Art & Creativity Quote by Piers Anthony

There’s a particular sting in how Piers Anthony frames this complaint: not rejected, not even reviewed. After 26 books, he’s not begging for entry; he’s describing a door that used to open automatically now staying shut on principle. The dash after “collaboration” is doing quiet work, turning a neutral craft choice into a contested category, as if the industry has decided the form itself is suspect.

The intent is part warning, part self-defense. Anthony preemptively blocks the easy dismissal (“it’s not that the books are bad”), then escalates to an accusation about process: editors “won’t even read them.” That’s less about wounded pride than about power. In traditional publishing, being read is the minimum due-process right; to be denied that is to be told your work is unclassifiable, unmarketable, or inconvenient.

Subtext: collaboration, once a selling point (brand extension, shared audiences, franchise-building), has become a risk marker. It raises questions editors hate to answer in meetings: Who is the “real” author? Who does publicity pitch? Does the book confuse the shelf? In a marketplace increasingly organized around clean author-brand narratives, two names can look like friction.

Context matters because Anthony is a long-running, high-output genre figure. His career was built in an era when prolificness signaled reliability. Now, consolidation, tighter lists, and algorithmic marketing tilt toward fewer bets with clearer metadata. His complaint isn’t just personal; it’s a snapshot of an industry that has started treating certain kinds of creativity as administrative problems.