paying the rent
-
Actively Seeking Words
How do you spot a successful writer? Over at Lit Hub, Shelley A. Leedahl explains how going pro can look a lot like going broke: After all, I do have a career. It just doesn’t pay.
-
The Write Life
At The Billfold, Christine Sneed gets real about the long, hard path to finding success writing books—even after being published—and why she wouldn’t have chosen a different career path regardless: I can’t imagine not being a writer. Maybe this seems…
-
Disguising Payments Hurts Writers
Literary journals don’t always pay contributors. But unpaid contributions are less of a problem for writers than literary journals that conceal their pay rates. Allison Williams, over at The Review Review, takes a look at how some publications handle the…
-
Quit Your Day Job
So what happened in those eight missing years to make a well-reviewed, commercially successful author fall so far so fast? Heartbreak? Rehab? Addiction to designer shoes? Easy. She took the wrong day job. The conundrum of how to support yourself…
-
Refinancing the Writing Life
The system for determining worth and value strikes me as terribly strange, and it occurs to me that it just might require a suspension of disbelief. Luckily for me, I know something about that. For Salon, Rachel Basch writes about…
-
Our Part-Time Labor Problem
I teach part-time. My students work. They work in fast food or slightly slower food or hospitality. Last spring semester, two were veterans, with at least four trips to the Middle East between them. One of my four parents cut…
-
Writing Erotica for Money
Once the story was actually finished, and there was no money to be made, all ambition tied to it evaporated, and now I’m left pretty much where I began. Ruthlessly lazy, without much money, and stuck for the foreseeable future…
-
Show Me the Money
It’s no secret that writing doesn’t pay. Ann Bauer wants to talk about where the money comes from: In my opinion, we do an enormous “let them eat cake” disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us…
-
A Career No More
Writing books has become a hobby for the wealthy, writes Toby Young over at the Telegraph. Writers’ incomes have dropped 29% since 2005, he points out, and even when writers are getting paid, it’s never enough: I wrote another book…
-
How to Be a Writer and Also Have a 401K
At The Morning News, seven writers with full-time jobs talk about how they fit (or attempt to fit) writing time into their work weeks, and the general conclusion is: There isn’t an elegant solution to cramming a writing life into…
-
Art Doesn’t Pay
The arts don’t pay very well, and working as a professional in a creative field like writing, music, or film has grown more precarious. High student debt doesn’t help, but it might explain why almost a quarter of arts graduates…
-
How the IRS Defines Art
In an essay on Narrative.ly, Alison Gerber recounts the rather harrowing IRS audit of Minneapolis artist Venus DeMars: Sometimes the line between professional and amateur is a clear, bright one. But in the United States artists are, for the most…