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Magazines were so flush with cash that Vonnegut was paid $750 for his first story. That's unadjusted for inflation. I'm no expert, but I think a first time author getting $750 from a magazine would be doing pretty well these days. He saw that market fall apart within his lifetime, and blamed it on th audience moving to TV, for what it's worth.

Many well known authors got their start in magazines like Hunter S. Thompson; Where would he be if he was starting out today? Probably doing podcasts and the youtube circuit instead.

My assumption is that many people are trying to break into the podcast circuit and the vast majority basically fail. The winners being those who are best suited for it. My assumption would be that Hunter S Thompson happened to be suited for a different attention market in a different era.

The last time I checked (2022), top-tier lit mags will pay about $50-100 for a story. They pay mostly in "exposure" these days.

> As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about.

Critical awards are a huge boon in getting your book on the very limited and dwindling shelf space (and especially on endcaps and displays, where they're going to be noticed), or on the front page of online book stores.

In a field that is hurting for readers, that's a huge deal. That will get books sold for a *very tiny* number of titles, but not create a stable fanbase. So everyone is competing for those critical awards, causing the genre to spiral.

>Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.

>The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.

I think that the second half of the article seems weak because the first half contains a critical flaw. Academia hasn't declined nearly as much as magazines. Government funding is down, but departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there. Meanwhile, enrollment is up and university budgets are broadly still quite healthy. The situation is much worse for traditional long-form entertainment media, which has been squeezed by the blogosphere and the algorithmic feed.

This is not to diminish the argument that the arts have suffered as a whole, but in order to look at changes within the field, we need to consider changes in the relative importance of various factors.

The expected consequence of this is that authors become more dependent on academic jobs, which often react more favorably to critical appraisal than book sales. The second argument in the article then follows.

There is a little more to say here: the old magazine audience was not quite the broad popular audience of the bestseller lists. Rather we have to hypothesize some particular "literary" interest among the magazine audience that creates a market for the writers of literary fiction in a way that today's media does not. But since I have only a passing familiarity with that world and I am not a big reader of literary fiction I do not have any useful insight here.

> departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there

Wow, that's a pretty low bar.

Ask newly minted PhDs about the job market. The submitted article even has a chart and a link about the job market, so which part of that are you disputing?

The answer to your question is just the next paragraph after the sentence you quoted.

To elaborate on lapcat's point, you have to look at this from the point-of-view of a young, would-be aspiring literary fiction writer. From that vantage, it doesn't matter what the steady state of English/MFA professorships is, all that matters is your ability/chances to get one of those stable professorships. And the odds are very, very low, because lots of new PhDs are being produced, the turnover on those jobs is tiny (they are very comfortable positions, and there are few other job opportunities that use the same skills), and ~no new jobs of that kind are being created. Even if you get into a top-tier PhD program, chances are you will never get a tenure-track position, much less achieve tenure. You will either scrape by on a series of poorly-paid, labor intensive adjunct teaching positions, or abandon academia.

This is all very well-documented, search for "humanities phd job crisis" and you will find lots of information, e.g. [0].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/upshot/academic-job-crisi...

Isn't it just math? How many PhD students are "minted" by a professor over their career? A very crude estimate is between 10 and 50. For each PhD to get a professorship, each generation the number of jobs would have to multiply by that number. Does anyone believe that can be possible? If not, you will end up with a "crisis" like this, regardless of the best of intentions or evil influences or whatever. I mean of course if you kept 10x-ing the available jobs, at some point the supply of students would thin out but probably only at a huge number.

No, it's not? Could you please be more specific?

I agree with you that the economic factors are much more persuasive.

I'm curious though, if you're a reader of contemporary literary fiction, do you think that it hasn't undergone a transformation to become more obscure and trendy compared to where it was in, say, the 1960s? Are the critics' favorites now just as accessible and of the same standard as, say, Lolita or Portnoy's Complaint were back then? Or do you agree there was a transformation and just disagree with the vague reasons he gives for it?

Also, do you have any recommendations of contemporary literary fiction for us here on Hacker News? Asking as someone who mostly only reads literary novels by dead people, contemporary sci-fi or speculative fiction, and of course, inevitably, books by Sally Rooney.

I'm not trying to present myself as an expert in the field, and certainly not as a tastemaker. I'm just a regular reader of contemporary literary fiction. My personal taste doesn't match well with the critics, or with the best-seller charts for that matter, so I don't pay a lot of attention to either. The article author is much more familiar with the empirical facts than I am.

My objection was that, from the perspective of a reader of the submitted article, there seems to be a giant plot hole in the author's story. The author claims:

> beginning in the 1970s, authors were willing to optimize for critical praise at the expense of sales to a degree they had not been before.

This may or may not be empirical true, but the question is why? As far as I could tell, the author never explained why.

> It’s easy to see how a vicious cycle could have arisen from the preoccupation with status, not sales:

> 1. Authors start to optimize for critical praise

You can't just start the argument there! Ironically, the author talks about a vicious cycle, but that's actually a circular argument. I want to see 1 as the conclusion, not the first premise.

> How exactly did this cycle start? I think there’s reason to believe it began in the 1970s.

That's an answer to the question of when it started, not how is started.

The author places as footnote at that point and admits at the very end of the article, "Epistemically, this section is the shakiest."

There is a theory presented about mass behavior, the behavior of novel writers as a group. Yet a psychological motive is lacking. Writers all just decided to change their writing fundamentally, for no apparent reason?

You have got it backwards. Why would economic incentives opportunities not exist if there were still demand?

If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet - wouldn’t internet then be the real cause of decline and not some vague reason about wages?

> You have got it backwards. Why would economic incentives opportunities not exist if there were still demand?

Novels can take years to write, and sometimes years to sell. In the meantime, authors need to pay the bills. Only authors who are already famous get substantial advances for unwritten books. Therefore, aspiring novelists need sources of income to support themselves while they write a novel. Magazine writing and academia have been two of the most common sources of income for aspiring novelists. If those sources dry up, then the supply of aspiring novelists dries up too, and thus the supply of novels. Even if there's a demand for novels, publishers have little idea who will write a great novel before that novel is actually written; publishers can't just throw around money to support a bunch of unproven writers.

> If you suggest that demand reduced because of internet - wouldn’t internet then be the real cause of decline and not some vague reason about wages?

Ironically, "because of internet" is the vaguest of reasons. Here's what the submitted article said, specifically: "the internet killed magazines, not because people’s brains turned to mush, but because of the loss of advertisement revenue. U.S. consumer-magazine ad spend almost halved from 2004 to 2024 as brands chased cheaper, better-targeted impressions on Google and Facebook. It was those magazines that didn’t rely primarily on advertising revenue which survived and are thriving today. The New Yorker, for example, is still profitable."

> My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization

Agreed. I think this was a big miss in the article.