It's because we all have day jobs, advances are pennies, publishers don't market, one underperforming book tanks your career, and we're expected to be well-tuned brand machines on social media websites designed to suck our souls dry.
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For some reason artificially increasing the costs of publishing a book in order to maximise publisher profits has led to fewer people publishing books.
There must be some sort link between these two things, but since I'm not a trained economist I'm having difficulty seeing it.
Honestly you can blame Amazon for a lot of it. Amazon demands such high discounts from publishers and ends up selling books to end customers for less than independent retailers can even get them wholesale. This is bad for everyone trying to make money from books except Amazon themselves
this is always a very funny pastime for anyone to do but especially today looking down the barrel of some historic inequality and going "well if everyone behaved just like ME there wouldn't be ANY issues" with regard to any of that
People in the old days also had just way less other interesting stuff to do than read and write. There was no TV worth watching, no Internet to goof around on. If you were Weird, hard to find friends locally in most places. All that energy could go into writing
I tried to make "creative writing" my business for years (counting games journo & narrative design work as that) and it left me broke, in debt, and bitter. The lesson I learned is if you're not lucky enough to hit it big, you need to accept writing will always be a hobby/side gig. It is really sad.
Why did writers start to struggle in exactly the decade when the Internet arose and print publishing rates cratered, it is a mystery, must be individual laziness on the part of every writer in the world
because today's reality is crazier than just about any fiction that can be created. in fact, one of the US's major political parties runs on fiction based reality. "Truth doesn't matter, just appearances" classic snake oil sales tactic
Abso-fucking-lutely. When you’ve got mental exhaustion from work, there’s just no juice left to write with. As it is, *when* I write, it’s only on the weekend and even then I have to wait until I’ve recuperated from the week prior.
One of the wildest changes is the lack of marketing, and the expectation the author will do it. Like it begs the question, then why is the publisher taking such a fat cut in sales, it's pretty much rent seeking at that point.
Good point, Aidan. I think this is similar to music and art. The advent of social media really creates the symptom of everything looking quite the same. While we're at it: anyone else feels the AI-generated images are unsettling in a glossy way?
There are so many things about me that they could feel morally superior to, down to which direction I hang my toilet paper. Must they seize on my work ethic?
I've been reading AC and listening to audiobooks and BBC dramas (Dumb Witness is on the radio as I type) for 45 years, and I have to say that while the plots are mostly clever she did write some old tosh too. I've read nothing like "he wasn't just the Prime Minister, he WAS England" from Ursula. 😀
I actually prefer most of the TV adaptations because they cut out a lot of scene-setting build ups and what I felt were rambling interludes while we waited for plot points to happen.
it's a lot harder to market writings too, when people have to READ blurbs about it to get invested. My generation and the one younger than me, can't read at a 10th grade level for the most part. Not to mention the attention span to get invested in someone's writings is trash now
He also received as much as a year's salary at GE selling three magazine short stories. I agree with you that the economics are very different and I also disagree with the original tweet's notion about the quantity of books published in a short time frame
Me: "hey publisher we can do a really cool asymmetrical marketing thing with this cultural juggernaut within the niche of my current book for (low 3-digits execution) because this brand that I talk about in the book will sponsor."
Publisher: "We Pass but go ahead if you like. Are you on tiktok yet?"
I was once in a writing group with a number of people who made a living from their writing and had published 20+ books. What they had to do to make that financially feasible was so horrible I think most of them would have been happier back in the day job.
WAY more books are published annually today than ever before in human history, but "I self published a novel that sold five copies" used to strongly imply you were a weird crank and now that's, like, the vast majority of authors.
It's like every creative field nowadays, the billionaires/corps want everything for nothing. This isn't a society, it's a giant sweatshop with a company store.
This. In the times of the ancients (my 20s), if you didn't have a deal with a MAJOR publisher you didn't get a space on store shelves, and you didn't sell. Now, there's a lot more independent work, and work that publishers previously bought but relegated to niche markets.
