Writing and money: why you have better things to think about

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Writing and money: why you have better things to think about

Paul Brasington 2023
Published by Paul Brasington in Good thinking · Tuesday 30 Jul 2024
Tags: Writingpublishingbloggingcreativity
Every so often, on platforms like Medium, and elsewhere, you'll see a piece proclaiming traditional publishing models are dead, or irrelevant, and in one recent example, the especially doubtful observation that the novel was dead, because it had developed to suit a particular commercial imperative, which has been left behind by the rise of short form digital platforms.

I want to unpack some of the confusions here, and also in the process reflect on why it is that any of us are drawn to writing in the first place.

I'm old enough to remember the excitement of the early days of the Internet, and the notion that this disintermediating technology had arrived to transform how people could practise creative work. For writers this meant you no longer needed to print your book in expensive paper form, but even if you did, the publishers no longer had a monopoly of distribution. Now you could connect directly with your readers.
It’s not that none of these things matter, and I'll come on to ways in which they do, but here we are, 25 years later, and the publishers are still there, as are the agents. Many independent bookshops might have closed, but that's mostly down to the impact of Amazon, and here in the UK, the abolition of the Net Book Agreement, which allowed supermarkets to undercut the independents.

The tangible benefit
I'd argue that publishers have survived, because what they do is different from the blogosphere, or whatever we want to call the digital spaces swarming with both published and would-be authors. There is still, apparently, a thriving market for printed books, and not just among older people. eBook technology continues to evolve (I really like the reading experience on my Surface Duo 2, even if that lovely device has been discontinued) but print has some basic advantages in look and feel that so far at least have limited the inroads of eBooks and other digital texts.

There is too, the significant perception that a text put out under a publisher's imprint comes with some assurance of superior quality.

It's only half true: the gatekeeping procedures of agents, publishers and editors are notorious for excluding good and interesting work. Nor can you blame them for being driven partly (or wholly) by commercial imperatives, (it's a business after all) though the fact that most published books don't sell well suggests the procedures themselves don't work particularly well.

(On the other hand the financial viability of most commercial creative activities is sustained by blockbuster or tentpole titles, so you can hardly expect it to be different for publishing.)

Nor does quality have much bearing on success (a comfort through the ages for penniless writers, but that doesn't preclude its being true). You don't have to look very far into the blogosphere to see that the quality is, to put it mildly, varied. Traditional publishing tends to produce a higher level of basic competence, but beyond this the same variation in quality is all too evident.

Reaching an audience
With so much stuff out there, we all need some kind of guide to what we might like to read. Traditional publishing relies on reviews in mainstream media, and to a lesser extent on word of mouth. Digital platforms have algorithmic and personal recommendations. If you're reading this I guess the latter have worked, a bit, but for the most part cutting through the noise to reach an audience is as difficult on digital platforms (where the noise is much louder) as it is in the cosier world of publishers and publicists.

A few people make a good living writing books. Many more make some money from it, but have to rely on other work, perhaps related to their writing, to pay the bills. Most make no significant money at all.
Samuel Johnson famously suggested that no one but a fool writes for anything but money. It wasn't one of his wiser observations, born perhaps out of his own often pressed circumstances. It would be truer to say that only a fool writes for money, and that brings us to the heart of the matter.
For most of the history of western civilisation, and other civilisations for all I know, it has been very difficult to live on the proceeds of creative work. Those who did, in any medium, were lucky enough to find rich patrons, which can bring its own problems.

This is particularly unsurprising when it comes to writing. Printed books using Gutenberg's moveable type did not appear till around 1454. Literacy was largely the preserve of the Church and the wealthy, then began to gather pace a few hundred years later in the 18th century, and became a mass phenomenon in the 19th. Before then most people experienced words aurally (and orally).

Things changed, particularly with the rise of the novel, which as a popular form with a mass readership allowed many more writers to make money from their work. With mass literacy came mass news media, and financially successful writers became known cultural figures.

It seems likely it was at this point that it became possible to want to be "a writer", rather than say a doctor or accountant or electrician.

Who would be a writer?
If you can make money writing and not have to do something else then you'll have time to focus on your craft, so it's a reasonable ambition. But it's very likely you won't be in that happy position.

As Stephen Marché observed in his salty essay On writing and failure "It should not be surprising that it's hard to sell your feelings. What's surprising is that there are sometimes buyers."

Much of the online discussion about the future of writing revolves around the best way to reach your readers, and in particular how to monetise that contact. It's in this context that we get the debate about traditional book publishing v digital options.

If making money (then being able to comfort yourself with the thought that you're a writer) is your main concern I guess this is fair enough. But pace Dr Johnson if writing matters to you and you want to hold on to your sanity then the first thing you need to do is stop worrying about making money. If writing matters to you, it's the writing that matters, not being "a writer". You will find your way of doing it, as best you can.
Most of us will want some kind of validation, naturally, not least because self-doubt is a necessary attribute for writing well, but it’s unlikely that validation will come in the form of significant commercial success, since there’s no necessary correlation between such success and the quality of what you do.

If you can make some money on the way, that's a bonus, and in theory the proliferation of digital platforms could make it easier, helping you bypass some of the traditional gatekeepers. But digital platforms, hungry though they might be for "content" have their own gatekeepers, and their own formal constraints on how (or even what) you can write. Arguably they multiply the strain, since as Marché also argues, the default position of the writer is one of submission, and digital platforms have multiplied the amount of time you're likely to spend submitting things.

Social media presence is, for better or worse, a prerequisite for existing writers (whether they manage that presence for themselves or turn to a publicist), as well as offering a means of bypassing the traditional audience gatekeepers.

