Wealth & Money Quote by Sara Paretsky

Paretsky’s line lands like a cold receipt from the publishing economy: talent may be personal, but visibility is purchased. The intent isn’t to whine about marketing; it’s to puncture a comforting myth that books rise or fall purely on merit. By pairing “money” with “contacts,” she sketches two parallel currencies that determine who gets seen: cash for advertising, social capital for editorial attention. The quiet sting is that both are unevenly distributed long before anyone types “Chapter One.”

The subtext is about gatekeeping disguised as taste. “Create awareness among readers” sounds benign, almost civic, until you hear what it really means: without paid amplification, a book can exist in a kind of cultural dark matter, technically published but socially absent. The second clause sharpens the critique: reviews aren’t simply earned, they’re accessed. Newspapers and magazines appear as neutral arbiters, yet Paretsky reminds you they’re also institutions with networks, habits, and informal hierarchies that favor the already-connected.

Context matters: Paretsky came up through and helped reshape crime fiction, a genre long treated as “popular” rather than prestigious. Her career sits alongside decades of consolidation in publishing and the steady shrinking of book review real estate. So the quote reads as both practical advice and structural indictment. It warns writers that the struggle isn’t just craft; it’s distribution of attention in a marketplace where “discovery” is often a euphemism for someone else’s budget and address book.