“My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply.”
Howey is describing a specific gap. Distribution cost collapsed to nothing around 2007 while the writing stayed hard, and that gap is the whole reason self-publishing paid anyone. His line about em-dashing for two decades is the sharp part. Writers now get accused of sounding like the machine that trained on them. The suspicion lands on the human either way, and there is no way to prove a negative.