Similar to something I read once about the music industry - something like “In the 1980s, you had hundreds of artists selling millions of records. Nowadays you have millions of artists selling hundreds of records”.
Yup, I was just talking with my wife about how I might just scale back writing because earnings aren't nearly equal to the time/effort/emotional energy required.
Exactly. That is it, *exactly*. Also, I feel VERY out of step with my genre. I'm barely even reading it at this point, so if I do feel the itch again, it will probably be straight historical fiction or SFF.
One reason that writers may not be getting paid very much is that readers do not spend very much on what they read. I get so many emails and blogs and news articles and social media things to read for free that I never get around to reading books that I have paid for.
It was quite a depressing scene in the recent Little Women movie, when Jo gets offered $150 for a story in the 1860s, and I thought that was more than most places offer now.
During the Great Depression, pulp writer Lester Dent was writing 12 installments of Doc Savage a year and getting today’s equivalent of over $14K for each one.
In the 1950s, the New Yorker paid $10k for a short story, which is like $60k now. You got a short story in the New Yorker, you could take a year off your day job to write your novel.
Having a day job is the albatross around the neck of any writing career. It is next to impossible to fit writing time in, never mind do all the requisite research and online courses, plus the hours of viral social media posting publishers expect from you just to get a foot in the door. It's bleak
Yeah this. Not to mention the motivation to write a novel is next to nothing, unless you simply want the pleasure of reading your own book. I’m finishing my first novel, which I started years ago and then set aside because the chances of even a great book being published is next slim and none.
I guess you just have to take the joy of creation as its own reward to motivate you to keep going. It'd be nice if there were other rewards too, of course.
Also, the Supreme Court Thor Power Tools decision. Suddenly, warehousing book inventory is a significant tax liability. Bye-bye, reprints of most writers' backlists.
Walden pond is and was inside the hamlet boundaries. His mother and sister prepared and delivered his meals and clean laundry. Then he mooched off Emerson some meals. He was not in the wilderness, more like tenting in the back yard
Books back then were shorter. A sci fi novel over 60k words was considered an epic. Also we’re not taking heroic doses of speed in order to produce 6k words a day.
And a bunch of us have "hidden" medical conditions that Big Pharma decided weren't worth investigating, because not enough people to treat. If it was real.
Covid changed that, but they're in catch-up mode on metabolic illness, and it won't give most of us back our lost books. :(
It all circles back to greed, wage theft, and Trickle down Billionaires. There's no room for creative writers in final stage Capitalism. Just sugar pop entertainment for dumbed down attention span mentality. Corporate Billionaires decide who gets published and who doesn't.
I keep seeing people say final stage capitalism. So what comes after capitalism and how do we get there? 😥
Or if it's bad how do we avoid it? Or at what point does capitalism murder itself?
Well everyone has theories. The rich need labour and people need to feed their families. If we don't Tax the rich for the labour wages they stole to become Billionaires it won't end well for anyone. We need to redistribute the wealth so everyone have a living.
I lived through the health bars and intense music. Hell my generation invented. What passes for that now is final stage materialism and excess used to fill the void that you won't be able to buy a new home that isn't controlled by a HOA for less than $1 million dollars from now on.
The rate in which the wealthy are accumulating more wealth is insane. Many that labour to feed that greed can't afford basics anymore. There isn't anything optimistic about Capitalism anymore. It needs to be replaced with a system that takes care of everyone, not just a greedy elitist handful.
oh for sure I agree. I just believe we are entering that stage now. I do believe it is going to get much worse too. It has too for people to finally see that Capitalism has a huge flaw and replace it. This is an incredible time in human history. I'm not sure how capitalism will end but it will end.
Not my area of expertise, but I would be very surprised if this wasn't yet another ill that, on the Global Scale it is today, didn't link back to the US/Reagan tbqh
Every moment in a capitalist economy is designed to encourage profit growth for billionaires/corps. We work, we produce profit. When we're done work and "relax," we produce ad revenue via our phones/TVs. Creating mass amounts of art does not fit that ecosystem, so it's intentionally squeezed out.
