Chapter 140: The Day Job Conundrum
There is arguably no more vexing paradox confronting nonfiction writers today than this: there are more ways to be published and discovered than ever before, and fewer ways to get paid to write.
The digital transformation has made it possible to be a published author in a matter of days, to start a publication in a matter of hours, to publish new work in a matter of minutes. But the book, which costs virtually nothing to publish, may not sell. The publication may not find an audience. And the platform may not pay.
In the before times – when publication depended on paper, ink and the fusing of the two between covers – business models made the nonfiction writing life financially viable.
You could write for a living at a newspaper, without necessarily feeling any gratitude to all those people who bought the classified ads that made the paper spectacularly profitable. (Yes, spectacularly, like 18 percent profit margins. Really). You could build a freelance life pitching and selling to magazines fat with display ads and subscriptions. And if you were just breaking in and trying to make your name, those same magazines were always churning through fact checkers, which meant that after, say, 40 hours a week at $20+ an hour, you covered your room and board and had time to write.
Ah, what a time to have been alive, when you could spend a career writing for daily newspapers with no fear of ever getting laid off. When if you had a regular gig at a glossy magazine your biggest complaint was not having enough time to write meaningful stories because the editors were forever badgering you to get on a plane and fly across the country to sit in a hotel room and interview another celebrity for a profile you kind of had to write. Tell me more about your childhood, Tom/Julia/Tom…To say nothing of the books, and those handsome advances that once seemed as accessible to writers as sitcoms did for everyone with a halfway funny standup routine.
That world, if not gone, is vastly diminished and the economic models that supported the careers of so many nonfiction writers (yes, primarily but not exclusively working journalists) has been evaporating with it. Newspapers are shrinking and dying. Magazines are vanishing; there was once a magazine store near my office; the owner cleared out the magazines and now does a brisk business selling children’s shoes. And those book advances – consolidation had rendered publishing into a business where risk is anathema.
And yet, opportunities abound.
Fiction writers have long understood that unlike their counterparts in nonfiction they could not send in a pitch for a short story or novel. They had to write the damn things and hope to sell them. It was taken as an article of faith that most every young fiction writer had to endure endless rejection by literary reviews that no one ever read. Nonfiction writers could count on a payday, even if that came with having to trim their creative sails and pitch a story for a particular publication with a particular approach and particular voice – is this an Esquire story, or a Vogue story?
But the gap between those who write fiction and nonfiction has narrowed. For fiction writers, too, new publications appear everywhere seemingly every day – much like popup enterprises that solicit submissions, cull for the best ones, and crowd source for funding to pay the writers and publish.
Fiction writers always knew they needed a day job. If it was “writing adjacent” all the better. And if not, such was the price of doing what you loved.
I have worked at newspapers and at a magazine. I understood the limits of what those jobs could offer – a paycheck and an outlet – and recognized, as many of my colleagues did, that if I wanted to write what I wanted to write I’d have to do so at night and on weekends. The job made it possible. I worked as a freelancer, and knew what it was like having to badger accounting about my check, because that check covered the rent.
But I worry about my students. I worry about what they will find the day after graduation when, after being encouraged to go out and conquer the world, they discover that while opportunities exist – for the most part they get jobs or internships – they are not as plentiful as they were a generation ago.
And yet they long to be reporters and writers; they are just as passionate and committed as my students of thirty years ago. They have stories they are bursting to tell. The good news is they can tell them. The bad news is that those stories may not pay the bills.
I want to help them – and not only them. I very much want to help create a new landscape for nonfiction writers, one that takes advantage of the great possibilities the digital transformation has created but addresses the gap between publication and paycheck.
I’d like to be able to offer my students useful advice. And I'd like to assist the subscribers to this newsletter who are writers, or know writers, so they can begin seeing the financial side of their careers in new and, I hope, exciting ways.
So, to start, I’d like to ask for your help.
I’ve attached a survey.
Two questions. A minute, two at the most, of your time.
-How you support yourself as a writer? – it’s multiple choice.
-And it asks, if you’d like, to say what your ideal day job would be?
I’ll share the results next week.
I’m hoping this can be the beginning of an ongoing conversation here – with the newsletter being a repository for advice, suggestions, and help.
Many thanks.
* * *
Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.