So, is what you're saying that having professional literary ambition is a reach (as in, to make enough to live on, not necessarily to be Stephen King), but creative ambition is always worth cultivating? (That's how I'm reading what you're saying, anyway.)
When I graduated college in 2005, I had vague-to-medium-strength professional literary ambition. I worked as a low-level editor at a local (but Pulitzer Prize-winning!) newspaper for a couple of years, then the possibility of advancement dried up, so I left. Then I worked for a travel industry newspaper for a couple years doing special sections, and that was needless to say unfulfilling. Then I quit to raise my kids and do some general freelance work, and here I still am.
I had any professional ambition quickly stamped out of me, but that's not saying much, because I've discovered a fatal flaw within myself is not having a whole lot of professional ambition to begin with. I'll be going back to work in a couple of years (in nursing) because I've realized over these past ten years that I don't want to do what must be done to make a living in publishing. (Not saying that I WOULD make it if I played the game, just that I don't even want to try.)
I appreciate your pieces on writing and pieces like this one that are honest about publishing as a profession because I come away feeling like my lack of professional ambition isn't in fact a fatal flaw, but maybe saved my creative impulses. I've been thinking of dipping my toe back in, trying to publish some stuff for the sake of sharing it, but not with the added stress of depending on it for money. That is a huge bummer for a lot of people, but for me, it's freeing.
I'm sure you'll hate this but I was a dedicated reader of late-stage Gawker (2014 - 2016) and I always thought you would have been a good fit there, even if it never could or should have happened.
There is a new elite consensus culture though, which is Robin D'Angelo and "1/6 is the new 9/11." But the Gawker set and its heirs have never been wired to satirize anything like that, and in some indirect sense they're partial architects of these new norms.
I discovered Gawker (and Jezebel and Deadspin) as a 24 year old in like 2014-15 because I had an office job with too much downtime. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it was intellectually formative for me. I read for the first time about concepts like "cultural appropriation" and "toxic masculinity" there, even though that's (obviously) not where they originated. Anyway, it's interesting comparing that version of Gawker to even the one you link to, in this post, from 2012. I would be curious which iteration of the site ended up being your favorite.
My personal reaction as someone who was a fanatical reader of Gawker during the time period I mentioned above, is that I don't really feel up to it anymore. Out of muscle memory, I would go to gawker.com every 30 minutes during a slow day. Most of the time, I would read something on the website that was frustrating or (it seemed to me) cruel, and I would resolve to be done with it, because all it was doing was upsetting me, and then I would be back 30 minutes later. Honestly, it's not that different from how I feel when I open Twitter these days. Either way, I don't really want to experience this again. Life's too short. But I don't know if my experience is representative of anyone else's, or if the goal for New Gawker is to retain the people who were obsessed with version 1.0.
My guess is that they become, out of necessity, a bigger arm of the cycle that drives "cancel culture." I will be shocked if they target anyone who is acceptable. It is a bit of chess move to counter people like, I would imagine, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi who are already targets on Twitter but will now get higher profile hit pieces. Slate, Salon - they can't really be as sharp as they used to be because, out of necessity, they have gone all in on the ideology that drives "cancel culture." But Gawker can be like Twitter Magazine. There is only one way to be mean now that is acceptable. The targets have to be tagged, as you would say, as "baddies." I will be curious to see if Gawker upends that strident policy.
I've written a lot in my life and never made much money from it. In my field (library science) we don't get advances (we get 5 free copies). I have always had a day job. Academia supports the small market writer.The world of metrics now in university work is quite precise and forces people to write only what gets cited as citation is the measurement often used in tenure decisions. You feel like Jacob working for Rachel because eventually, you think, if you are awarded tenure you'd be able to write what you want to write. But by the time you get tenure you may not remember what that was anymore.
My book, published in 3 editions has sold under 10,000 copies and my total earnings are less than $20,000. So, maybe $1.00 an hour..maybe not even...if I looked at it that way I might have been discouraged. Journal articles for trade journals-- no compensation.(and in some academic fields the author has page fees--esp. sciences).