Unfortunately maintaining a social media presence can easily negate the main point of earning money through your writing, because feeding the ravenous maw of social media platforms can consume much of the time you need to write the things you actually want to write.

So what we have is far from some brave new world. But it's the world in which we have to get by.

Risk, cost, and reward
One thing that probably will eventually change under pressure from digital media is the cost/reward model used by traditional publishing. It's true that under that established model the publisher shouldered the financial risks of putting out a book, which can be the only justification for the shockingly low royalties paid on book sales. Amazon has already disrupted that norm through its direct publishing operation, though it still takes a substantial cut while taking no risk at all. Would-be writers have flooded the platform, and some particularly in popular genres like romance and fantasy, have made a lot of money.

But most will find themselves in the digital equivalent of the remainder bin, because that's also the nature of the activity, and the fundamental difficulty of matching personal ambition and reader interest.

The Amazon model then has come under fire (and there are plenty of other reasons for wanting to limit your engagement with the Amazon juggernaut). But it remains a rational question: why would you want to go through these old or new mainstream routes, if they're not going to deliver much in the way of a financial reward?

In truth, there are no short cuts. It's pretty easy to publish things on digital channels. Getting people to read your work is another matter. If you have the technical means to do it, building your own sales platform could yield the highest financial returns, but you'll still need to bring people to that site. You'll still need to build something like an effective mailing list, by whatever means. You'll need to market yourself, or find someone else to do it.

Writing and form
As for the suggestion that digital platforms have made the long book format irrelevant, again all the evidence is against this, and that’s because of the real nature of the activity.

Writing is difficult. It might appear to come from the same place as speaking, and most of us can speak coherently, but in conversation you have other resources (audible tone, gestures, a limited context). Managing these things within the blankness of a page or screen requires imagination and a highly tuned sensitivity to context, as well as craft skills.

It's why we've usually respected the work of writers, just as we respect fluency in visual art, or music.
It's why people like me have been able to earn a decent living as commercial writers, crafting other people's ideas and imperatives into a form that might promote understanding and interest; it's not something most people can do for themselves.

(AI is currently assailing that work: I discuss AI, and the ways it's changing how we understand the function of writing, in a separate companion piece: AI, writing, creativity and art.)

Creative writing comes from a different imperative, a desire through the manipulation of language to make, to share and at some level engage (these are broad terms, but can stand for my purposes here).

From the outset you'll be choosing a form in which to place your words, but the notion of literary form is always metaphorical. Although you can describe the structure of a novel or play (for instance), this notion of structure is itself metaphorical. While you might start with the idea that you're going to write a novel, or a sonnet, and that might be a helpful constraint on the way you shape your text, nothing depends on you following some kind of norm (in the way a building will fall down if you don't lay proper foundations), and when you don't you're unilaterally creating your own form. It will always help if there's some purpose behind it, but you have that freedom.

In this light, given the claim that the proliferation of digital channels has rendered a particular form (specifically the novel) obsolete, you could be forgiven for thinking more needs to be said.

The long and the short of it
It is evidently true that the novel, broadly speaking, has been the most commercially successful literary form of the last couple of hundred years. The question is whether the conditions that helped make it successful no longer apply.

The persistence of printed novels suggests otherwise, and there's no real sign of that changing.

But more than this, the notion that it's easier to make money writing short blogs than the new Great Expectations (even if it was true) assumes that the only reason anyone's writing anything is to make money.
It is true that available media have necessarily had an influence on the shape of the things a writer can feasibly do. Dickens' novels were not only published in serial form, but they were written that way too (which makes their cohesion all the more impressive).

The development of new digital media offers writers new formal possibilities. Mainstream publishing is not being replaced by digital forms, but if reading habits are changing, at least to some extent, it's up to writers to explore what can be done.

At the same time if a novel is the right form for what you want to say, then write your novel, or something similar. You may or may not be able to find a way of publishing it. That's how it's always been for writers, but the important thing is to get the work done.

The appeal of long stories has not gone away. People like “to get lost in book”. Duration gives you very different possibilities from short form work.

Just think about music. For sure a three minute pop song is likely to have wider appeal than a three movement concerto, but no one can seriously suggest that a three minute pop song offers all that anyone could really want from music. I like three minute pop songs too, and I play some as a performing musician, but where music demands more of us, it also gives more.

Ironically digital platforms have destroyed the possibility of making much more than pocket money from recorded music for all but a few musicians, but who knows what the future holds? Vinyl has already enjoyed a surprising comeback, and more recently CD sales are picking up again. There’s an enduring appeal in the physical object it seems, as well as the experience of a collection of songs curated by the musicians themselves.

The place to be
There’s a parallel scope for writers in creating beautiful physical (or even digital) formats for their words. Writers with visual skills will have an advantage in this world, though those skills can always be bought in, along with promotional (and perhaps editing) expertise. In the traditional publishing model these supplementary resources have been bundled into the publishing deal, though they are often managed badly.
Physical printing has evolved, with short runs more cost effective than they ever could be in the past, even to the point of print on demand.

Authors need to take more control, and insist on greater cost transparency and accountability. They will need the skills and knowledge to do this. I suspect that the role of publishers/agents will continue to evolve quite radically. They no longer have an effective monopoly on distribution, so that’s not where their value lies. Where they can help is getting work in front of people who might want to read it. The distribution of financial risk and reward needs to reflect these new realities.

The reading landscape is evolving before our eyes. If we’re going to find any kind of place there we need to be thoughtful about what it really looks like, which means acknowledging the continuing interaction of digital and traditional platforms. But more than this we have the opportunity to think what it could be like, and help it to become a more rewarding place (in every sense) than the landscapes shaped by Gutenberg or blogging.


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paul@brasington.co.uk    +44 7798 913129
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