“I really believe that most writers in America have taken on this idea that we’re never going to get paid–and so we accept so little for what we do, when what we do is so valuable. And it’s wanted.” —Ali Liebegott
I tell myself I will be a “real writer” when I receive $1.00 for my writing. In exchange for time and effort and vulnerability, I want more than self-satisfaction; I want money. I want to stop comparing Walgreens’ brand prices with name brand prices.
In my Interview with Elaine Showalter, I asked her how to be a “real writer”:
Rumpus: In her review of Jury of Her Peers, Sarah Churchwell (who studied with you at Princeton) said you gave her “the single most influential piece of professional advice [she’s] ever received: ‘Write to get paid.’” Writing for money seems inconceivable to me; your advice encourages me, but most magazines and the Internet deflate me. If more writers are writing a) disposable content and b) for free, how can writers find valuable work that pays?
Showalter: “I told Sarah Churchwell (and all my graduate students), ‘Learn to write so well that you can be paid for it, rather than so badly that someone has to be paid to read your work.’ Many graduate students in English deliberately make their writing so obscure and pedantic that it is unreadable. But actually getting paid as a freelance journalist demands hard work and luck, as you know, and these days the market is tighter than ever.”
Money’s not everything; it often forces the creator to compromise with detached, if not stupid, people and make concessions about a piece of work that feels equal to, if not greater than, a child. David Lynch earned a lot of money making Dune, but it wasn’t worth it to him because he didn’t have control of his product. He said of the experience: “I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut.”
I am not the first to suggest that the intersection of writing, money, and having final cut is self-publishing. But my hope is to be among the first who ceaselessly and shamelessly promote the trend.
I self-published If Not for Everything Else as an experiment in making money for what I like to do everyday. Also, no one would publish it. Maybe no one thinks it is good. Or maybe some people will connect with it. Either way, I don’t want to live in a world where my writing can’t get out there because no one puts it out there. I will put it out there.
Here’s what I did:
– I bought a domain name on GoDaddy.com. (The thinking here is to give the story its own space; like a book that is a single entity, so is my URL.)
– I paid extra for hosting.
– I purchased a website builder, even though most Macs come with iWeb and sites like WordPress and Tumblr are free.
– I received free editorial services from people who take love over money. I’ll never be able to repay Julie Greicius for what she gave me in hours and skill. Unless I become super famous.
– I took my friend Ilyse Magy, a talented designer, out to sushi and paid her pittance for original illustrations. (I believe text should always have an aesthetic.)
– I put a commanding PayPal button on the front page that says “Donate.”
– I asked people to donate.
– No really, donate.
– I plan to do everything I can to promote the site (like what I’m doing now). While I hope a few people never read it, I hope everyone else does.
This wasn’t my idea. It was Susannah Breslin’s idea, as told to me by Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon.com. After I asked Tracy if this piece could work in any piecemeal form on Salon, she asked, “Why don’t you self-publish?” This was the best rejection/advice ever. The most common response I received from editors was, “I just don’t see where it fits.” For every time an editor says this, my response will be, “Why don’t you self-publish?” Math is not my forte, but I imagine that many unpublished pieces remain unpublished because they don’t fit neatly into the excess of fiction-geared literary journals or reportage-based magazines. If Not for Everything Else is mainly nonfiction, but I changed some names and reordered events and exaggerated a great deal and also lied and at times told the truth in a way I’m sure to regret and plagiarized in a way I hope comes off as “paying homage.” What genre is this? I just don’t see where it fits. And that’s why I self-published.
44 responses
Check out Scribd too — I understand some people have had luck with that site.
Money, money, money! Don’t let money dictate your life. Wealth and poverty are just states of minds. (Dr. Tim Leary)
The best advice I got about writing, was not to write to make money. I have had a few short stories published, and knowing that somebody is reading my stories is reward enough for my hard work. Yes, I’d like to make some money as a writer, but when that was my first goal, my writing was horrible because I let my greed drive weaken my creative drive.
