humans. People with experiences worth sharing. If we are the magic in what you are attempting, we will wrap support around you to help refine your work.

That’s what Folly is about - creating accessible literature that resonates with the human experience we are all grappling with. Unrefined, messy and lacking in ego. Done of the most amazing work arrives from people who have never written before.

And if you need more reason- ChillSubs recently ranked us one of the best literary magazines in the world - specifically for weird and bold writing.

Charge on!

We are heading into Christmas having sold more copies of Folly in four weeks than we’d normally sell in a whole year. Fortunately I doubled the print run this year or we would have sold out within one week. So in the slow down of Whitcoulls banning our publication, the media circus that followed and the temporary freight business I had to stand up from HQ, I am now reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic - which I procured from an op shop in Whangarei last week.

I have reservations about the quality of the writing, but I love that she’s refreshingly open about being lazy and half arsed as a writer. The art you are creating - it doesn’t need to be perfect she says. It can be a bit shit, like hers. What an admission from a bestselling author.

It made me think about my own writing, but also about how sometimes the unhinged chaos of just letting creativity flow - fuelled by raw human emotion and energy - it’s that energy that keeps someone reading. It’s what we will be looking for when submissions for Folly open next month. And no, we aren’t looking for perfection.

Often when something is too polished, when too much effort has been applied to sand down the edges, it strips away the essence that I find so appealing in the first place. One writer we worked with in Issue One told me this once. During editing she stripped all the raw emotion and sex from her story, only later realising that was exactly what had been so appealing about her writing.

With Folly, we’re more interested in the personal essay lens: What is this character experiencing? What does that tell us about the human condition?

For me personally, a lot of my best writing comes when I’m at an emotional high or low. I suspect that’s the same for many Folly contributors. Because when we are wildly in love or wildly in despair, the floodgates to our hearts open. That’s where the magic comes from.

Gilbert had a line that made me laugh initially because I thought she meant it literally: “Having an affair with your creativity.” Of course - the affairs provide emotional highs and lows, those waves of extreme emotion. Great artists are always having affairs, muses, lovers. But what she was actually talking about was treating creativity with the same reverent admiration you’d provide a lover. Carving out sacred moments - even just 15 minutes - to work on your craft.

I’m someone who often feels I need at least four hours and possibly some prescription painkillers to knock myself into the right headspace for writing. With two young children, a dog, businesses etc….finding four uninterrupted hours happens only a few times a year.

Right now I’m in the rewriting and editing stage for my second novel. My first novel was recently acquired by a publishing house, although I can’t talk about that yet. So I’m deep into the second one, getting churned through the wringer of revision.

This is all happening as I approach my late thirties, an era when I launched Folly and unexpectedly faced criticism due to  to my whiteness, my privilege, my audacity……whatever multiple things people choose to take exception to.

A Kirsha Kaechele says very wisely in Issue 003 of Folly: Well, of course the trolls are angry. They want to be privileged too.

But creativity isn’t a privilege of money. Creativity is a privilege of boldness. Of making time. Of bravery.

People who are not bold, who do not carve out the time, who are not brave enough to pursue their passions in life - yes, they will be resentful of those that do. They will be angry. And they will hate on those who are brave enough to create.

That’s their problem, not yours. Not mine.

As Gilbert says- they can fuck off and create their own art.

Inside Whitcoulls’ very strange decision to ban a small literary journal - following its decision to strip Folly from the shelves of 47 stores.

This afternoon I received another message from a Whitcoulls staff member.

“I work at Whitcoulls too, and I agree it is absolutely insane that we’ve banned the journal supposedly over a ‘customer complaint’ — which was espoused to us in a company-wide email only hours after the copies arrived in store!”

Hours after? Who is riffling through magazine racks at 11am on a Monday morning looking for a reason to make a formal complaint to a head office in Auckland?

For those who aren’t aware, on Wednesday Folly was informed our publication was ‘too offensive’ and went against the stores ‘family friendly values’. It would now be kept under the counter, we were told. Like a porno, ciggies, stuff that’s a threat to society.

Flummoxed, we spoke to our distributor. They warned us to ‘say and do nothing’, that ‘head office at Whitcoulls’ had warned if we say anything on social media then they will restock all stores of Folly entirely. Is that a threat, we wondered?

This seemed insane, but ‘under the counter’ I thought, I could work with. But of the three stores we visited over the next 24 hours, no Folly’s were ‘under the counter’. One staff member told us they were stashed ‘upstairs’ in a stock room, another told us they had already been delisted from the database.

