Why are people focusing on the numerical comparison between writers and billionaires? Whatever, it doesn’t really matter.
The point of the article is that writers and authors are seemingly less valued than they ever have been. One reason for this is probably the change in media consumption habits which renders writers mere employees and underlings in the film and television industries (along with everywhere else). People no longer read books, which are the main format by which writers can become self-employed and self sufficient.
As always, it comes back to the homogenizing aspect of capitalism which tends to absorb everything into an interconnected web of economic dependencies. Instead of small businesses, we have overarching retail behemoths like Walmart and Amazon. Similarly, instead of a multitude of independent writers and authors expressing their own thoughts in books, they are compelled to work in teams to construct artificial, corporatized narratives due to economic necessity, yielding film franchises and television series along with all of their advertising and merchandising income.
Yeah. I mean the article could be right or wrong, although it seems to me at first glance to be plausible + relevant. But the number of people coming out to just purely jeer at the conclusions like “FUK U THERES PLENTY OF WRITERS THIS DUDE IS RONG, CITATION: MY DICK” – no real attempt to disagree with anything he’s saying other than that they don’t like it – is distressing to me.
Eh it’s fine, everyone on the internet likes to take the opportunity to correct an argument that they think is wrong, even if just on a technicality. I don’t think the author of this piece needed to focus so much on the numerical comparison with billionaires either. If anything, they could have focused more on the historical compensation of writers to make a more compelling argument. Maybe try to find book sales and compensation from the past few centuries and see how they compare.
Yeah, I get that, I think that’s probably more why it’s provoking resistance; he phrased it deliberately provocatively and wound up excluding some avenues that still produce books and people making a living (like working as an academic / teacher and also doing writing). It just kinda irritated me like, hey, I can draw a really strong and surprising conclusion from this data, and people’s reaction “that conclusion is surprising” -> “therefore is wrong” -> “no need to look further, I figured it out for you and corrected you, that was easy next pls”
The part that isn’t mentioned in this article is the onus of marketing. Now that anyone can self publish with almost no overhead, more than a million books are published every year. How many of those even get noticed? Sometimes it feels like people see the same 10-20 books on the bestseller list (which is gameable btw) and think that’s all there is to read.
These days, traditional publishers don’t do any marketing on behalf of authors unless they feel it’s a sure thing, similar to how they give out advances. If you are already famous or have large social media following, you’re far more likely to get an advance or a marketing effort. Everyone who self publishes, and even most who are traditionally published, have to do their own marketing. Most writers are not marketers, and this is where they fail, no matter how good their book might be.
Personally, I think the big publishers will collapse soon and the whole industry might move to a subscription model ala Spotify. That would probably be worse for writers, but no one seems to be able to come up with a solution that makes book writing a more viable career.
Yeah. The social contract used to be that the publisher would do marketing, editing, layout, and physical production, and the author would make the words, and they worked in partnership so they could both make a living.
Now, the author does marketing, editing, and makes the words, and bargain basement third parties do layout and physical production, and the publisher sits in their office chair screaming into their headset “MORE, MORE, I WANT MORE, IT’S NOT ENOUGH”, thinking that if they can just shave the margins a little thinner and increase the already-bloated salaries they draw for doing literally nothing, then it’ll finally fill the gaping chasm deep within them.
People no longer read books?
Unfortunately not. And even the few people who do still read books are much less likely to purchase a physical copy.
Well, true on the physical copy. I love my audio books and e-ink reader.
This article has some elements of truth, but skips over some important stuff. In particular, the odds of making a living writing books when on salary, writing the books for a big company or celebrities etc, are vastly higher than just writing your own books. You don’t have to beat insane odds if someone hires you for 70k/year to write books…you simply make that 70k/year. It’s the same as e.g. people working in the video game industry. The odds of earning a middle class income as an Indie Game developer are super bad, but there are many thousands of people working salaried jobs in the mainstream AAA game industry who are definitely ‘making a living’.
Also, this is nothing new. There is a reason ‘starving artist’ is a common term. For centuries, a lot of the most well known people in all creative fields were people who already had money when they started e.g. nobility, and some of those people were able to become famous, largely because they didn’t have financial pressures that the vast majority of people had.
Piers anthonys advice for becoming a professional writer was having a spouse who works. He pretty much gives his first wife the credit for his success (she passed away, they did not get divorced)
You can use the term “late wife” to avoid ambiguity.
yeah. on hindsite I feel sorta foolish as that term is used pretty often.
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Given the respective numbers of professional book writers and billionaires, I doubt it very much.
