As I traverse between these two inevitable points on a writer's journey, I find myself asking: why are there SO many people making a living off of writers, rather than writing itself? My facebook feed is packed like a post-brexit British slaughterhouse with adverts for courses which promise to help you become a published author, or improve your skills overnight, and my inbox is also jammed with emails from the select few I have been hooked into further exploration, and they vary from downright scammers (Voyage media) to providing a lot of useful info without spending any money (the Dream Engine), although they of course will throw everything they can at me to make a sale (they havent). If you have the cash, finding professional editors is as easy as finding a chicken shop on an east London high street. Ive worked with two and they were both great. I could have chosen any one of thousands with good references and credentials. Wouldnt these people be making money by writing, rather than selling dreams or services to writers? Surely these editors would much rather be writing their own story than editing someone elses? If X was such a fountain of knowledge, wouldnt they be too busy penning their next best seller or Hollywood script rather than hassling me with their LOW LOW PRICE ONE TIME OFFER TODAY ONLY!! I read the average wage for a full time writer in the UK is £12000. Thats less than £33 a day! If I didn't already have a reasonably well-paying, flexible job I could walk into employment tomorrow in a restaurant as which pays that in 2 hours, or pour pints for 3 hours a day. We all write for different reasons, but knowing the stark truth, what keeps the dream of being a career author alive? To make it in self-publishing requires more skill in marketing than anything else, but SOME people do make a living. Hybrid looks interesting but avoiding the vanity scammers is vital and you still need to be ace at marketing. Sloth-like Trad publishing is can take 2 years from finished draft to launch and you buy your bingo card with the rest just to get on the starter's grid. Indie press is comparatively spritely but with far less chance of grossing dollar number 1 on top of any meagre advance. My naive plan was to work for the next 4-5 years and build my skill and brand with a view to making the leap, but now I see that as more lottery ticket than meal ticket. My revised plan is to work my ass off, hopefully cash out of my business in 4 years, and have enough in the bank to at least spend the next 5 years full time writing with a small warchest to throw at it (them editors/marketing gurus/PR firms etc aint cheap). But I'll be fifty at the end of that! I guess I'd love to know what keeps that inner flame burning inside you. Is it pig-headed obstinence and blindness to the facts? Youthful optimism? Unshakeable self-belief? An unbeatable game-plan? In the words of the man himself, are we all "....a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Short answer, there's much more money to made off of writing than the writing itself. Unless you write bestsellers and option them for movie rights, there's very little money to be made. But because so many writers think they can make money--that their shit is a bestseller waiting to happen--they're willing to pay editors, coaches, etc. You make a decent living as an editor, but it's nearly impossible to do it as a writer. Of all the traditionally published writers I've met on this forum and on the outside, not a one of them has ever been in a position to quit their day job. Not even close. Most of them actually laugh when I ask. Apparently $10K is a good year and $20K is a legendary year. That's nothing to sneeze at, but it's still below the poverty line.
If what you're looking for is money then the last thing you should be aiming at is being an artist of any kind. A good artist is a marketable commodity, off of which many others make money before he or she gets any. Look at for instance music. There are agents, people running venues, ticket sellers, advertisers etc, and the last person to make anything is the artist. You enter the arts not to make a living but for love of the art. If your focus is on making money you'd be much better off to learn a trade or something.
For me, it's that so long as I play it safe and don't make the leap before having a large enough writing income, it really doesn't matter if I never 'make it' as a full-time career author. Worst-case scenario, I get my books out there and indulge in a hobby I'm passionate about instead of spending all my spare time browsing Netflix. As a fairly likely and reasonable scenario, I never make enough to quit my day job, but do get a nice additional side-hustle going and am able to retire early and focus my later years on essentially writing full time. And of course, best-case scenario, have a runaway bestseller and get to live the dream. Even the worst-case scenario isn't a tragedy, so why not aim for the stars?
Whereas I know lots of people who are making a living at it but they are treating it like a business, not like "I have to be motivated to write!" I know one who quit his day job as a Silicon Valley software engineer to write full time and he brings in $300k a year consistently but he works his butt off to do it. It can be done but it's the exception, not the rule and it takes a special kind of person who can get the work done through thick and thin.