Hey Elissa, if a magazine/lit-journal saw your story on a the website and wanted to pick it up, would you take it down (according to most lit-mag rules about not having a story published somewhere else) or do you consider it a ‘finalized’ publication (meaning you’d refuse an offer).
I’ve toyed with an online lit-mag in my city, but it’s hard to get any friends to put work up because they’re scared it’ll screw their story’s candidacy in another literary magazine. (That’s what I get for trying to be DIY).
How much do you need people to donate for this story in order to feel adequately compensated for writing it?
Hey Michael,
After spending a year writing, rewriting, and hating this piece, I love it too much to give it to anyone (if asked). I am now attached to the idea of publishing it on my own, in the way I have. The creative control solves a lot of my existential crises.
It’s definitely a risk to put work online (especially in a blog post, where the content becomes more disposable and floats too quickly to the archives). But what if more people started self-publishing finished pieces with their own URLs and donation buttons? Couldn’t that change the publishing world and create a huge space for writers to distribute their work? This is scary because it’s not the current model, but what if it became the current model? Publishing has never been so malleable–out of the ashes of book publishing comes the Phoenix of online self-publishing…or something–and I think now is the time to make it what we want it to be.
Stephen,
I’ve been staring at your question for twenty minutes. I’d feel adequately compensated if everyone who read it donated $2. According to Google Analytics, over 100 people have read the piece but only one person donated (thank you, Vito Trevino). Now all I need is $198 to feel adequately compensated.
I feel like the word ‘compensation’ in this context brings up the wrong idea — it feels poisonous, like it could ultimately make you resent your readers for not donating. You get compensated for services rendered or products sold, and writing offered to the world in this way is not a service, nor is it a product (the way it might be regarded if you sold it to a publisher for a fee). This is more in the nature of a gift, I think, and my feeling is that when you offer a gift, those on the receiving end owe nothing. But the donate button provides an easy way for readers to give something back if they feel so inclined, and who knows how many will. I suspect that gifts from 1% of readers is actually a pretty high response.
And I would like to say to Rufus that making money per se is not my first goal as a writer, but I do need to make a certain amount in order to keep myself off the streets, and I’m not good at anything else. Seeking money for my writing and editing work has only done me good, as a writer and as a person.
Jeremy said what I meant to say.
Is this about validation? I don’t think $2 adequately expresses why I dig your writing.
Then by all means, donate more!/it’s the thought that counts?
$2 is the suggested donation. It’s a little about validation and more about treating writing like a job. With a job, you sit at a desk from 9am-6pm, get a paycheck every two weeks for all the work you put in, then you pay the rent and maybe get an online subscription to Kink.com for whatever your pleasure, and then you do it all over again and this is your life and this is how the world works. While $2 may not be adequate and the story itself may not even be adequate, it’s certainly a start.
Okay, I donated. Now that you are a working as a paid writer, you also get a demanding reader.
My question: What were your expectations when you were writing this piece vs. the interview with your ex-boyfriend Dan (https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/06/the-exit-interview/)?
Maybe Vito Trevino will ask a question too.
Correct link https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/06/the-exit-interview/ (my ‘?’ got in the way)
Stepping up a level, huh, Claire? I like you. Let’s do this.
My expectation with If Not for Everything Else was that I’d write the most definitely best personal essay I could, one that took everything I was thinking in my head and feeling in my vagina and put it exactly as I felt it on the page. I succeeded maybe 10%. I would have succeeded more if I didn’t have to kill my darlings and cut the truly terrifying emotional stuff that would make me look just totally bats (you think you know, but you have no idea).
Originally Thom Pain (based on nothing) the play inspired my story, and I wanted to write something as moving. I’ll tell you this: after trying to imitate a lot of my favorite authors so that I’d write like them and do to others what they did to me, I learned it’s impossible to have any voice other than my own, which is a bit disappointing. I could never live up to my expectations on this one. I had to publish it so I could move on.
