I once had dreams of making it as a literary writer. Those notions were, of course, about as far fetched as my earlier dreams of playing professional baseball. But we’re not here to discuss my childhood dreams. Thanks to fresh data from The Wall Street Journal we’re going to examine just how hard it is for writers–even writers of exceptional merit–to make a living.
“In terms of making a living as a writer, you better have another source of income,” says Nan Talese, whose Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint publishes Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and John Pipkin. One reason for Talese’s pessimism is the hard facts of a shrinking market for books. Consumer books peaked in 2008 at 1.63 billion units and are expected to decline to 1.47 billion this year and to 1.43 billion by 2012.
With all the entertainment options and various time pressures like work and raising a family, who has time for a book today? Online game developers are getting rich; meanwhile, our nation’s scribes are applying not just for grants, but for food stamps.
Yet, where there is disorder there is also opportunity. “Writers come up from nowhere, from the ground up, and nobody is looking for them or asking for them, but there they are,” says E.L. Doctorow. Who’s going to produce and market their work, and help them make a living? No one knows. But writers, like weeds, will keep coming. That we do know.
One answer can be found in independent publishers like Turtle Point Press who are signing some promising literary-fiction writers, so it’s not as if good books aren’t being written and published today. But independents offer, on average, $1,000 to $5,000 for advances, a fraction of the $50,000 to $100,000 advances that established publishers typically paid in the past for debut literary fiction.
What about eBooks? eBooks are selling like hot cakes, right? According to the Journal, eBooks are far from a game changer for emerging writers, although they do provide a nice bit of change for best selling authors.
Let me ask, what is your relationship to the printed book? Do books take up a lot of shelf space in your home? Are they packed away in boxes in the garage? Have you sold them all back to the used bookstore? Do you carry all the reading material you’ll ever need in one electronic device?
Personally, we have more books in our little cottage than we know what to do with. But I’m not reading new books at the pace I once did. The atomization on content is to blame. Like music fans who now buy just the single instead of the entire album, I click through the web harvesting bits and pieces from my favorite sources. I don’t have to subscribe to a magazine or newspaper, or buy a book. For the most part, I just click and read.
Interestingly, all this online clicking and reading repositions the book as special event in my life. To set time aside for a printed book is to say, I’m here now concentrating on this long form narrative. Email and iThis and iThat be damned.
SEATTLE—Out-spoken and fearless urban planning expert, social critic, author and journalist James Howard Kunstler is a man on a mission. He wants to shake the American people awake with his special brand of righteous anger, and tonight he’s on stage in a grand ballroom at the Westin to do just that.
Kunstler is here to deliver the opening keynote at Living Future 2010, “the unconference for deep green professionals” put on by Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the U.S.G.B.C. (and my wife’s employer). Kunstler is an interesting choice to open the unconference, for he is a rabble-rouser of epic proportions.
He says, “People call me a ‘doomer,’ but I call myself an actualist.†One of the things he’s being “actual†about is suburbia, which he says is “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.†Kunstler says, “We’ve invested our identity in this. Suburbia is part of the American dream.â€
Kunster claims the suburban dream is over, despite our lingering dreams. He claims builders and others are waiting for the bottom, so they can resume building, but “no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run suburbia.â€
Americans are conditioned to want something for nothing, he says. Kunstler reminds the liberal audience that President Obama said, “We won’t apologize for the American way of life.†Building on that, Kunstler says he is sorely disappointed by the nation’s elite cadre of environmentalists who are more concerned about producing electric cars than they are about living in walkable communities. His word for it: techo-grandiosity.
“We are not a serious society, not at all,†he practically spits form the podium. He tells a story about speaking at the Googleplex in Mt. View, CA. “The whole place is like a kindergarten. It seems the whole idea in business today is to be as infantile as possible.†Worse yet, Kunstler says the Googleites don’t know the difference between energy and technology, which is his way of saying technology isn’t going to solve all our problems.
Lack of political will is another sore point. He says we’re spending stimulus money to fix highways, when “we have a train system that would embarrass the Bulgarians.†Sadly, “we can’t afford to be clowns.â€
During the question and answer session, a psychologist in the audience asks Kunstler if he doesn’t have a more hopeful image he can share, one that will make an already paranoid people feel less paranoid. In true Kunstler fashion, he says, “we can’t fix everything with therapy.â€
When the talk is done, people applaud, but not as vigorously as they might. It seems the air’s been sucked out of this vast ballroom.
One attendee tells me he found Kunstler’s talk depressing. And therein lies the crux of the matter. Kunstler paints a broad canvas where all sorts of American ugliness are put plainly in view. Yet, most people working on solutions—like creating green buildings—are busy addressing one small part of the problem, not the entirety of the matter, and they want to feel good about their contributions. But Kunstler doesn’t care about making people feel good. His thing is to sound the alarm and make it ring loudly in our ears.