I was put on involuntary paid leave as a precursor to being laid off about a week ago, and I've been trying to get back into d&d homebrew and rp now that I'm not in the office. Yet, of course, I have parents asking me if I'll do "something productive" today, meaning towards my next job. Ugh.
Also, thanks to publishers getting bought and merged, it's harder to get traditionally published, which means your options are slogging through the slush pile in hopes that editors whose assistants got laid off will take time to read you, or self-publishing and competing with AI slurry.
Someone recently *insisted*, "It's easier than ever to be published, it's the audience who decides!" with the expected confidence of a gibbering idiot.
I tried to educate them, but again, they *insisted* that I, a working writer, didn't know my own industry, so off to the block bin they went.
Why are we accepting this premise? Jane Austin, Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, Raymond Chandler all wrote less than 10 books. That's just who I fact checked in a few minutes......
The early and mid-century writers got, in inflation adjusted dollars, between $1 and $20 (5¢ to $1) a word for magazine work, and long-format advances that were buy a house or a house and a car.
And now, short work still gets between 2¢ and $2 a word (the latter is rare).
Yup. Even back in the late 90s my dad was getting >$1/word writing for newspapers/national magazines/etc. AND they'd pay for him to fly around to do interviews, etc.
A thing I've never fully understood is: has revenue really collapsed *that* much? Part of it is greed and profits sure, but not enough to explain an order of magnitude or two of difference in this way. Were people actually paying *that* much more for news in like the 70s?
No! It's that across all industries, profit goes to the corporation. And profit shared down the line is considered inefficient and corrected. That's why we see all those news reports about the economy being great, but nobody in the middle class and down can afford groceries anymore.
Like objectively the economy is doing extremely well and not just for the rich. Inequality is down, unemployment is down, inflation is down, labor force participation is up
Making up *a little bit* for decades of stagnation. Then can we compare that to inflation? The cost of living? And as others have noticed have hourly rate gone up, while employer has cut staff or cut hours, so while each worker has a better wage, fewer:same amount of work.
Which isn’t to say that’s true for everyone or that your experience is wrong or that nobody is getting laid off or can’t find a job in their field but nationwide on the whole? Better for the working class than it’s been in a minute.
The economic health is measured off of the stock indexes and corporate profits, the whole point of the measurement is to give us something we could beat the Soviet Union on. Nothing to do with how the economy actually is, just to beat the Soviets
See but I can never seem to get that math to make sense! If you told me that you used to make 40 cents a word and now you make 5, that your pay has gone down 8x, that sounds like profit gouging. But 5 *dollars* to 5 cents? A hundred times difference? These publications don't seem that profitable
Well, it was places like Vogue that were paying $5 a word back then, and they're still paying relatively well comparatively. The ad-based online model is also broken and drove prices for journalism, etc. sharply downward. Somewhere like Clarkesworld wouldn't have existed when $1/word was the norm.
What Adrian said, but also: high tax rates meant it was in the company’s best interest to turn profit into pay raises and higher rates, into improving infrastructure and maintenance, and wise expansion. The way to reduce that 93% top marginal rate was to spend the money on the company, not the feds.
…or real R&D (which, of course translates largely into wages). I don’t have more than an impression to back it up, but it seems that companies used to spend more time investigating ideas that didn’t necessarily have an immediate profit stream.
Don't forget stock buybacks were illegal until 1982. Investing in the company involves a large chunk going towards stock, with infrastructure and maintenance being pushed to just in time instead of proactive.
In the 1970s, "newspaper in medium-sized city" was a sustainable business. Revenue came from paper sales, classified ads (eg. cars/houses for sale), and business advertising. Now readers pay nothing, and both types of advertising have been eaten by the internet. 😢
I have friends whose family became extremely wealthy old money because of owning newspapers in a small city. The money obviously was invested very well but that's how it started
I remember when the Scotsman newspaper occupied this building overlooking Edinburgh Castle. (Iain M Banks called it "the finest view in newspaperdom".) You could go to the back door at 5 am and buy a paper hot off the press.