My interview with Dan was the opposite. First I expected he wouldn’t do it. But he immediately said yes. We’re both delightfully destructive in this way. Then I think we both expected we’d engage in a lot of wordplay and make jokes out of anything real. But we were so real (and more boring that our usual sparring selves–as an example, I used to cut and paste our g-chat conversations into my fiction pieces in college until my professor called me into his office and told me to stop writing completely unbelievable dialogue that was altogether too clever and sinister…two people don’t talk that way, he said).
I don’t want to say too much about the interview because people are getting what they want out of it, and I don’t want to fuck with that. Suffice it to say that Dan and I got a lot of closure in that one interview than we could give each other in four years. This is something I suggest all people do with their exes: conduct a professional interview about why it all fell apart. After we spoke, I felt as if a massive weight had lifted. Fantasy became reality, and as much as we think otherwise, reality hurts less than you can ever imagine.
Also, thank you for donating!
I only read the first paragraph (I plan to read the rest when Jeopardy! is over), so should I donate only a few cents?
This is classic Bassist: “Fantasy became reality, and as much as we think otherwise, reality hurts less than you can ever imagine.”
I’m a happy customer.
I recently reprinted some previously published short stories on Scribd.com and Smashwords. Lo and behold, some folks actually ponied up $3.00 to read them.
Showalter’s advice resonates with a quote I once heard, attributed to Steve Martin. When asked for advice about how to succeed, he responded, “Be so good they can’t say no.”
Between Showalter and Martin, the message seems to be: If you want to get paid, you’re gonna have to earn it!
Stephen’s Daily Rumpus made me think of something I wish I said originally: money is never (never should be) the driving force.
“It’s a little about validation and more about treating writing like a job. With a job, you sit at a desk from 9am-6pm, get a paycheck every two weeks for all the work you put in, then you pay the rent….”
But it’s not like a job, because the essential thing about a job is that somebody else is paying you to do what they want you to do, not what you want to do. That, as they say, is why they call it “work.” Some people like doing what they’re being paid to do, but that’s irrelevant to whether or not it’s a job.
Writing is a job if it’s writing that someone else wants you to do (tech writing, copywriting, etc.). If it’s your own stuff you can’t treat it like a job because it isn’t one. I’m with Stephen Elliott on this one.
I’m with me on this one too!
Note on the “Here’s what I did” section: you also received free editorial services. Wink wink. Which, strictly for rhetorical purposes, brings up the question of collaborative compensation, and what percentage of that $2 you are going to have to cough up to say, Ilyse, for example (not me! I work for love, not money.) I do a LOT of work for nothing, but only if I enjoy the work–which often means it provides me with the things money can’t buy. At the same time, I do a little work for a lot of money. I have two kids to support and I live in a jackass part of the country where rents are crazy and my kids’ friends have pools and private chefs. I’m carefully raising them to value intangibles. In all things, not just art, money is just one measure of value, and a deeply distorted one. I strongly agree with Andrew O. Dugas that the quality of work should dictate it’s marketability. Alas, we all know that this doesn’t always play out fairly in the real world. Mystery novels about cats will often win the race. But I admire you for marketing yourself on your own terms Elissa. Detour a system that rewards drivel. Promote yourself ferociously. But if you have to work a day job to make ends meet, don’t be above that. People can do several things at once (ask me how!), and the value of creative effort must not only be measured by your ability to live off it.
But to Damion’s point, writers who make good money sometimes are both paid to do what someone else wants, and what they themselves want. If the writer loves what they’re writing, and the reading public pushes it to the top of the bestseller list, then it does both. And that’s really what we all wish for, isn’t it? THAT is hard work. Here’s how Frost puts it:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Money should never be the driving force, agreed, but there’s no harm in wanting it in exchange for what you do–and do well, I might add. Why is it so hard to get paid to do creative, interesting things in this country?(world?) I don’t think this is about refusing to have a day job, more just wondering why writing can’t be said day job.
I agree that the “job” analogy has certain limits, but when I hear writers speak of treating writing like a “job” (and I have heard this many times), I get the feeling they’re thinking more about the rewards of productive discipline, which for most people includes money as a matter of course, so why not for creative work? In that sense I don’t think there’s anything particularly inaccurate about regarding your own writing as a “job” if you’re not doing anything else with your days.