I’m grateful to literary blogger, Maud Newton, for sharing this 1964 documentary from BBC on poet Phillip Larkin, widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Also from YouTube, these excellent clips of the poet reading his poems, “Water” and “Aubade”.
Cathy’s Book is a transmedia storytelling experience written and produced by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman (with illustrations by Cathy Brigg). First published in 2006, the book includes an evidence packet filled with letters, phone numbers, pictures, and birth certificates, as well as doodles and notes written by Cathy in the page margins.
Cathy’s Book is a huge success and now two more books, Cathy’s Key and Cathy’s Ring round out the trilogy. All three are presented in print and online in a complimentary and overlapping fashion.
One of the author’s, Sean Stewart of Fourth Wall Studios, spoke to ARGNet about building “interactive arcs†into the stories, so that a reader might send an email and go through a 3 or 4-step investigation to arrive at a satisfying endpoint.
Online or off, the magic here is the series of interactions taking place between readers/followers/fans and the storytellers. Stewart explains:
MA: What was your favorite out-of-book element in the trilogy?
SS: Actually, I think my favorite thing we did was to build a gallery for readers to post their art…and then put some of those pictures in the printed books. There is something very beautiful to me about closing that circle: the books invite you into Cathy’s life beyond the page, and then, eventually, circle around until your life is part of her printed world. That for me is a lovely version of The Dance – that cooperative give-and-take between artist and audience that is seems so clearly to be part of what the next evolution of art will be.
With the rise of digital culture, writers are now required to think beyond their manuscript. And while the writer remains the architect of the story, as the larger experience of the story unfolds, others with a deep interest in the story emerge to help bring finishing touches and/or new ideas to the table. This could be somewhat off-putting to the storyteller, put in needn’t be. When you tell a story in the ancient tradition–around a campfire!–the people gathered there clearly impact the pace of the story, the details left in or taken out, the ending, etc. Thanks to the interactive abilities of today’s always-on mediums, we’re getting back to that more familiar model.
Darby and I have been intently viewing seasons one through four of HBO’s The Wire (care of Netflix), which leaves just season five to go. I’m afraid we’re already dreading the end of the series. We don’t want it to end, the way you don’t want a great novel to end. But end it must.
In preparation for this coming conclusion of what one critic calls the “greatest TV show ever made,” I’ve begun searching for and processing the criticism.
Mark Bowden of The Atlantic called the show’s co-creator, David Simon, “the angriest man in television.” In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Simon says he doesn’t mind “being called that” and asks rhetorically if there’s a better response to the America of the last decade.
Bowden also makes note of the literary form advanced by The Wire.
Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary†fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.
It’s a point well taken. I’ve often thought that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be successful in Hollywood. It’s also interesting to understand Simon’s background as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. For 12 years the man told detailed, well researched, fact-filled stories, but those stories didn’t change policy in City Hall, Annapolis or Washington, DC. Simon isn’t holding his breath to see these changes come as a result of his TV show either. He sees the problems in America (like the failed War on Drugs that his show dramatizes) as systemic, and argues that conditions will have to become much worse before they get better.
Here, let’s listen to the man:
Simon says our economy doesn’t need the underclass, and that’s why these urban black communities have been pushed completely from the frame of American life. He’s right about the extreme marginalization, but I would counter that this nation does need the underclass and that poor, under-educated workers can become productive and change their station in life and possibly the country’s future in the process.
President Obama is conducting a “jobs summit” this week to help spur jobs training and jobs creation. In my opinion, we need to get off our collective ass now and institute a 1930s-style public works program. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much work there is to do. The nation’s roads and bridges need repairs and we must build high speed rail from Seattle to San Diego and from Miami to Boston. Moving to energy, the nation’s entire electrical grid needs to be refitted to store and conduct DC current produced by solar and wind. And the list goes on. Meanwhile, little progress is made.
In one episode of The Wire, “Bunny,” of Baltimore city police, says he doesn’t know what the answer is to getting kids off the corner and returning the streets to the citizens of Baltimore, only that it can’t be a lie. That’s correct, and it can’t be a lie in real life. Yet, empire is a lie. The wars to maintain it are a lie. The war on drugs is a lie. Saying we don’t have the resources nor the will to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the uninsured is a lie.
It’s easy to get fired up by The Wire, and that art’s role in society—to challenge us, to make us think, and help us to care. On these fronts, HBO’s gritty crime drama is a huge success.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
Law professor William J. Quirk, writing in The American Scholar, examined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns from 1919–1940 and came away with a detailed portrait of a rich man–perhaps unexpectedly, for Fitzgerald portrayed the rich from close physical proximity, but with (mostly devastating) emotional distance.
