Art doesn't pay. Capitalism can't exploit it as much as manual labor so there's no money in it, unfortunately. On top of that, we have to constantly deal with people demeaning artists as useless and trying to bury us in favor of celebrities.
This article has some elements of truth, but skips over some important stuff. In particular, the odds of making a living writing books when on salary, writing the books for a big company or celebrities etc, are vastly higher than just writing your own books. You don't have to beat insane odds if someone hires you for 70k/year to write books...you simply make that 70k/year. It's the same as e.g. people working in the video game industry. The odds of earning a middle class income as an Indie Game developer are super bad, but there are many thousands of people working salaried jobs in the mainstream AAA game industry who are definitely 'making a living'.
Also, this is nothing new. There is a reason 'starving artist' is a common term. For centuries, a lot of the most well known people in all creative fields were people who already had money when they started e.g. nobility, and some of those people were able to become famous, largely because they didn't have financial pressures that the vast majority of people had.
Why are people focusing on the numerical comparison between writers and billionaires? Whatever, it doesn't really matter.
The point of the article is that writers and authors are seemingly less valued than they ever have been. One reason for this is probably the change in media consumption habits which renders writers mere employees and underlings in the film and television industries (along with everywhere else). People no longer read books, which are the main format by which writers can become self-employed and self sufficient.
As always, it comes back to the homogenizing aspect of capitalism which tends to absorb everything into an interconnected web of economic dependencies. Instead of small businesses, we have overarching retail behemoths like Walmart and Amazon. Similarly, instead of a multitude of independent writers and authors expressing their own thoughts in books, they are compelled to work in teams to construct artificial, corporatized narratives due to economic necessity, yielding film franchises and television series along with all of their advertising and merchandising income.
Yeah. I mean the article could be right or wrong, although it seems to me at first glance to be plausible + relevant. But the number of people coming out to just purely jeer at the conclusions like "FUK U THERES PLENTY OF WRITERS THIS DUDE IS RONG, CITATION: MY DICK" -- no real attempt to disagree with anything he's saying other than that they don't like it -- is distressing to me.
Eh it's fine, everyone on the internet likes to take the opportunity to correct an argument that they think is wrong, even if just on a technicality. I don't think the author of this piece needed to focus so much on the numerical comparison with billionaires either. If anything, they could have focused more on the historical compensation of writers to make a more compelling argument. Maybe try to find book sales and compensation from the past few centuries and see how they compare.
Yeah, I get that, I think that's probably more why it's provoking resistance; he phrased it deliberately provocatively and wound up excluding some avenues that still produce books and people making a living (like working as an academic / teacher and also doing writing). It just kinda irritated me like, hey, I can draw a really strong and surprising conclusion from this data, and people's reaction "that conclusion is surprising" -> "therefore is wrong" -> "no need to look further, I figured it out for you and corrected you, that was easy next pls"
Side note, why are substack posts shared consistently, when it looks basically to be blogspam? If I was linking to “billionaire vs books metrics” or whatever, and posted it from blogspot, or tumblr, or even a facebook post, itll be rightly shit on.
But on a substack? Its discussed like it wasnt written by random internet person instead of a valid source
I am sure there are many more people who are writing books than who are billionaires. His point was, how many are making a living at it as their primary career.
Did you read his breakdown? He made a pretty compelling case that that number is about 500.
Dany Laferrière, working writer who lives in Miami
Jean-Luc Marion, retired professor
Andreï Makine, working writer
Christian Jambet, philosopher, IDK what he does to pay the bills but his last published work was an essay in 2016
It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don't know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn't an argument that it isn't hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.
Again: The argument is not that writers don't exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don't know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance -- maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play -- but regardless of that if you didn't like that guy's fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.
You're really getting out of your way to miss my point. The number of professional writers is some orders of magnitude bigger than the number of billionaires, so much so that taking some arbitrary subset of writers of approximately the same size is easily done.
Another counter example (because I'm really nice like that): some contemporary French writers, just from memory:
Annie Ernaux
JMG Le Clezio
Amélie Nothomb
Michel Houellebecq
Erik Orsenna
Virginie Despentes
Patrick Modiano
Christine Angot
Jean Echenoz
Sylvain Tesson
Marie Ndiaye
Virginie Grimaldi
Marc Levy
Alain Finkielkraut
Michel Onfray
Mélissa da Costa
Andrei Making
François Cheng
JC Rufin
Yes I know, it's not 43, but I could easily go to my local bookshop and find 180 more, and again 43 billionaires is a lot for 70 million inhabitants. In any case the number of 500 writers in the article is laughable.
But that's not the main point. What gets on my nerves is that the author of the article is cherry picking facts to entertain an idea. I could deliberately try something like "but you know there are more astronauts than true painters" and refute everything opposed to this with No true Scotsman fallacies.
The article proves absolutely nothing and the author makes a mess of logical thinking, while managing to blur what the wider perspective is supposed to be.
How many of those people are making more than $50k per year at it though?
It’s not “no true Scotsman” if there’s a defined dollar value that makes someone, so to speak, a Scotsman. I mean for all I know you are right and there are plenty who are supporting themselves doing it- but the point is not that writers don’t exist; it is that the number of them who are making a living without some other means of support is way smaller than it should be.
It kind of gets into the napkin math. But it's sort of silly.
If most writers can spend the first third of their career focusing on journalism or some type of corporate writing, and then the middle third on publishing novels or whatever, and then the last third teaching, or maybe just riding the fame of the one book that got turned into a movie... Yeah I think trying to be a writer sounds easier than becoming a billionaire.