Hell of it is, you don't even realize it till long after. It's just the way things are. You aren't important, you aren't visible, you don't sell, you aren't worth publishers' time.

I did have one editor in particular fighting hard for me long after the sales cratered, and my agent and his younger associate tried hard with a very idiosyncratic book that nobody really "gets" even after the Kickstarter, but the overall sense was of being made smaller and smaller and smaller.

And it is cultural. It is gendered. It isn't us. Which it's taken YEARS to even see.