A bunch of people have commented on a terminally silly and self-indulgent article in Salon (which used to be good, by the way, and iconoclastic and surprising), so I sat through the lame Flash ad and read it.
It’s about an author who is unhappy that her books aren’t stacked fifteen deep at airport bookstores (and, by entension, the covers hung on the walls of her place in the Hamptons). Here’s the miserable pittance she earned from writing:
* 1994 – $150,000
* 1997 – She doesn’t say what she got for the celebrity bio she ghostwrote, but friends put these kinds of assignments at about $50,000 – $100,000, so call it $50,000
* 1998 – $10,000
* 2002 – $80,000That’s $290,000 over 10 years – $29K/year, plus a book she thinks she could sell for $50,000, bringing her to $340,000 over 10 years or $34K/year.
In 2002, the median household income in the United States was $42,400. So by writing (assuming the lowest likely sale for the biography and that she sells the current book), she made 80% of the median household income.
Don’t know about you, but that’s pretty good. She’s doing somethng that she loves, actualizes herself, and making a decent living doing it.
But from reading the pity party she wrote for herself, you wouldn’t know it.
Why do I care, you may ask.
For two reasons, one slight and personal and one large and public.
Personally, I know and am friends with about ten people who are or aspire to be writers. I’d bitch-slap any one of them that wrote something this sullen and self-pitying, and consider myself a good friend for doing so.
Publicly, I’ve said all along that we are in a contest that will determine the future of our society. And for me, the kind of corrosive self-pity and anomie that comes with it are a far bigger risk than a bunch of frustrated mullahs with Semtex vests. Because if that attitude wins – anticipating the ‘beautiful destruction’ that is the anodyne to wallowing in negative, hopeless regard of one’s life – the mullahs just have to walk in and they’ll win.
Cripes, I think half of the SF and fantasy authors who are regular Baen Books contributors would *love* to have her “miserable” schedule.
Even millions-of-copies-sold authors like David Weber and Lois Bujold only make a couple of hundred thousand a year, IIRC, and some years they make much less. And those are Baen’s two biggest guns… heck, Lois has as many Hugo Awards as friggin’ Heinlein does, fer Gossake.
[Nods]
Chuckg is right. And the thing to remember is that compared to SF’s “Golden Age” or even prior to the 1970s even that is incredibly prosperous as the case of H. Beam Piper reminds us. But quite frankly no matter how good your situation it’s human to want more. I suppose that writing is no different from any other home business in that the price of independence is self-disipline and bouts of insecurity over whether or not you’re doing the right thing. Also in fairness to her, I’ll suppose that any businessmen would brood a little over a source of revenue that he would like but lacks…and it *can* be a temptation (In the formal and theological sense of the word! ^_^;) to share your woes with your readers partly because of a mistaken belief that material is material and partly because it’s satisfying (albeit wrong) to vent (Especially if she was offered money for the privilege of venting).
But having said all that in her possible defense I agree with Armed Liberal; if I *ever* get that whiney over a situation as good as hers I feel that it would’ve gone beyond the need for bitchslapping and I hope my friends would consider *euthenasia*! >_< The only thing I can think is that she must've really and truly been suffering from writer's block if she was that hard up for material to write about! ~_~
I guess I agree with your overall point, but you have to thrown in benefits if you want to truly compare things. Plus there’s certainly some value in having a steady stream of income. Not knowing where your next dollar is coming from or when it will arrive is very unsettling.
But, surely, isn’t there a deeper underlying problem? Are satisfaction and success solely denominated in dollars? If this is true there is truly no hope for satisfaction in any job or career that is unable to constrain the market for only these jobs have any real security.
The thing that was really notable about the article to me was, in fact, how badly written it was. It was disconnected, and didn’t bother to make the points it promised to make, preferring to assume that the reader would fill in the blanks, extrapolating a cruel and heartless industry from her personal misfortunes. Perhaps she was experimenting with a Dos Passos-esqe breaking of the traditional forms, attempting to present a pastiche of different perspectives, but in the event it just came off as precious and flat. Reading an entire book in that style would make my head deflate with an extended, quiet farting noise. I mean, I get it, publishing sucks and is in desperate trouble, but damn, she could have lit a brighter fire than this one to call in the rescue planes.
However, I must admit upon review that using the word “was” 4 times in the first 20 words of my post does not do much to establish my bona fides as a writing critic.
Ahem.
Ya know, should I ever in life get that whiny about where I’m published, feel free to spank me before and after bitch-slapping me…
Exactly!!! As a published composer and as someone who gets paid for doing what I love, I can’t agree more. Some balance is in order for people like this; we’re blessed to do what we love *and* have someone actually send us checks for it. I don’t care if the check is for $1.32 or for $13,200… some perspective is required.
Personally, I despise this attitude, and run into it more often than I’d like. And I ain’t making 80% of the median from music.. but you will never hear me complain. Quite the contrary – it is a constant delight to me, and will always be so.
That author needs some perspective. Perhaps she should work at a horrid job for a little while.
After a stint that involved cleaning public restrooms and picking up trash at the state beach, I absolutely revel in my job as a magazine editor. Someone pays me to play with words and pictures? Wheeee!
Ah, acceptably sharp and biting. You missed the point at the end when she really gets weepy claiming that a book took her a full three years to write. This is where I’d bitch-slap her into a low earth orbit. She’d have you believe that for three years she was slogging at it 40 hours a week. Pure bullshit.
As you well know, there’s a great deal…a very great deal… of just fucking around with writers. Lots of the worst of them put in two hours a day at midnight and wonder why they’re blocked. They’re not blocked. They’re just lazy and disorganized.
I’ll be that if you scraped the barnacles of her neurotic soul and looked at her “work” day by day, you’d see there was about six months of real work in the book and two and a half years of just fucking around.
The real money game is to try and figure out how much this moron actually worked at the task and divide those hours by the money earned. Far above minimum wage, you can be sure.