Up in Smoke
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
The article is a long read and I'm doing it in segments, but it's hard to read - agonizing to see the struggles.
All writers I know do it for love of writing, because they have the urge to write. There are so many gates: I have written a novel, but I'm at the agent gate right now, trying simply to get someone to represent it. Self-publishing is common, but requires a lot of self-marketing which is not something I feel capable of doing myself, in the tiktok/booktok sense. (Blogs, talks, book events, sure; marketing with a publisher, absolutely; trying to get a self-published novel noticed on booktok, not by myself.) It's not like coding where you can publish a library on github or get involved in a community and your work becomes visible. I've done that. This is another game.
After all this -- the writing, the gates, the publishing -- you won't make enough to live.
The article really seems to be that the story of writing is a lie, that our culture has a picture of authors living from their writing and it's false.
The hidden work and jobs that subsidize being able to write make writing something of a side gig when it should be the main work, and I cannot help but think of all the cultural value we have lost by not letting writers focus more on writing. Some countries have small stipends, small support. We need more.
Can anything that's not young adult fantasy pornography actually get noticed on booktok?
It's scifi, 'weird' fiction, and a commentary on power in the guise of an adventure story, and I think there is room for that somewhere. But I cannot imagine going solo marketing it, especially for Booktok.
Books don't earn out their advance unless your first name is a ball of initials.
"All <game> writers I know do it for love of writing <games>, because they have the urge to write <games>."
For better or worse, luck probably matters more than quality in determining whether a particular writer breaks through and earns enough money to live. They can do everything right and still fail. Aspiring writers need to accept that reality with grace.
In fact, the examples of the NEA (no change in the rate of prize winning US works) and the Soviet Writers Union (famous writers explicitly expelled from the stipend mechanism) indicate to me that the effects are marginal at the levels of spending we can tolerate.
I’m sympathetic to the general argument that many problems can be solved by throwing money at them but this one seems like it needs a lot more to create an effect or adding government money to it does not result in the creation of more cultural works.
On the other hand, I've known writers who make it work. Larry Correia has a lot of useful thoughts about it, he used to be an accountant before he got into writing and brings those skills to his analysis.
eg. "Analyzing My Royalties" https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02/08/analyzing-my-roya... he breaks down how the system works. Claims to be making Doctor/Lawyer level money as of 2022.
I would like to see an analysis including "non-traditional" publishing options, and how different kinds of writing sell. I suspect genre fiction is different from "literary" from non-fiction, etc.
You're not going to be able to jump head-first into (career) successful writing; but since it's almost perfectly suited to "after hours work" you can slowly build up to it.
The harsh reality is most wannabe authors suck and their writing sucks, and if they haven't written yet they need to get started, because the only way to get good is to get going and produce - the first five books may never see the light of day but you'll have improved.
Funny thing how bards/poets/musicians/storytellers are a fixture in every society that has figured out how to produce more calories than each individual personally needs to consume
unfortunately, precisely defining good writing is difficult, much like good coding. And as such, whether there is enough good writing, or "how much better good writing is to bad writing", or "what the effects of good writing are on the individual or society" are questions that we arent remotely prepared to answer. I imagine many people advocating for support for writers believe on some level both that good writing has very positive effects for the readers and society, and that there also isn't enough of it, or at least that its drowned out by perverse incentives and mountains of bad writing
This is, notably, the exact same argument we make for why tech firms should hire junior engineers. If one doesn't keep subsidising opportunities for the up-and-comers in every field, one quick runs out of experienced candidates.
Why could a society not have a role for bards as well as hunters, as their day job, as their purpose?
Or in modern times, replace "hunter" with "working class".
Caveman land implies human nature without needing to make an argument for it. It is so far in the past that there is limited evidence, and most people you encounter aren't anthropologists. So you can justify all your unexamined assumptions about present society with an appeal to the caveman land.
Ironically, all you need to craft a fantasy caveman land is an imagination. "Picture hunter gatherers, sitting around a campfire, carving rocks into Pokemon cards and trading them." What a great story! Anything is possible in caveman land.