Quirk’s direct examination of the writer’s records indicate:
Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition.
The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns. Today, a taxpayer would have to earn at least $500,000 to be in the top 1 percent.
His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.
Fitzgerald wrote short stories for magazines to earn money which provided him the freedom to pursue less well paying but artistically significant works. He also moved to Los Angeles and wrote scripts for the studios. During his Hollywood years, he was never paid less than $1,000 a week. By contrast, Warner Bros., in the 1940s, paid William Faulkner $300 a week.
Also by comparison, I received a check in the mail from Google today for $100.73. According to Technorati, I’m among the 28% of bloggers, a.k.a. writers, who make some amount of cash from their efforts today. That’s a lot of people making a little bit of money, when the trick–one clearly mastered by Fitzgerald–is to be one of the few writers making lots of money.
Books are like babies. They take time to conceive, develop and eventually stand on their own.
According to The New York Times, a star of the print media business–now deep into her first big digital project–thinks she can speed the incubation process up considerably.
In a joint venture with Perseus Books Group, The Daily Beast is forming a new imprint, Beast Books, that will focus on publishing timely titles by Daily Beast writers — first as e-books, and then as paperbacks on a much shorter schedule than traditional books.
“There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,†Ms. Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.â€
Perseus is paying The Daily Beast a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing and designing the books, and Perseus will distribute the titles through its existing sales force. The writers will receive low five-figure advances from Perseus, then split profits from the sale of both the e-books and paperbacks with Perseus and The Daily Beast.
The imprint’s first book, scheduled to be published as an e-book in December and a paperback in January, is “Attack of the Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America,†by John P. Avlon.
It’s Friday after work and there’s one picnic table left at the bar.
But it’s not really open, because a guy is sitting there, talking to people at the next table over.
I ask him if we can sit there too.
He gets up and moves to the other table.
I say, “Let me buy you a beer.”
He says, “I’m not gay.”
I come back with his I.P.A. and the show begins.
Bobby Joe O’Reilly has fine features and pale, almost translucent skin which he covers up with lots of ink.
But there’s no ink on his face.
What’s on his face is a war movie that will not stop playing.
It stars, oddly enough, Sargent O’Reilly himself, although he’s a younger man in the movie.
The more O’Reilly drinks the louder and more obnoxious his movie gets.
“Take those damn sunglasses off, they’re bothering me,” O’Reilly barks.
Here’s a man ready for hand-to-hand combat.
“I was in Kosovo,” he says.
He pauses for dramatic effect, a habit he picked up by watching late night Westerns.
“I watched four friends die right in front of me.
A sniper pinned us down and then a ‘bowling Betty’ came rolling down the narrow street.
Boom, my friend turned to ketchup right in front of me.
Splat, another friend turned to ketchup.
Bang, another.
Shit, another.
And I told that dumb ass Lieutantant we had no business in there, but he didn’t listen.
And you know what else?
I had one fucking bullet in my chamber.
One fucking bullet thanks to the U.N.
I fired that bullet and so did my men and the sniper died by our bullets.
I went to see his body and he was a kid.
A 13 year old kid!”
“You did what you had to do,” I say.
“A 13 year old kid!” screams O’Reilly.
Later, a cab pulls up for O’Reilly.
He stumbles and falls to the concrete.
I think, “Man down!”
But he makes it.
He survives.
Again.
Name Your Tale asks for a title and if they like it, one of the site’s writers creates “a very short story, in fact, exactly 100 words.” Jenny Nicholson, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and works in advertising by day, “while plotting world domination at night,” was kind enough to write to my title idea.
I just submitted three “six word stories” for consideration. They are:
Will work for mansion in Wilmette.
It takes beer to make wine.
Before Twitter she did not type.
Maybe these bits will be digitally elevated on Six Word Stories. Or maybe I need to work harder to get away from bumper sticker copy. Either way, it’s a fun exercise and I appreciate the efforts of those involved.
I like that “create your own currency” idea. Sounds like Rushkoff has some radical, but right on, advice.
Here’s how the book begins:
Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.
Corporatism is something else entirely. Though not completely distinct from commerce or the free market, the corporation is a very specific entity, first chartered by monarchs for reasons that have very little to do with helping people carry out transactions with one another. Its purpose, from the beginning, was to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors.
This agenda was so well embedded into the philosophy, structure, and practice of the earliest chartered corporations that it still characterizes the activity of both corporations and real people today. The only difference today is that most of us, corporate chiefs included, have no idea of these underlying biases, or how automatically we are compelled by them. That’s why we have to go back to the birth of the corporation itself to understand how the tenets of corporatism established themselves as the default social principles of our age.
Rushkoff is the author of ten books on media, technology, and society. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and the upcoming Digital Nation.
