Making a living as a writer in 2023 is so weird. Your choices are:
* nepo baby staff writer for legacy media fawning over billionaires and peddling fascism
* writing 3 email newsletters a week and making the most obscure one subscriber only
* organizing a community of your fans and charging for access to it
* starting your own publishing business and asking fans to pay you up front to write the next book
All of these ways of making a living writing are morally fine except for the first.
My complaint as a reader is that they all involve major skill sets in addition to writing book-length materials, severely limiting the people who can make a living writing and therefore the things available for me to read.
In the before times, the skills you needed to write were: writing the thing people want to read, pitching the thing to publishers, chasing invoices if you're not on staff, and optionally networking/schmoozing.
This still eliminated a number of good writers from making a living writing, but when you compare it to today, when you need social media expertise, community management, event planning, marketing, and speaking skills, and/or the skills to hire and manage people to do them...
And on top of that writers making a living at writing have to deal with massive exposure to unhealthy parasocial relationships at the level usually only sought out by live performers like actors and musicians.
When you add all that together... not only are there very few people who can write, run a business, perform, manage a community, and tolerate parasocial relationships, but most of those people have the option to get paid six figures as a manager or executive.
Hey, someone wrote a whole article about the inescapability of self-promotion and marketing skills for artists today:
Real problem. Good article. Thanks so much for sharing this.
@vaurora HEAR FRIGGIN' HEAR.
If I'da wanted to do advertising and marketing all the livelong day, I'da stayed in my advertising/marketing job, WHICH I HATED AND SUCKED AT.
@vaurora * use Smashwords as your publisher and roll around on your piles of dollar coins* :)
*[/jk]
@vaurora all creative pursuits are a lottery in terms of being paid. Try spending years building a game and then getting paid next to nothing (been there, done that). How many bands ever make money? And of course many great artists starved to death, unappreciated in their own lifetimes. The world today is, comparatively, a godsend. The trick is to have a source of income that doesn’t destroy your soul.
Anthony Trollope worked for the post office.
@vaurora yup I'm in option 5 and it means I'm dependent on someone else to do things or I do it myself, badly.
(Layout, I'm talking about layout.)
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