I think the fundamental problem with this model is that it can’t be a trend. It can work occasionally because its a fun and interesting idea, but the interestingness of ideas fade quickly when ideas become trends. elissa will probably get a lot of donations more due to this post at the rumpus, and people will be donating not particularly for elissa as a struggling writer but more for all struggling writers and supporting the general idea that they ought to be paid.
id prefer to see a model that is more meritocracy based. like option to donate after the actual work is read, and note to readers to donate what you think the piece is worth. that at least would feel more attached to the work involved instead of trying to get people to appeal to a general sympathy for struggling artists.
Writing is my day job, but it’s tech writing. It pays well, my inner geek has found expression, and the corporate environments in which I’ve found myself have provided material for more stories than I’ll ever have time to write. Turns out I’m good at tech writing and as an added bonus, it’s given me access and experience with publishing tools that I could only dream of when I was a vagabond poet shelving books at Green Apple or scratching verse into Brazilian beaches.
Unlike other kinds of professional writing I’ve done — marketing copy, translation of marketing copy — technical writing requires a lot of time and focus but zero soul. None of my creative juice gets tapped in my day job, and that’s a good thing. I write poetry and fiction — I need every drop of juice I can save.
Up one more notch Bassist? Shall we? Yes.
Your interview with Dan is one of the best things I’ve read this year. It will probably remain one of the best things I will read next year. You started with the expectation that the interview might not happen and followed your heart from there.
I enjoyed ‘If Not for Everything Else’, but it feels more self-conscious than most of your writing. Though you have the opinion that matters, I wonder if this comes down to money being just one of many expectations (fame, prizes, sales, etc) that can interfere with writing?
p.s. I have a bad case of the second book blues, so I am with you sister.
I wrote If Not for Everything Else last year because I had this great real story that happened to me. I wrote it for me–I had to write out every detail of what happened between me and that other person because I was so hurt, so confused, and so in need of sorting *EVERYTHING* out. This sacred act of writing down the bones is one of the greatest recourses for writers. And then I decided to submit [what was originally called The Actor] to MFA programs as my writing sample. I never thought I’d publish it a year later. But my editors, people like Julie Greicius and Braden Marks and Tracy Clark-Flory, were so encouraging that they made me brave.
The piece is self-conscious because I wrote it thinking few people would read it. And I’m self-conscious. Anything else I’ve written was with an awareness that it’d go on The Rumpus or Salon.com–so I edit myself more when I know a piece is going public. In this way, If Not for Everything Else is the most genuine piece of writing I have. I do not think it’s the best. I think it has its moments. I think it has the potential to give readers more than I’ve given before. And I appreciate it as a start of a long career of writing, writing better.
My conversation with Dan was 10x the length of what you read. I just edited out our genuine self-conscious moments. And he is a great writer who contributed to half of that piece. So maybe you like us together.
P. S. I don’t have a first book or a second, so you’re miles ahead of me–and I don’t think you should have the blues about something that comes second. I don’t think writing comes in discrete iterations; it’s a life-long process with ups and downs and failed experiments and a lot of good intentions. At the end of the day, you’re still a person who is not your writing.
Julie, I changed the post as per your gentle and loving reminder.
Dan is fine, but I think you are very brave. I am already looking forward to your next piece.
And this is such an interesting point, does editing yourself more make a piece less genuine? My first instinct is no, but it might. I need to think about that one.
p.s. Yes!
Elissa,
I’m confused. Did you create a web site (with all the costs that entails – hosting, domain registration, etc.) just to showcase this one story?
I think this is what they call a buried lead.
Rather than publishing something ON a web site, you’ve published it… AS a web site. (Or singular point of download, at least.)
This is most intriguing. It might even be brilliant.
Yes! Andy, yes!
Contact me separately about this; you have my email. I’m mad curious about self-publishing and e-publishing and all that jazz, new paradigms, etc. I want to see how it works out for you.