WTAF, we thought. So we did what any sane former PR person would do, and got a story up on a national newspaper that day. Had a yarn with Heather on ZB the following night, kept light hearted with Emile on RNZ on Friday. Because, it was all a bit weird.

What Whitcoulls Actually Stocks

Whitcoulls says the journal was removed because it “didn’t align with our family-friendly brand.”

What hilarity. This is a store that stocks:

• violent thrillers

• rape-content crime novels

• serial-killer biographies

• BDSM erotica

• celebrity tell-alls of every moral shade

• romance novels containing absolutely every act that the Folly editors have never heard of including ‘fae sec’ and ‘wall slamming’

Yes, Whitcoulls is a “family friendly” retailer that proudly stocks a full spectrum of human depravity.

And yet despite ordering hundreds of Folly’s latest issue, they have then made the decision - within hours of issues arriving - that its content is so extreme it can not be on their shelves.

Folly contains;

• humans having human sex, with humans (with consent)

• Social and political commentary

• Raunchy poetry

• An interview with the Reserve Bank Chief Economist

Yes, we are flummoxed too. Of all the material in their stores, the only thing deemed dangerous enough to hide behind the counter was a locally produced New Zealand literary journal that contained the word “fuck” on its inner cover and the word “c***y” inside an essay about misogyny alongside a bunch of raunchy stories.

The Whistleblowers

The lovely thing about kiwis is we tend to fight for the underdog. And we hate rich people. And Whitcoulls is apparently owned by some rich Auckland family who clearly don’t spend enough time checking their middle management employees aren’t making irrational, hypocritical decisions that will make the brand look silly.

On Saturday morning I received a screenshot of a email from a Whitcoulls staff member- the email was a babbling incoherent mess written by someone at head office. URGENT, it said with far too many exclamation marks. FOLLY JOURNAL SITUATION!!!! The email had the vibe of OMG they DIDN’T LISTEN to our THREAT so now we will REFUSE to sell any copies to ANY customers even if they BEG.

Staff, I was told, were then later told to delete this email.

Another staff member told me:

“All started with a supposed customer complaint about ‘fuck’ being on the inner cover page which was brought to head office — the ‘family friendly’ line was there from the start — a manager up north added to the group email that page whatever ‘has the word c*y’. Their phrasing. And nevermind actually reading the article and understanding why you’re saying cunt, instead of pearl clutching because they said THE WORD.”

Staff confirm that Issue 003 has been written off, though they do not know whether copies will be destroyed, returned, or quietly disappear.

“The justification is ludicrous,” one staff member said. “It’s feeling vindictive and nasty,” another told us.

We, a tiny literary journal that’s just represented the country on the world stage, has somehow caused a national bookstore head office to react this way? Why? The Wellington Writers Studio got drunk, reciting passages to each other and debating what on earth was so offensive in Folly, compared to the filth Whitcoulls sells on their shelves (and yes I’ve recently reread portions of Fifty Shades just to clarify that Folly is definitely not publishing smut).

Several staff also expressed this frustration at the double standard applied to Folly versus Whitcoulls’ own catalogue:

“‘Pretty Boys Are Poisonous’ by Megan Fox has poems with cunt/cunty in it and it has been stocked for months if not over a year now.”

“Romantasy/smut has taken over in the last few years… When arranging displays we have printout lists that sometimes mark books as ‘spicy’ and ‘extra spicy’ to keep in mind what not to put front and centre.”

“That said, we still sell them — even with 18+ content warnings printed on the books, and parental guidance stickers that WE make and can use at store discretion.”

The Original Complaint: A Single Use of the Word “Fuck”

According to early Whistleblowers, the entire chain-wide ban appears to have been triggered by one customer complaint, objecting to a single use of the word “fuck” in a poem by Australian neurodivergent writer Rachel Apps, titled:

“It Costs Fuck All To Look This Cheap.”

Staff confirm the response from head office was immediate and disproportionate - which all started making sense when a manager from the chain raised the fact the the complaint from a customer sounded like bullshit.

No doubt this will continue to get weirder.

In the meantime, we eagerly awake the return of our hostage stock so that we can continue meeting our online orders.

Lesson 1: The Red Light District

We booked a really nice hotel that was walkable to the Frankfurt Book Fair, had a sauna on the roof and cool looking rooftop bar. We didn’t realise it was in the red-light district and in the middle of the worst crack problem in Frankfurt.