It's even worse isn't it? Most of the books that are published shouldn't be. Go round Waterstones flicking through random pages of random books on any shelf outside the classics (and even inside if you like) - it's all garbage. It only works because enough readers have been damaged by state education. It's nearly all loss-making garbage. Bookshops and publishers aren't even in the business of selling books - their executive boards are incentivised to look like they're positioned to sell some books again in future if literacy rises. Even Amazon probably would have stayed loss-making on an epic scale if it only sold books. IMO the big problem with writing is that everyone thinks they can do it. They don't realize how vast is the gulf between their goodreads review of Huckleberry Finn and those words Mark Twain wrote. Editing feeds this: it combs over the mundane tips of divine icebergs. In the process, it gatekeeps the authors in print to being the privileged graduates of creative-writing courses. These can be relied on to be descended from loyal members of the elite, and to only ever write the currently-sanctioned monomyth: "how the one-legged Cambodian revolutionary transitioned into being a tamourinist in the Noh theatre". Three-act structure - check. Inciting incident - check. Patronizing characterisations - check. Limited vocabulary - check. But there's oodles of money in writing-as-content-creation. I've never made money any other way. Just don't bother with books. Money isn't even the reason not to bother with books. The reason not to write books is they're a decadent pasttime that weighs down the middle and working classes with hunks of inert timber that fill up whole rooms and never pay rent. And they contribute to society's illusion-of-literacy. If we really cared about writing, we'd go round in vans in the night lobotomizing the book-buying public - whose malignant and vestigial temporal cortices not only damage literature, but all other forms of public discourse as well.
Of course, entering any such creative endeavour for money alone is at best a losing game, at worst idiotic. However, is it not reasonable to expect, that if one hones one's skills over a period of decades, that one could earn enough money to survive. Your comparison of the music industry is fair but simplistic. I was in bands myself for a long time, Ive been a promoter and I own a music venue ( as sure fire a way to lose money now as anything). In recent pre corona times at least, for bands with a reasonable reputation, live shows paid pretty well. It is possible with some hard work and talent to eek out a living, although the career as a saleable artist might be very short. I never made a living doing it, and learned a trade, which bored me silly and now I earn a living doing something which is based on joint passions of mine (booze and arcade games) but still a dayjob which I'd rather enschew for writing one day. Looking at is as a hobby is certainly one way, and I expect that's what most of us do, but to really mine the depths one must make a leap to full time at some point. Looks like that is a leap into surefire poverty. If we take that as near-certain fact, then the question becomes how and why do we keep going? Put it another way, if you knew 100% you would never make it as a writer, would you keep doing it?
IMO commercial success in one's lifetime is an almost perfect indicator that one hasn't written a very good book. It's easy to envisage Literature improving if authors were always buried alive in a stone sarcophagus immediately after submitting their manuscripts. And perhaps if it's even still a conscious decision: to write or not, Literature-in-itself doesn't have sufficient hold over the person for them to call themselves a writer.
Well what do you expect, I made a 5-second investment of thought into a comment on a message board, not a well-researched and documented dissertation. Only if it's your main or only source of income. Again, my answer is the same. Do it for love of the art. If you don't love the writing itself, then why do it at all? There are many things that take a lot less time and effort to get good enough at, and where you'll make a lot more money. Many of them allow enough free time (such as seasonal work for instance) to write if you want to do that. But I still maintain that writing is not something to do for the money or even primarily for the money. If you approach it that way, then yes, you'll end up jaded.
The only way to be 100% sure you'll "never make it as a writer" is to not write. I write because I like to write. I've liked writing ever since I wrote my first three or four sentence story sixty years ago. It entertains me, challenges me, and teaches me things I'd never learn any other way. Sometimes when one's paradigms mark one's life as a failure, one needs to rethink the paradigms. Writing is a handy skill to develop, and not making a living as a novelist or true crime writer is not indicative of "not making it as a writer." I've taught writing classes, edited manuscripts for other people, and produced everything from resumes to cover letters for folks who can't write well enough to efficiently sell their professional skills. I did legal research and writing. I proved to myself that I could make a living freelancing, but I disliked the constant hustle and search for new angles and stories calculated to first attract attention and only secondly to inform and educate. My choice was to get a couple of part time day jobs (both involving writing, but not exclusively) and write whatever I want to write on the side. Have I made it as a writer? I think so, but I'd like to take it further, so- I keep writing.
Creating is a compulsion. I have stories inside me that want to come out and won't leave me in peace. That's why I dedicate a part of my time to writing.