Now the paper's a shadow of its old self and the building is a hotel. 😭
And the advertising eaten by the internet is demonstrably worse and more fragmented, while also being too wide (massive over-spray) and too targeted (especially in jobs).
Yes! I used to write for a few magazines and got up to 5 dollars a word in some cases. One article in the 90s could sustain you and pay for a decent apartment. I remember having this sinking pit in my stomach when I saw an ad advertising for blog writers for a penny per word.
It also kind of illustrates how the industry is tilted so all the money flows toward “major” writers, so they don’t HAVE to write a million novels to earn a living. Meanwhile, midlist writers are paid a pittance for a book a year.
also allows any person making such a claim to respond to someone saying "but Author B has written XX books" that "Author B isn't a 'major' writer" so therefore
Even in terms of just writing for fun, it's the same thing! I wrote fanfics often in college, then the way life just kind body slammed me, I hardly wrote anything in the 8~ years since graduating.
Also agents get a fraction of those pennies, big publishing houses have grown more conservative about unproven authors, and a dud self-pub or small-press book renders you unpublishable but any success short of LEGENDS & LATTES doesn’t matter to big houses, and don’t get me started on neural nets.
I've published 20+ books and lots of my author peers have 20+ books - we're indies... and that dude ain't looking at anything other than trad pub.
Trad pub currently favour celebrity names, they don't nurture new talent anymore cos celeb names are a safer bet - and who cares if they can write 🫠
There were quite a few early C20th writers - and fairly critical reputable writers as opposed to hack romance writers - who were turning out a book a year because they could make a living that way, supplemented with reviewing, essays, etc. A different literary economy.
Almost 30 yrs in the business & I haven't experienced 3, 4, or 5, thank heaven. But maybe another reason is that novels are now almost thrice the length they used to be? The word count of my 7 novels would have been about 18 books' worth back then.
Was just lamenting to the writer's group the other week about how no one except tent-pole authors get "7 years to work on their Anna Karenina" because we need to churn as much content out as possible instead of refining our art.
My fav (unresearched) podcast trivia fact of this week is that even Michelangelo didn't want to do the Sistine Chapel but couldn't say no to those patrons another commenter mentioned.
They make more money if they go through 30-40 writers all on first book deals than letting writers get established and go write massive series and get enough away to get a better cut too
Not to mention they'd rather take work that can be made into a shitty cash grab movie that they own rights for
I'd just like to add that humankind/fandom has gone feral and SM allows them to constantly attack authors/creators over the stupidest of things. Why would any creative person willingly subject themselves to that environment, especially for such little compensation?
Also, that older generation of writers includes Thomas Harris who has written, since 1975, a total of SIX novels of which only two don't involve Hannibal Lecter.
Its like thst for music too, except every algorithm expects me to pump out an albums worth of songs, but released as singles planed for the whole year or some shit
I can pump out a song in under a week, but its still alot of work, thats like 3 days of working for sometimes 12 hours a day
Didn’t Jonathan Coulton do a stunt thing a while back where he wrote/released a song per day for a full calendar year, then vowed to never attempt that again?
Im sure thats true, but often times, our best work as artists comes at the cost of our creativity, it can vary easily lead to artists block, and that can result in sometimes worse content
Always appreciate your favorite artists, people dont realize how much work it takes to make good music.
Idk, but if he did i can see why he only did it once
That sounds insane
I tryed to do one song a month once for a full year and couldn't manage it(this was closer to when i started producing) i cant imagine how stressful that must have been
Orson Scott Card talks about emerging writers outgrowing $400/short story from smaller journals in 1990. Only Clarkesworld and Asimov pay around that now in non inflation adjusted dollars! https://defector.com/the-money-is-in-all-the-wrong-places
Howard Waldrop, who just passed, described himself as seldom breaking five figures as a writer, but a) rent used to be affordable and b) he could live off sales to Omni magazine, which paid magazine rates instead of pulp rates. Magazine rates for fiction basically don't exist anymore.
