Writerland, Chapter 16: Can There Be Joy Without an Audience or Paycheck?

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

I cannot write about the joy of writing without talking about publishing. Meaning, being published and being paid for having your work published. It is all well and good to write, to take pleasure in the work. But it is hard to feel joy unless your work is seen, and you are compensated. This sentiment is neither original nor new. As Samuel Johnson so famously put it centuries ago, No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Dr. Johnson, bless him, wrote this in the 1700s when the model for publishing was built not on the market but on a system of patronage, wherein writers found patrons to support their work. Interestingly, patrons were not necessarily people of great wealth. Often, they were of more modest means, which would suggest that long before Kickstarter and GoFundMe, there was a tradition of citizens taking it upon themselves to support creative souls, without necessarily getting a T-shirt or coffee mug in return.

In the 19th century this system of patronage gave way to publishing as we have assumed it always was: a market, driven by all the forces that shape markets, and which, from a certain political perspective, took full advantage of the labors of those whom the market was most dependent upon: the writers.

In return for a share of the profits, or anticipated profits – later to become known as the advance against royalties – the writer would hand over his or her manuscript to a publisher who would print, bind, and sell it, the latter incentivized by the desire to recoup the investment the publisher had made, and the hope, fingers crossed, of turning a profit.

So it went for next 200 years.

Then came the internet, which unleashed the great, unstoppable tidal wave known euphemistically as disruption. Disruption has been so much a part of our lives for what feels like so long – like since 2003! – that it is easy to understate its power, and how it changed life for so many, writers and publishers among them. Perhaps the most fitting analog to the Age of Disruption is the final days of the Age of the Dinosaurs, wherein, according to one widely held theory, a great meteor hit the earth and plunged the world into a darkness from which the dinosaurs would never emerge.

Similarly, the meteor-like force of disruption wreaked its greatest havoc on those very enterprises that prided themselves on their history, their lore, their way of doing things, their Legacy. It is a truth too slowly appreciated that the forces of disruption are felt most acutely by those very enteprises that were doing just fine right up until the moment disruption hit. Think T-Rex. The T-Rex did not make it. The little animals it snacked on did. Like startups.

Publishing has been disrupted but, I’d argue, not with the clear before/after divide seen, say, in daily journalism, where once proud newspapers are either no more, or so profoundly reduced as to be pale approximations of their once thick, ad-filled selves. Even as those news organizations have been upended, new ventures have emerged, smaller, quicker, digitally-oriented, unencumbered by the ways of the past.

The disruption of publishing too has happened differently, and not always to the benefit of all those writers who, since the days of Homer, have mattered most because they produce the goods. We now live and work in a world where anyone can be a published author tomorrow – thanks to the bane of every publisher’s existence: Amazon. And if not a book, a Medium page. These tools, created and refined and made widely and easily useable, cost little if anything to use. No need to cover the cost of paper and ink. Amazon will take a cut of your sales. Which is just what publishers have always done.

So all is good, yes?

Kinda.

In the Analog Era (which predates the Digital Era) writers needed publishers because how else could their pages become a book or an article? Publishers got the book to the bookstores. Magazines included stories between their covers. And writers fortunate enough to find a publisher to accept and publish their work were compensated. The bar may have been high and left many talented souls on the outside looking in, but at least you could make a buck.

But now, because there is, in effect, no bar, it is possible to be a published writer. Though not necessarily a compensated one.

Too many of those new, sparky, digital-only publications offered writers the most pernicious of all choices: yes, we will publish your work. We just won’t pay you for it. This is akin to treating writers like indentured servants. And yet the desire, the need to be published proved too powerful. You could tell yourself that even though you were not being paid in currency, you were being compensated with social and professional capital. And if you refused, if you said, I am a professional and demand payment for my labors, that publication would smile and say, sure, we get it, best of luck to you. And then find someone else who’d do the work gratis.

This is not to suggest that publishers were a happy lot. Far from it. Where once publishing was a place that fancied itself populated by sagacious, creative risk takers – find me the next…Thomas Wolfe, goddammit – that illusion was slowly and inexorably undermined by one of the consequences of disruption: consolidation.

There are now for all intents and purposes exactly five major publishing houses in New York. Each has acquired any number of formerly smaller, independent houses. The result is an industry where fear is common, where risk of acquiring the wrong title – meaning, it won’t be a big seller – is rampant. The paradox of publishing is that each acquisition is preceded by what is known as a P&L, or profit and loss report, wherein a publisher will anticipate how much it stands to make on what is, in essence, a product that does not yet exist. So absent clairvoyance, a publisher will factor in how other books on the same subject sold, and if the author has been published before, how well his or her books sold. Poor sales can mean a failing grade on the imaginary author report card. And if the book did not sell, it is always the author’s fault.

Which brings us to now.

There is a terrific essay in the March/April issue of Current Affairs in which Yasmin Nair dissects the uproar that greeted the publication of “American Dirt”– the novel whose author that came under assault over the question of her standing to write about the life of a Mexican immigrant – that turns that controversy into an illuminating look at publishing. Nair argues that simply seeing new leadership in the industry will not change the fundamental way publishing works: that the system, built on a market, and exploiting its most valuable yet vulnerable workers does not change, and so needs to be re-imagined.

She offers what I thought was a great idea: instead of paying writers on the projection of how the market will treat their work, instead pay each writer a flat fee, the way magazines do. Yes, you’d be giving up on royalties. But I can tell you I know a lot of writers, respected and well-compensated writers, and I have seldom if ever heard them say the words “royalty” and “check” together. Generally, your advance is your fee. And if you are thinking, what happens if my book becomes a best-seller? Consider the odds, and consider, too, that in return for a flat fee you will not be measured on the strength of sales that in fact you are generally powerless to do much about.

It is nice to envision a world where instead of one author earning, say, a $250,000 advance, ten writers could each be paid $25,000. That’s ten books, each with the potential for its own, niche audience that a wise and imaginative publisher can identify and target – not a vast, amorphous audience that might, if the publisher is lucky, deliver all that now matters: a best seller.

I love Yasmin Nair’s idea because it seems so reasonable, so fair. So respectful of writers, as well as readers. It imagines a world in which publishers are less reactive gate-keepers and more intermediaries between writers and readers: a world of readers finding joy in the work of writers who are, by virtue of being treated fairly and honorably, free, or freer to find joy in their work.

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