But I think my book is a useful book and helps people in their work. The glamour/social aspect of writing FdB writes about is kind of low key in library science (understatement). BTW, I know you are all anxious to get my non-famous book--"Introduction to Public Librarianship" and I have a great publisher (American Library Association).
It is kind of funny that with all the writing I have done when someone asks me what my job is I say "librarian," not writer, even though time spent on the latter is as much or more than the former."
The stuff about low advances and low books sales for literary work, that's a story as old as the hills. Sure, King got $400,000 in the 70s, but someone like Joseph McElroy, for example, a much better writer, was probably getting less than a fraction of that, as were his peers. The real author money has never come from the advance anyway, it comes from backend stuff like foreign rights, film rights, lectures, etc.
There’s a very simple answer to your last question: INFLUENCERS. They’re not so distributed in TikTok (and Instagram) as you think. Just grab the top 100 of them, and boom, you have a cast of targets you can rotate through for the next 2 years at least.
I do have some comments on being a writer that have relevance here. I do understand what you are talking about, none of it is inaccurate. it is just incomplete. I have wanted to be a writer since i was a teenager (50 years ago). luckily, by the time i was 21 i realized i had nothing to say and decided to wait awhile. i began to write in earnest when i was 38 and yes, most of it was terrible. nevertheless my first book came out in january 1996; it still earns me around $3000 a year. few of my 23 books have gone out of print or failed to earn back their advance. Only three of them in fact. I decided at the beginning that i wanted to make my living as a writer. to do that i realized i would have to publish a book a year for ten years. There are a great many people clamoring for attention, most of them want to write a book. it takes sustained effort to gain any attention when there are so many voices trying to get it.
Like far too many writers, esp of my era, i was enamored of the NY literary world. But as one world class editor told me long ago, there is no NY in NY any longer. it is just a corporate jungle; they could be selling toilets or tobacco, they don't really care; they just want the money. Yes, you can get large advances (and yes i went there once and got 50k for a two book deal, worst experience of my life) but except for the huge sellers or the prestige market, they don't care about their writers. Midlist writers, which most writers are, are not welcome. they don't make enough money for them. (They are the world of the blockbuster, not books that matter.) The magazine market is even worse. the competition is fierce for far too little money. I realized that long ago and took my ball and went home. They call me every so often and offer a thousand dollars or so for a piece and i generally say yes. but i never ask them.
Further, too much experience has shown me that editors at magazines are the worst editors in the world to work with. they pretty much have to urinate in every writer's work and stir it around with their pencil before they like the smell enough to print it. Usually this means removing every particle of my unique voice and style. Truthfully, i generally had to do more editing work on a 3000 word magazine piece than a 100,000 word book. it really isn't worth it. So, i took my work to the large, independent, small presses. THAT is where writers should go. They are the equivalent of the pulp magazines of the early to mid part of the twentieth century. it is where you get paid for learning your craft. There are a million words of bullshit in every writer, the only way to get them out (and out of the way) is to write them out. Out of quantity comes quality, eventually. I have had, to date, three best sellers (over 100,000 copies) and many award winners. By my sixth book i was making a living from my royalties.
The trick to it was: find a niche that is undeveloped, write the shit out of it, have something unique and essential to say (that is, don't copy all the other writers), keep saying it more elegantly with each book while at the same time never repeating what you have previously done, have all the books connected to an overarching theme, travel all over the place giving talks and workshops on the books (this does NOT mean bookstore signings, they are a waste of time), and write write write. After awhile i gave up asking for any advances. by doing so i got the money from sales nearly immediately and the publishers loved doing it that way. in the beginning, at the moment of greatest excitement on the publishers part (that is, right before the book came out) i sent them another proposal, which they always accepted. Publishers and editors are always seeking breakthrough books, they hunger for it. this can be leveraged as any hunger can. and for sure, always, always treat the profession like a business. The publishers and editors are not your friends, they are in business and they like you as long as you treat it as a business and make them money.