I am sure there are many more people who are writing books than who are billionaires. His point was, how many are making a living at it as their primary career.
Did you read his breakdown? He made a pretty compelling case that that number is about 500.
Frankly the whole article is just bizarrely defining metrics to fit the narrative.
Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?
My metric is based on “how many bizarre metrics are in this article”.
Because they didn’t write an article, they’re just critiquing one.
“Critiquing” is a pretty charitable description
Just one then, there are 43 billionaires in France (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by_net_worth).
And there are around 40 people in the French Academy alone. That’s only a small part of French writers.
And 43 billionaires is a rather big number. Compared to Pakistan or Colombia where the comparison would be even more skewed.
Just looking down the list of academy members and grabbing some at random I see:
- Claude Dagens, 84-year-old priest
- Dany Laferrière, working writer who lives in Miami
- Jean-Luc Marion, retired professor
- Andreï Makine, working writer
- Christian Jambet, philosopher, IDK what he does to pay the bills but his last published work was an essay in 2016
It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don’t know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn’t an argument that it isn’t hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.
Again: The argument is not that writers don’t exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don’t know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance – maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play – but regardless of that if you didn’t like that guy’s fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.
You’re really getting out of your way to miss my point. The number of professional writers is some orders of magnitude bigger than the number of billionaires, so much so that taking some arbitrary subset of writers of approximately the same size is easily done.
Another counter example (because I’m really nice like that): some contemporary French writers, just from memory:
- Annie Ernaux
- JMG Le Clezio
- Amélie Nothomb
- Michel Houellebecq
- Erik Orsenna
- Virginie Despentes
- Patrick Modiano
- Christine Angot
- Jean Echenoz
- Sylvain Tesson
- Marie Ndiaye
- Virginie Grimaldi
- Marc Levy
- Alain Finkielkraut
- Michel Onfray
- Mélissa da Costa
- Andrei Making
- François Cheng
- JC Rufin
Yes I know, it’s not 43, but I could easily go to my local bookshop and find 180 more, and again 43 billionaires is a lot for 70 million inhabitants. In any case the number of 500 writers in the article is laughable.
But that’s not the main point. What gets on my nerves is that the author of the article is cherry picking facts to entertain an idea. I could deliberately try something like “but you know there are more astronauts than true painters” and refute everything opposed to this with No true Scotsman fallacies.
The article proves absolutely nothing and the author makes a mess of logical thinking, while managing to blur what the wider perspective is supposed to be.
How many of those people are making more than $50k per year at it though?
It’s not “no true Scotsman” if there’s a defined dollar value that makes someone, so to speak, a Scotsman. I mean for all I know you are right and there are plenty who are supporting themselves doing it- but the point is not that writers don’t exist; it is that the number of them who are making a living without some other means of support is way smaller than it should be.
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Come on, have another go! It’s fun to critique things and tell people they are wrong; I wanted to have a turn.
It kind of gets into the napkin math. But it’s sort of silly.
If most writers can spend the first third of their career focusing on journalism or some type of corporate writing, and then the middle third on publishing novels or whatever, and then the last third teaching, or maybe just riding the fame of the one book that got turned into a movie… Yeah I think trying to be a writer sounds easier than becoming a billionaire.
Art doesn’t pay. Capitalism
can’t exploit it as much as manual laborexploits it more than anything else so there’s no money in it, unfortunately. On top of that, we have to constantly deal with people demeaning artists as useless and trying to bury us in favor of celebrities.(Not a writer, but an artist nonetheless)
Capitalism can’t exploit it as much as manual labor so there’s no money in it, unfortunately.
Doesn’t that mean that art is exploited even more?
Actually yeah, you’re right
50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year
Yikes.
Side note, why are substack posts shared consistently, when it looks basically to be blogspam? If I was linking to “billionaire vs books metrics” or whatever, and posted it from blogspot, or tumblr, or even a facebook post, itll be rightly shit on.
But on a substack? Its discussed like it wasnt written by random internet person instead of a valid source
There are lots of respected and credible people on substack. Mind the author, not the host.
So, what we should take from this is that any foray into any art is useless, therefore we should surrender any and all creative impulse to faceless companies.
Fuck no.
I’d rather distribute my work for free and have it read and enjoyed nonetheless than not write at all.
This. I just want to write something I’m somewhat satisfied with and have people appreciate it.
The secret is to just be a machine that looks human, like Sanderson, fucker writes whole books as secret projects
This article gives the impression that most people who studied English literature are now considered to be doing some equivalent of flipping burgers.
