money
-
(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…
-
Weekly 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…
-
More 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…
-
Tech 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…
-
More 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…
-
Weekly 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.
-
Does 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…
-
Living 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…
-
Children 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.”
-
The 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…
-
Author 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…
-
Paying 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,…