My work has primarily been nonfiction; with one caveat it is the easiest to sell to both publishers and the public. There are very few nonfiction books that contain luminous prose, so that is the kind of writing i used and the kind i love anyway. it offered something that most nonfiction books don't have. Into that form i included by poetry and memoir stories and fictional pieces as well. I make a very good living at it. But I didn't get here by going through NY. Their final determination was that my work would never sell, no one cared. I think about that every time i deposit a 40k royalty check from one of my publishers. (I have 6 I have worked with; they all still pay me, twice a year, each and every year.)
The one caveat for fiction writers? Amazon. Many of the best sellers on amazon have not gone through NY but have self published. They make a LOT of money. hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The truth is, the publishing world has changed. NY is dead for most writers but people still want to read and they want to read, for the most part, something other than the NPR voice, manhattan literary style of writing. Most people hate it and the snotty voice that goes with it. They just want to read a good story, to be entertained, to be talked to like a human being. Anyone who does this and really focused on it can make a good living at it. you just have to be outside the old box.
The world does not need any more MFA graduates who sound like all the other MFA graduates. As Elif Batuman once put it, never have so many books been written so well that no one in their right mind would want to read. Or as judy garland put it, be yourself, all the other positions are already taken.
God, the "NY literary world" sounds like it was bleak and empty at its height, and has now only gotten worse. I can understand it looking sexy enough from the outside to lure a certain kind of people in, but I can't seem to imagine anyone healthy voluntarily staying there, let alone thriving.
As someone in the internet industry, the idea that ad space is declining in value because of oversupply is just false. The value of online inventory keeps rising. It’s driven by improved targeting from more data and better algorithms, combined with more compelling formats (eg. skippable video), and an explosion of consumer products designed to benefit from the innovations in advertising. The value of an “eyeball” on a media source has never been higher.
The problem is circulation. The % of viewership going to “news gossip” is dropping because it’s being outcompeted by other forms of entertainment (and let’s face it, Gawker was first and foremost entertainment not news). And straight news was never that popular on its own.
Surprised to be saying this, but I think this article gives Gawker too much credibility and ideological coherence.
Vice and Gawker being anti-hipster-counterculture also seems really off base to me. Any meaningful definition of 2000s era hipster that includes more than 10 people was going to include most of the people who worked at these places, smug liberal arts majors who lived in Brooklyn. Making fun of hipsters was always the sign of being one, or at least being a character in the extended hipster universe - nobody else in America cared about this barely existent counterculture.
Far from scouring the counterculture, Gawker was the hipster TMZ, a tabloid built around nastiness and bile. The writing was bad, the content was disposable, it died because they refused to take down revenge porn. The Gawker content policy was "bad guys deserve it" and that helped create the internet we see today, where mobs justify torturing random people as long as they're deemed bad by an increasingly flexible moral calculus. The Gawker magic trick was that the easiest way to only punch up is to just change the definition of up.
Toward the end of Gawker, one of the biggest draws was the comments. Reader discussions carried a lot of the low-effort "articles."
They were good at attracting and retaining commenters by making it feel like a cool kids club. For a while, the best commenters would be awarded stars or promoted status. One time, I got a star for being the only person who understood Adrien Chen's joke about France.
Anyway, these days those conversations occur on Twitter. It will be interesting to see if the new Gawker attracts anything like the old comments.
I don't think I ever read Gawker. Which reminds me of this:
>The 56th episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” first aired on March 27, 1963, finds comedy writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) and his wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) at a New York City cocktail party surrounded by serious — or, at least, self-important — writers and artists. Transplanted Midwesterners, they feel out of place and at a loss for what to say.
>It gets even more embarrassing when Laura tries to impress a few party-goers by telling them that her husband writes for a popular television show. Which elicits only blank stares from the Kennedy-era intelligentsia.
>“I’m sorry,” one goateed beatnik type says with an odd accent. “I do not own a television machine.”
So, is what you're saying that having professional literary ambition is a reach (as in, to make enough to live on, not necessarily to be Stephen King), but creative ambition is always worth cultivating? (That's how I'm reading what you're saying, anyway.)