Elissa–thanks, though the hypothetical model of compensation was more what I was getting at. Plus I was kidding… But the important thing is, yours is a simple, independent structure that is transparent about asking for exactly the compensation you would like in exchange for your art. I think that’s a healthy model, whether your currency is money, love or, as Steve Almond declined to receive, karma. Not everyone thinks this through ahead of time, or even knows what’s fair to ask. As more writers ask for pay and establish new models of pay for their work, the more they (you) set up a standard that can help other writers to do the same. Keep up the good revolution, Bassist.
Oh, how much is it all worth? Helen DeWitt has an interesting thing going with book sales on her blog — I feel like there was a longer post about it there once, but I can’t remember it now. Anyway, quoting below:
SECONDHAND SALES
Readers sometimes want to buy copies of The Last Samurai for friends. It’s tempting to buy the book “As New” for $1.70 + $3.99 postage rather than for $14.95 with free shipping in an order of $20 or more, especially if there are many, many friends. The author gets nothing on a secondhand sale — but then, the author would get only $1.12 on the new book. To send the author $1.12 the reader would have to pay an extra $9.24. That’s a pretty expensive goodwill gesture.
Goodwill doesn’t have to cost that much. PayPal takes 30 cents + 3% on each transaction; if you send the author $1.50 by PayPal she will get $1.15. So only 35 cents of the goodwill gesture goes to a middleman. It would look like highway robbery if we hadn’t seen the competition.
It’s a tough call, Elissa. I’ve written (part-time) for pay for 20 years and the pay’s almost always been a joke. It’s not about how well you write. I know I write good, ha! It’s about which markets you traffic in, intense competition, locked-up staff gigs by older writers, editor connects, what you’re willing to write about, AND straight to the point: how badly you want to hustle to research and pitch an article to multiple publications before even writing it, and THEN how much you want to deal with editorial “suggestions” (i.e., massive rewrites to shape YOUR story the way an editor sees it).
I’ve known freelancers over the years who’ve been paid $1/word v. my typically lesser figures, and in the end, the per-hour rate kinda evens out — e.g., I’ll write a number of shorter pieces that require far less rewriting for $1k total, while someone else might write one large piece that requires a lot of interviews/research and rewrites for the same payoff. Me, personally? I don’t want to spend months on a simple magazine article that most likely won’t even come out the way I originally intended due to editorial constraints.
What will I spend months/years on? Novels. Will they “pay” in the end? None have been published yet, but the gears are churning in that direction. Will there ever be MO-NAY with this type of enterprise? Ask Stephen! Thing is, it doesn’t matter b/c I didn’t write these novels for money, and the payoff’s already been huge.
In a nut, as I see it, here are your choices: “work” for money v. “write” for other reasons; aggressively query publishers/agents v. self-publish; print pub v. e-pub; hustle v. hustle.
My advice for you, Elissa (thanks for asking): promote your new e-pub on the web site AND maybe use the book espresso machine in the Presidio to make print copies to sell at shows around town like the Death Match. Who wouldn’t want to purchase your work — at $2 over cost? — after seeing you up on the stage?
Alright, that’s my three cents.
I’ve actually been toying with the idea of a literary escort service. Need a companion for the opera? Want to impress your friends at a dinner party? Hire a writer as your date. No sex, just (hopefully) witty and informed repartee.
Who’s in?
I’m in. I’m all about the repartee. I’ll even consider the sex, you know, for the right donation.
Just click your button, right, Jesus?
Right here on this table, Andrew…
Claire, I’m in. Can you please also offer escorts that are also literate in science history, science current events, and mathematics? I would pay good money.
(Whatever is tantamount to a sadistic literary orgasm is about to happen now…)
Dan, I think you mean “escorts who are also literate…”
I’ve been meaning to correct you on the who/that thing. You use “who” when you are talking about a person and “that” when you are talking about an object, unless you hope to imply women are objects, in which case, you’re also wrong.
I like the idea of a literary escort, I see every one of those evenings where a literary escort is in attendance concluding with a happy ending.
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