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.
Unfortunately not. And even the few people who do still read books are much less likely to purchase a physical copy.
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)
Art doesn’t pay. Capitalism can’t exploit it as much as manual labor exploits 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?
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?
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.