When I graduated college in 2005, I had vague-to-medium-strength professional literary ambition. I worked as a low-level editor at a local (but Pulitzer Prize-winning!) newspaper for a couple of years, then the possibility of advancement dried up, so I left. Then I worked for a travel industry newspaper for a couple years doing special sections, and that was needless to say unfulfilling. Then I quit to raise my kids and do some general freelance work, and here I still am.
I had any professional ambition quickly stamped out of me, but that's not saying much, because I've discovered a fatal flaw within myself is not having a whole lot of professional ambition to begin with. I'll be going back to work in a couple of years (in nursing) because I've realized over these past ten years that I don't want to do what must be done to make a living in publishing. (Not saying that I WOULD make it if I played the game, just that I don't even want to try.)
I appreciate your pieces on writing and pieces like this one that are honest about publishing as a profession because I come away feeling like my lack of professional ambition isn't in fact a fatal flaw, but maybe saved my creative impulses. I've been thinking of dipping my toe back in, trying to publish some stuff for the sake of sharing it, but not with the added stress of depending on it for money. That is a huge bummer for a lot of people, but for me, it's freeing.
I'm sure you'll hate this but I was a dedicated reader of late-stage Gawker (2014 - 2016) and I always thought you would have been a good fit there, even if it never could or should have happened.
There is a new elite consensus culture though, which is Robin D'Angelo and "1/6 is the new 9/11." But the Gawker set and its heirs have never been wired to satirize anything like that, and in some indirect sense they're partial architects of these new norms.
I discovered Gawker (and Jezebel and Deadspin) as a 24 year old in like 2014-15 because I had an office job with too much downtime. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it was intellectually formative for me. I read for the first time about concepts like "cultural appropriation" and "toxic masculinity" there, even though that's (obviously) not where they originated. Anyway, it's interesting comparing that version of Gawker to even the one you link to, in this post, from 2012. I would be curious which iteration of the site ended up being your favorite.
My personal reaction as someone who was a fanatical reader of Gawker during the time period I mentioned above, is that I don't really feel up to it anymore. Out of muscle memory, I would go to gawker.com every 30 minutes during a slow day. Most of the time, I would read something on the website that was frustrating or (it seemed to me) cruel, and I would resolve to be done with it, because all it was doing was upsetting me, and then I would be back 30 minutes later. Honestly, it's not that different from how I feel when I open Twitter these days. Either way, I don't really want to experience this again. Life's too short. But I don't know if my experience is representative of anyone else's, or if the goal for New Gawker is to retain the people who were obsessed with version 1.0.
My guess is that they become, out of necessity, a bigger arm of the cycle that drives "cancel culture." I will be shocked if they target anyone who is acceptable. It is a bit of chess move to counter people like, I would imagine, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi who are already targets on Twitter but will now get higher profile hit pieces. Slate, Salon - they can't really be as sharp as they used to be because, out of necessity, they have gone all in on the ideology that drives "cancel culture." But Gawker can be like Twitter Magazine. There is only one way to be mean now that is acceptable. The targets have to be tagged, as you would say, as "baddies." I will be curious to see if Gawker upends that strident policy.
I've written a lot in my life and never made much money from it. In my field (library science) we don't get advances (we get 5 free copies). I have always had a day job. Academia supports the small market writer.The world of metrics now in university work is quite precise and forces people to write only what gets cited as citation is the measurement often used in tenure decisions. You feel like Jacob working for Rachel because eventually, you think, if you are awarded tenure you'd be able to write what you want to write. But by the time you get tenure you may not remember what that was anymore.
My book, published in 3 editions has sold under 10,000 copies and my total earnings are less than $20,000. So, maybe $1.00 an hour..maybe not even...if I looked at it that way I might have been discouraged. Journal articles for trade journals-- no compensation.(and in some academic fields the author has page fees--esp. sciences).