Everything smelled of urine, which we later learned is the smell of crack. The windows didn’t open (‘in case the crackheads climb in’) and the sauna was locked until 4pm (‘because of the crackheads’). It became a running joke, starting with the weird flat square pillows on the bed.

‘How the fuck am I meant to sleep on these?’ I asked Dana on night one.

‘They’re not for sleeping. They’re for propping people up for sex.’

‘But what if I want to sleep?’

‘People don’t come here to sleep. They come to have sex and do crack.’

When the sauna reopened, we went up to the rooftop in swimsuits and found a giant naked man sitting in the middle, in the dark, with his legs splayed open. My first thought was, oh god, one of the crackheads got in. He wasn’t. He was a local with a monthly sauna pass.

And although the reality outside the ground floor windows was grim, the drug taking and dealing occurring over breakfast each day was also a fascinating cultural eye opener. Dana routinely opened the curtains to report on the goings on while munching her breakfast of black coffee, sauerkraut and sausage. And we got good at timing our exit from the hotel to avoid the worst (although did walk right past people injecting straight into their necks). The receptionist at the hotel was dismissive of our questions, baffled that this was new to us and saying in a very direct German manner that New Zealand will soon have this problem too.

Where I live, in Wellington city, there is significant mental health and homeless issues. My walk to work frequently involves avoiding people huffing paint, and staggering around drunkenly yelling abuse. The crack users by comparison kept to themselves. And the police presence was high, moving drug takers into a special room off the street to do their drugs before allowing them to lie on the pavement to enjoy their drugs.

We went to a techno gig on the Friday night, staggering downstairs half asleep at 1am to enquire the night porter if it was too early to turn up to the venue (we had been told not to arrive until 3am). They barely batted an eyelid, shrugged and said 1an would be ok, before shepherding us past the crack heads into an uber. Unlike NZ, the crowd at the gig was (whilst no doubt largely high in M at least) incredibly courteous and polite. Unlike drunken crowds of NZers. The German politeness and efficiency extends right through to all kinds of drug taking.

Lesson 2: Romantasy and NZ sales

Throughout the book fair publishers and agents used the term ‘romantasy’ a lot. For non writers this is romance plus fantasy — now one of the biggest trends in international publishing. Two years ago apparently it was fringe; now it dominates the charts. To the horror of literary writers, we heard over and over the important of followers, fandoms and audience. Agents want ‘creators’ now, likening them to influencers. Apparently they don’t even use the term author much anymore.

The only time we heard NZ mentioned was in relation to the dire sales of our book industry. By comparison globally, our book sector is dying, and hence Folly’s approach as a global publication rather than one targeting NZ sales is critical to our success. New Zealanders are g buying books like overseas readers do, nor are we paying as much for them. As a publisher, and an author, success relies upon:

• A global reach and appeal

• Social media and fandom

• A core niche

For Folly, we were at the fair to sort out access to our global audience, meeting with sales agents and distributors who can help us get Folly to our readers cheaper than us shipping from NZ. But importantly, we also built connections with businesses who can help us get our unit price down- another critical element to long term visibility.

Lesson 3: AI Everywhere

AI was throughout Hall 5, and prolific within the official events schedule. The crowd were steely, but the focus wasn’t on why AI is here, it was on access and licensing — how publishers can control or monetise their content when AI models are trained on it. This was markedly different to previous years, because publishers were now engaging.

Afterwards I grabbed one Chief Strategy Officer from an American firm to chat about why publishers need to license to gen AI (uploaded this to LinkedIn for those interested).

Speakers talked about users moving faster than publishers, discoverability collapsing under ‘zero-click search,’ and the need for new revenue-sharing frameworks. One line stuck with me: ‘The purpose of publishing is to share knowledge; we just need a way to get paid for it.’

While this will take off with academic and research based publishers, I had significant concerns around the ability of corporate like Big Pharma to manipulate which research is available over AI - and how the models might disseminate it.

In New Zealand everyone hates AI. Last year apparently publishers at Frankfurt weren’t engaging. This year they were. For Kiwis this is a reminder that the world is moving forward, and we need to move with it - with clear strategies in plans in place for licensing to ensure access and reliability of factual accurate AI results. I’m not sure what this means for fiction yet, but the big publishers I spoke too were still of the mind that any AI is bad AI- and how to create guidelines about how AI use is, or is not, acceptable in the art of writing will take longer to work out. Without a doubt, it’s prolific amongst indie genre authors however- and their fan bases don’t give a damn.