It's the fact that nothing else makes me feel as good as when I'm developing a world, or a good slice of one, populated with characters and a good ripping story. Drawing and painting come close, but a painting is just a snapshot of one part of the world with a few characters in the midst of a moment of action, it just doesn't give me the same deep sense of immersion and creation that conjuring a story from pure imagination does. When I go long periods of time without using my brain and my soul to create this complex of life and drama I begin to feel dull and dead, as if life is nothing but bills and taxes and waking up and sleeping and watching movies or websurfing to try to defeat the boredom. It's when I'm deeply engaged in the months-long (or longer) processes of creation that I feel profoundly alive. I don't care if I earn money from it, in fact to do that usually means you lose a lot of creative freedom and must meet the needs of publishers, editors, the reading public etc. I went through that when I was making airbrushed T-shirts. I thought it would be cool to take something I enjoyed doing (though not nearly as much as actual creation, I just copied existing pictures onto shirts) and make some money from it. But I quickly learned nobody wanted pictures that I thought were exciting or fun, they just wanted silly message shirts, and many of them wanted to just give me a vague list of things and for me to design an image assembling them all together. That isn't fun at all and is a lot more work than copying an existing picture, but of course they didn't want to pay extra for me doing the job of a designer. I know it's far from a perfect analogue for writing to existing markets, but I did try to turn something I enjoyed doing into a moneymaking venture, which worked, but it rapidly became something I couldn't stand doing. And I've heard many people say the same thing essentially happened to them. I write for the joy of writing, which stirs me deeply like nothing else can. And I refuse to turn it over to marketers and have it changed into something I no longer enjoy. The money can be made by other means, doing something that doesn't destroy my soul. But maybe your connection to writing is different from mine. For some maybe it's just like any job, I don't know.
There was a world that did not exist until I made it inside my head. I've tried to find a similar world already in existence, but could not. So for me, it's about realising the world I want to immerse myself in, a universe of my own making. The thought that others may enjoy reading and learning about that world is an added bonus, but others enjoying it is not a requirement. If I make bank and become successful because of that world, then that is yet another bonus, not a requirement. Do I envision success? Of course, I often do, and sure that helps to spur me on. Do I equally forecast failure? Yes, but not as often as I see success. And if I were realistic? Bah! Humbug! Few writers can be realistic about their writing. We embed our soul and spirit into our works, sometimes. I often consider my work more important than my life. It is my legacy... if I ever manage to finish it... I see it as something very important as well, since I will likely not be able to have a child of my own. I want to leave something behind, a flicker of light that say: Here I was! Something to make me pretend I was relevant to the world.
Lots of interesting thoughts on this. I'm glad to have a job I like that pays more than I'd ever expect to make from writing, which currently stands at zero euros. I've always existed inside my head and writing, for me, is self-expression. And that's enough. It also occurred to me that a thousand years from now, historians and archaeologists will try to work us out. Who knows what records will survive, but we should try hard and encourage each other. We could have Cicero in our midst.
Lol, Cicero??!! Hardly! Maybe more like Empedocles Impunious. Never heard of him? Yeah, there's a reason for that...
That's exactly why I started and what keeps me going. If I don't give my creativity an outlet, I'll go insane. I am constantly coming up with new ideas and I'll never get all of the books written that I know about now, much less all of the new ones I add.
When I was younger, I actually believed that people who are great at what they do will eventually get the recognition and compensation that they deserve. Not just in the arts, but at work in general as well. It is strange how so many people can be intelligent and yet so naïve at the same time. Success in life isn't determined by who is best, or who works the hardest. It's about who you know, and how proficient you are at deceiving/persuading other people. It helps if you are a sociopath. Not so easy for people who are burdened with principles. After finishing my first novel this year and then researching the publishing industry to find out how to sell it.. well. Any expectations I might have had disappeared pretty quickly. Writing something that is worth $10K a year seems to be as commonplace as having a good night at the casino. Or maybe less so. Right now I am purely motivated by the fact that I am actually trying. I am writing! Not everyone who wants to be a writer actually writes! So good for all of us who are at least giving it a go, eh?
So far we seem to have missed ego. I wish you wouldn't sit on the fence like that. Less of these pleasant, milquetoast platitudes!
Lots of negativity here, folks. Have you considered that maybe you guys simply—wait for it—suck at writing? Just kidding, of course. If anything, reading this thread motivated me to write and publish a legendary best-seller even more.
There's plenty of shitty writers who have made millions. Quality isn't always all that important. It's difficult to find any sort of success at writing mostly because there are just so many writers. Everyone has a computer with a word processor these days, and it's very simple to submit online. If we were back in the typewriter and physical submissions era, I reckon a good chunk of the writers today wouldn't bother with all the trouble.
It's a bit like the barbed wire they put on the Golden Gate Bridge to reduce the suicide rate. The decades of trouble - of learning an entire language and finding anything new to say with it - doesn't deter anyone in the slightest, but - dear god - changing a ribbon!