But I think my book is a useful book and helps people in their work. The glamour/social aspect of writing FdB writes about is kind of low key in library science (understatement). BTW, I know you are all anxious to get my non-famous book--"Introduction to Public Librarianship" and I have a great publisher (American Library Association).
It is kind of funny that with all the writing I have done when someone asks me what my job is I say "librarian," not writer, even though time spent on the latter is as much or more than the former."
The stuff about low advances and low books sales for literary work, that's a story as old as the hills. Sure, King got $400,000 in the 70s, but someone like Joseph McElroy, for example, a much better writer, was probably getting less than a fraction of that, as were his peers. The real author money has never come from the advance anyway, it comes from backend stuff like foreign rights, film rights, lectures, etc.
There’s a very simple answer to your last question: INFLUENCERS. They’re not so distributed in TikTok (and Instagram) as you think. Just grab the top 100 of them, and boom, you have a cast of targets you can rotate through for the next 2 years at least.
I do have some comments on being a writer that have relevance here. I do understand what you are talking about, none of it is inaccurate. it is just incomplete. I have wanted to be a writer since i was a teenager (50 years ago). luckily, by the time i was 21 i realized i had nothing to say and decided to wait awhile. i began to write in earnest when i was 38 and yes, most of it was terrible. nevertheless my first book came out in january 1996; it still earns me around $3000 a year. few of my 23 books have gone out of print or failed to earn back their advance. Only three of them in fact. I decided at the beginning that i wanted to make my living as a writer. to do that i realized i would have to publish a book a year for ten years. There are a great many people clamoring for attention, most of them want to write a book. it takes sustained effort to gain any attention when there are so many voices trying to get it.
Like far too many writers, esp of my era, i was enamored of the NY literary world. But as one world class editor told me long ago, there is no NY in NY any longer. it is just a corporate jungle; they could be selling toilets or tobacco, they don't really care; they just want the money. Yes, you can get large advances (and yes i went there once and got 50k for a two book deal, worst experience of my life) but except for the huge sellers or the prestige market, they don't care about their writers. Midlist writers, which most writers are, are not welcome. they don't make enough money for them. (They are the world of the blockbuster, not books that matter.) The magazine market is even worse. the competition is fierce for far too little money. I realized that long ago and took my ball and went home. They call me every so often and offer a thousand dollars or so for a piece and i generally say yes. but i never ask them.
Further, too much experience has shown me that editors at magazines are the worst editors in the world to work with. they pretty much have to urinate in every writer's work and stir it around with their pencil before they like the smell enough to print it. Usually this means removing every particle of my unique voice and style. Truthfully, i generally had to do more editing work on a 3000 word magazine piece than a 100,000 word book. it really isn't worth it. So, i took my work to the large, independent, small presses. THAT is where writers should go. They are the equivalent of the pulp magazines of the early to mid part of the twentieth century. it is where you get paid for learning your craft. There are a million words of bullshit in every writer, the only way to get them out (and out of the way) is to write them out. Out of quantity comes quality, eventually. I have had, to date, three best sellers (over 100,000 copies) and many award winners. By my sixth book i was making a living from my royalties.
The trick to it was: find a niche that is undeveloped, write the shit out of it, have something unique and essential to say (that is, don't copy all the other writers), keep saying it more elegantly with each book while at the same time never repeating what you have previously done, have all the books connected to an overarching theme, travel all over the place giving talks and workshops on the books (this does NOT mean bookstore signings, they are a waste of time), and write write write. After awhile i gave up asking for any advances. by doing so i got the money from sales nearly immediately and the publishers loved doing it that way. in the beginning, at the moment of greatest excitement on the publishers part (that is, right before the book came out) i sent them another proposal, which they always accepted. Publishers and editors are always seeking breakthrough books, they hunger for it. this can be leveraged as any hunger can. and for sure, always, always treat the profession like a business. The publishers and editors are not your friends, they are in business and they like you as long as you treat it as a business and make them money.