I stopped being able to support myself with my novels around 2016-2017, no matter how heavy my output. I still get a thin trickle of royalties but it's pocket change.
I think a lot of this is because more titles are published. 30-40 years ago, you'd see maybe 5-6 new titles on the SFF shelf at the local bookstore each month, mostly by known authors. More total books are sold than ever, but individual titles sell less. This isn't even including ebooks.
I get that! I work 50-hour weeks at my day job, and put together NYC art shows and events in my off-time. But I’m single with no kids, and I don’t know how anyone else does it without a pile of outside money.
I also question the number of readers today. For all its faults, booktok keeps people engaged. But generally, consider how many book sales are needed to support one author, then consider units could reasonably get moved. Even under favorable terms
I’d say the real machinelike writers still do it. Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith and David Mitchell all always have a next book on the way. They’re just not at 20 yet because … their careers are only half over?
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Writers are still writing their multiples of books, and plotting out their next Steven Erikson 10 book sagas with associated encyclopaedias.
The problem isn't the writers.
There must be some sort link between these two things, but since I'm not a trained economist I'm having difficulty seeing it.
Also, plenty of prolific fiction writing IS going on, but it's being self-published, or put out via online story-sharing platforms
It’s not glamorous.
It also leaves my brain struggling to write more even if fiction is much more enriching and enjoyable.
I had one in Feb. April I’ve another for a possible buyer so more likely to result in a sale than some of my other fiction.
So looking forward to April, very much.
But weekends…I often have to make up work hours I spent parenting.
I’ve given you rain,
Looks like you’re not happy
‘Less I open a vein…
.........
(Although if I’m forgetting any appearances, do remind me. And omg, autocorrect, stop changing “do” to “so,” I know what I’m saying.)
#ModernProblems
He's obviously never heard of them
Publisher: "We Pass but go ahead if you like. Are you on tiktok yet?"
But hey, if it gets covered on a few podcasts maybe Amazon will want to option it for a limited series or something.
Me now: ...WHY ARE THEY MAKING MORE THAN YOU CAN GET FROM A FUCKING CONTEST YOU HAVE TO PAY TO ENTER IN THIS DAY AND AGE
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Covid changed that, but they're in catch-up mode on metabolic illness, and it won't give most of us back our lost books. :(
Or if it's bad how do we avoid it? Or at what point does capitalism murder itself?
"If your not Learning your Not Earning"
My friend, I just want to collapse when I'm not at work
I tried to educate them, but again, they *insisted* that I, a working writer, didn't know my own industry, so off to the block bin they went.
And now, short work still gets between 2¢ and $2 a word (the latter is rare).
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2022/
Like objectively the economy is doing extremely well and not just for the rich. Inequality is down, unemployment is down, inflation is down, labor force participation is up
For a nuanced look on the subject. Muting this thread
Now the paper's a shadow of its old self and the building is a hotel. 😭
also allows any person making such a claim to respond to someone saying "but Author B has written XX books" that "Author B isn't a 'major' writer" so therefore
Trad pub currently favour celebrity names, they don't nurture new talent anymore cos celeb names are a safer bet - and who cares if they can write 🫠
Absolutely. It's a hellscape.
Then I see this.
Not to mention they'd rather take work that can be made into a shitty cash grab movie that they own rights for
If you think there aren't, it's because you aren't bothering to look anywhere past corporate publishers and chain bookstores.
I can pump out a song in under a week, but its still alot of work, thats like 3 days of working for sometimes 12 hours a day
Always appreciate your favorite artists, people dont realize how much work it takes to make good music.
That sounds insane
I tryed to do one song a month once for a full year and couldn't manage it(this was closer to when i started producing) i cant imagine how stressful that must have been
Its alot
It's not a job. It's a hobby.
Maybe I should write another book.
The rest of us have demanding day jobs. We're still doing the work, but it doesn't pay.
KSR though has written over 20 books