The Life of the Mind: A Conversation with Elizabeth Scanlon
Elizabeth Scanlon discusses her debut full-length collection, Lonesome Gnosis, brains and trains, and poetry as prayer.
...more
Posts Tagged: money
(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Kirsten Irving
The pressure to prove ourselves can have a distorting effect, causing us to doubt our instincts in favor of following others we perceive to be experts or “genuine.”
...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #23: The Love Song for Argyle C. Klopnik
File this one under “they can’t Trump everything; life goes on.” Last week, I got caught up in reflections on poverty in America: mine, yours, and ours. This week, I decided to do something about it and buckle down to design a careful budget. “Ack!,” I said, early one morning. “We’ve got to make a budget […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Terry McDonell
Terry McDonell talks about his new memoir The Accidental Life and his career in the magazine business, which spans the beginning of New Journalism through the digital revolution.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Math reveals the six plots of fiction (and yoga). Messy room affecting your mood? These pessimistic pigs agree! Money buys happiness—if you pay in advance. That smile makes you look like a sucker. Arrival, CP Snow, and a place for the humanities.
...moreThat Painful Money Subject
Os&1s Reads’s The Art of Commerce talks with Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back, about the relationship between writers and money: Publishing is a machine that does what it does. You’re grateful, of course, to have the connection to it, because part of what it does is present your book to thousands and thousands of readers. That’s […]
...moreLoving Writing Back
My name is on the phone bill. The student loan bills, medical bills, internet service provider bills, car insurance bills, the lease. My name is on three bank accounts, the present combined balances of which are insufficient to pay any one of the aforementioned bills. My name is also on a book, my first novel, […]
...more
Love and Gymnastics
I didn’t want to be a ballerina. It didn’t even sound right. I wanted to be a gymnast. The word alone made me feel proud and stand a little straighter.
...more
The Upper Far East
So much for the ‘glamour’ of selling pretty things to pretty people.
...more(Attractive) Debut Novelists Earn Millions
Emma Cline received $2m advance for The Girls, due out in June, which puts her near the top of a growing list of first-time writers with advances in the millions. Last year, City on Fire earned Garth Risk Hallberg a $2m advance. The allure of debut novelists isn’t always an economic issue: Given the amount of […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
If a weasel can shut down the Large Hadron Collider, we can finish that novel. And barring any more weasel problems, the future of physics is very exciting. Did you celebrate email debt forgiveness day? Fake hackers make more money than you. Your procrastination is making Facebook rich.
...moreMore Money, (Not) More Problems
In a powerful and anecdotal essay at The Toast, Nicole Chung discusses how money-related anxiety has stayed with her into adulthood, and how disparity between her and her husband’s attitudes toward money influences the dynamic of their marriage: It makes it sound as though my money-related anxiety is nothing more than an unfortunate personality quirk, […]
...moreTech Companies Profit While Writers Starve
Digital media companies are suddenly worried about declining ad revenue, and the venture capitalists funding these companies have also turned off the faucet of cash as they realize that success stories like BuzzFeed and Mashable are not the unicorns everyone thought they were. Instead, the big winners have been the technology companies like Google and […]
...moreMore Money, More Problems
What happens when writers suddenly face a windfall? Bad things. That’s why the Whiting Awards include a financial planning workshop for winners. Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards each received $50,000. For authors who are struggling as freelancers or adjunct professors, that is a huge influx of cash. At the New York Times, Sarah Lyall catches up with […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Is indie publishing dead or just moving over to Medium? Your money is snitching on you. Are you schizophrenic? There’s an app for that. Alert: More hand-wringing over technology ruining things. This time, the death we mourn is live music.
...moreDoes Commercial Success Hurt Literature?
Publishers are offering big paydays to debut authors—that’s the good news. The bad news is that the books earning big money aren’t particularly literary. Tom Leclair at The Daily Beast takes to task Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s novel The Nest as too middlebrow to be considered great literature: I understand the economic strategy: a novelist with no […]
...moreLiving Wages Cost More Money
A new study has revealed why academic adjuncts are paid so little: living wages would cost universities a lot more money. A new study says that converting adjunct faculty to tenure track positions would cost $27 billion dollars. The study also suggested that as more faculty became full time, as many as 450,000 adjuncts could […]
...moreChildren in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.”
...moreThe Hipster Consumes
…I can eat hip, wear it, and hang out with people who do the same. I do like artisanal food and vintage clothes. But I’d trade their proliferation in a heartbeat for the chance to eliminate my high-five-figure student debt or buy an apartment. Kashana Cauley writes on “hipster” consumer culture and its deeper interests […]
...moreAuthor Pay Conflict Heats Up in Britain
The row between authors and the literary festivals that don’t pay escalated last week when Philip Pullman resigned from the Oxford Literary Festival. Pullman also serves as the president to the British Society of Authors, a group that has been lobbying to earn authors money for making appearances. The Oxford Literary Festival is a twenty-year-old […]
...morePaying Authors to Appear
The British Society of Authors has called on literary festival organizers to pay authors who make appearances at events. The organization is asking that any literary festivals that charge entrance fees pay authors a minimum fee. At present, few events pay, and those that offer an appearance fee typically pay as little as £150, or about […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
...moreUnique Pageviews Don’t Pay Your Web Hosting Bill
Wil Wheaton created quite a fuss last month with an essay about Huffington Post’s request to republish an essay from his blog sans payment. When we called attention to a Salon article discussing paid versus unpaid creative work, Gawker had a “got you” moment, pointing out that The Rumpus doesn’t pay its writers. Fair enough, although […]
...moreClicking on This Story Won’t Pay Anybody
Noah Davis is running an experiment: how much will he earn off writing a news story about how much freelance journalists are paid. Like many freelance writers today, part of his compensation is based on the number of pageviews his article receives. Writing was never very lucrative, and the transition from a printed world to […]
...moreAmazon Monopoly Threatens Everything
Amazon just turned twenty years old. Even though the company might be too young to celebrate with champagne, competitors have begun to levy charges that the online retailer is becoming a monopoly. While Amazon’s tentacles spread across many retail sectors, the store’s dominance in books represents a major monopolistic threat. Fortune takes a look at […]
...moreNY or LA? Try Neither
At Hyperallergic, Claire Voon breaks down a report from New York’s Center for an Urban Future. The report’s findings include evidence that New York City has outpaced Los Angeles for sheer number of workers in the creative sector, while higher rents and lower grants and wages make it increasingly difficult for workers in that sector […]
...moreLiterature’s Crowdfunded Future
From small presses to literary journals, crowdfunding has grown into a major source of money for publishing. Authors are even turning to services like Kickstarter to fund their booktours, like Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star. Her successful campaign raised more than $9,000 for her book tour. To date, Kickstarter has raised more than $70m […]
...more