My work has primarily been nonfiction; with one caveat it is the easiest to sell to both publishers and the public. There are very few nonfiction books that contain luminous prose, so that is the kind of writing i used and the kind i love anyway. it offered something that most nonfiction books don't have. Into that form i included by poetry and memoir stories and fictional pieces as well. I make a very good living at it. But I didn't get here by going through NY. Their final determination was that my work would never sell, no one cared. I think about that every time i deposit a 40k royalty check from one of my publishers. (I have 6 I have worked with; they all still pay me, twice a year, each and every year.)
The one caveat for fiction writers? Amazon. Many of the best sellers on amazon have not gone through NY but have self published. They make a LOT of money. hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The truth is, the publishing world has changed. NY is dead for most writers but people still want to read and they want to read, for the most part, something other than the NPR voice, manhattan literary style of writing. Most people hate it and the snotty voice that goes with it. They just want to read a good story, to be entertained, to be talked to like a human being. Anyone who does this and really focused on it can make a good living at it. you just have to be outside the old box.
The world does not need any more MFA graduates who sound like all the other MFA graduates. As Elif Batuman once put it, never have so many books been written so well that no one in their right mind would want to read. Or as judy garland put it, be yourself, all the other positions are already taken.
God, the "NY literary world" sounds like it was bleak and empty at its height, and has now only gotten worse. I can understand it looking sexy enough from the outside to lure a certain kind of people in, but I can't seem to imagine anyone healthy voluntarily staying there, let alone thriving.
As someone in the internet industry, the idea that ad space is declining in value because of oversupply is just false. The value of online inventory keeps rising. It’s driven by improved targeting from more data and better algorithms, combined with more compelling formats (eg. skippable video), and an explosion of consumer products designed to benefit from the innovations in advertising. The value of an “eyeball” on a media source has never been higher.
The problem is circulation. The % of viewership going to “news gossip” is dropping because it’s being outcompeted by other forms of entertainment (and let’s face it, Gawker was first and foremost entertainment not news). And straight news was never that popular on its own.
Surprised to be saying this, but I think this article gives Gawker too much credibility and ideological coherence.
Vice and Gawker being anti-hipster-counterculture also seems really off base to me. Any meaningful definition of 2000s era hipster that includes more than 10 people was going to include most of the people who worked at these places, smug liberal arts majors who lived in Brooklyn. Making fun of hipsters was always the sign of being one, or at least being a character in the extended hipster universe - nobody else in America cared about this barely existent counterculture.
Far from scouring the counterculture, Gawker was the hipster TMZ, a tabloid built around nastiness and bile. The writing was bad, the content was disposable, it died because they refused to take down revenge porn. The Gawker content policy was "bad guys deserve it" and that helped create the internet we see today, where mobs justify torturing random people as long as they're deemed bad by an increasingly flexible moral calculus. The Gawker magic trick was that the easiest way to only punch up is to just change the definition of up.
Toward the end of Gawker, one of the biggest draws was the comments. Reader discussions carried a lot of the low-effort "articles."
They were good at attracting and retaining commenters by making it feel like a cool kids club. For a while, the best commenters would be awarded stars or promoted status. One time, I got a star for being the only person who understood Adrien Chen's joke about France.
Anyway, these days those conversations occur on Twitter. It will be interesting to see if the new Gawker attracts anything like the old comments.
Freddie please do the southern border and the influx of illegal immigrants: trump’s wall vs Biden’s denial and MSM’s obsequiousness vs Fox’s alarm.
I don't think I ever read Gawker. Which reminds me of this:
>The 56th episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” first aired on March 27, 1963, finds comedy writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) and his wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) at a New York City cocktail party surrounded by serious — or, at least, self-important — writers and artists. Transplanted Midwesterners, they feel out of place and at a loss for what to say.
>It gets even more embarrassing when Laura tries to impress a few party-goers by telling them that her husband writes for a popular television show. Which elicits only blank stares from the Kennedy-era intelligentsia.
>“I’m sorry,” one goateed beatnik type says with an odd accent. “I do not own a television machine.”
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2020/07/05/george-pyle-carl-reiner/