Cash for Words: A Brief History of Writing for Money | Hacker News Reader

Cash for Words: A Brief History of Writing for Money

newrepublic.com

54 pointssamclemens21 comments

I pay by the word, so this author and I have complementary perspectives (I publish a small science fiction magazine, http://compellingsciencefiction.com).

First, I certainly don't think that paying for content decreases quality in any way. Every argument I've heard against paying authors is incredibly nebulous, and it's generally accepted that statistically you'll get better work (in any field of human endeavor) when you economically incentivize people.

Second, this quote was very interesting to me:

“So far online self-publishing has been the preserve of fan fiction and erotica but it can’t be long before high-quality fiction starts to emerge.”

After thinking about the entire ecosystem for a bit, my conclusion is that the above quote is probably completely wrong. The main issue is that there is SO MUCH bad writing produced compared to good writing. I receive 300-400 submissions a month for my magazine and most of them are not publishable (and my editor friends tell me that these numbers are low). Because of this hugely skewed ratio, it is very unlikely that "high-quality fiction" will "start to emerge", mainly because readers on the internet are unwilling to sift through all the chaff. For great writing to 'emerge', it requires both someone to read it, and for that someone to have enough influence over their friends for their friends to read it. I'm not sure that those two conditions will ever be satisfied well enough to be an effective screening system. It will be interesting to see how the ecosystem evolves, though.

Have you thought of writing a guide to help people submit higher quality content? Might prove useful. :)

If you believe Stephen King, you can't make a competent writer out of a bad one.

And what's the answer if you DONT believe someone with a clear financial incentive to discourage competition? What an awful quote!

Actual quote is:

...while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

Stephen King doesn't give a shit if anyone else writes a book or not, he is at this point incredibly wealthy and has certainly made his mark, even if you confine it to the "modern novel" or something.

The quote actually comes from his rather popular book On Writing, where he discusses the craft (presumably to the benefit of competent writers).

My question is:

Have you thought of writing a guide to help people submit higher quality content?

It is not:

Have you thought of writing a guide to help bad writers become competent?

Im talking about the content quality and not the writer's skills. Competent writers can be taught to improve their content but not their writing skills. Different things.

I've certainly considered it -- I would like to write some blog posts on it at the very least. Many submitters ignore my existing guidelines (http://compellingsciencefiction.com/submit.html) already, though, so I question how much impact such a guide would have.

Put a clause in, about 3/4 of the way down, requiring a brown M&M.

Id read those blog posts. Going to subscribe to avoid missing them.

I really wanted to submit a story to you but I see that you are not accepting any right now. Can you please share when that would change?

We won't be officially accepting stories until March 1, but if you send the story to my personal email (joe@compellingsciencefiction.com) I'll evaluate it.

While I agree that free content isn't inherently better (and usually worse), I disagree that good content will emerge in free venues. Social media has crowd-sourced the costs of discovery. You don't have all day to separate the good free content from the bad, but some teenager does.

Fan fiction is mostly terrible, but it appears frequently enough to be good enough to compete for the new rare commodity, reader's attention.

(and also a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover fanfic won the 2004 Hugo short story, but most fanfic writers don't write as well as Neil Gaiman)

The main problem with writing for money these days is that there's no money anywhere in the chain.

Yeah I'm just getting back into fiction after sticking with only non-fiction for 18 years. The first step to writing quality fiction is to read the best stories available. Right now I'm studying Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

> it might actually benefit a writer not to rely on books as their main source of income.

As long and energy and time left is enough to work just for the love of it. Although I might not feel like work, producing quality work certainly takes considerable amounts of time and energy. Side projects are hard to even complete without discipline and focus.

> Money obscures one’s relationship to work; it distances us from ourselves and the things we make

Reminds me of the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326792

“Luckily, the freedom offered by the Internet offers a chance to resurrect the idea of writing for love, not money,” waxes Rahim. “So far online self-publishing has been the preserve of fan fiction and erotica but it can’t be long before high-quality fiction starts to emerge.” In two thousand years, we have not strayed far from Pindar’s long-ago complaint: “Men used to write for love alone; now they write for money.”

Yeah but they are not mutually exclusive. You cannot write for money if your quality is total crap, because no one will pay you a respectable amount of money (and I'm not counting o-desk where you get paid $1 for 500 words).

Money doesn't taint everything for me. Therefore the rest of the article was impossible to agree with as the generalization it became by that initial declaration.

That's not the thesis of the article. The thesis is basically that Simonides and other writers got alot of flak for wanting to be paid, but the author believed that the flak was really for pointing out a relationship that was already in place, just in a kind of reciprocal gift economy instead. More to the point, that the gift of words in the previous economy was always reciprocated by something more valuable so that the writer would remain in the patron's debt.

So the people who believe that writing should always be untainted by money (or reciprocity) are failing to understand and live up to either the patronage system or the "modern" monetary payment system.

From the article:

> Money taints everything, why not writing too?

Don't forget that even writers who charge by the word have to set a price per word. A better writer can charge more, while still achieving a target quality.

And let's not forget Dostoievsky. He was paid by the word as well and since he was a severe gambler...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com