I had told my daughter that she shouldn't read BotNS until after high school ... Wolfe's treatment of his female characters can be, well, let's say problematic.
Did you know that Wolfe was a devout Catholic (with a shrine in his home to Mary), AND believed (or at least claimed to believe) that the Roman Gods were real powers in the world who were now diminished for lack of worshippers (and who did not deserve to be worshipped). Which reminds me of a Star Trek episode ...
As someone in an academic field apparently of similar size to yours, I read this comment twice for double enjoyment. "Trendy Word Vomit"...inspired! I think I'll read it again!
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.
Well it's a bit tangential to the larger point of the piece, but I would say
1. Don't write for money; the vast majority of people who try make terrible wages and eventually give up.
2. Understand that first books are hard to sell and that second books are even harder to sell because that first book very likely didn't sell.
3. Never write a book under the pretext that the advance money will be sufficient to make you rich/pay off your loans/enable you to be a professional writer of books because it won't be.
4. Have a day job.
5. Please no more writers who are embarrassed to be writers writing books that are embarrassed to be books. Write it or don't. Save the scarce publishing resources for people who are unashamed of wanting to write and what they write.
1 and 2, true for NY, not so much for the small presses. Again, it is possible to make money as a writer, i believe that money is important but about third on the list of importance to a writer. doing it solely for the money is stupid and without integrity and yes, the first one is harder to sell as there is no track record. second books are only harder to sell in NY, they want a winner the first time around. the small, independent presses don't care. 3: always true. 4: it took me 5 books before i could live on my royalties, this is generally true for those writers who make money at it. never put all your money making in one basket, have multiple sources, always. 5: many people want to write simply for their vitae, kind of like a business card sort of thing. they are not writers. writing is a sacred craft; there is a long tradition behind each of us who become writers. betraying that is a sin. still, as my mentor john dunning (the mystery writer) once put it: illigitimi non carborundum and never expect to find the word integrity in a publishing contract.
I just bought a little book about surveying to understand geodetic markings. The writer is clear, lucid and insightful. I never heard of him, but I bet he makes a lot of $$$ beneath the radar. Also bet he's never been to a party. __Geodetic Datums Made Simple: Step by Step Guide (Surveying Mathematics Made Simple) (Volume 19).
I went through a pretty similar process: I wanted to be an author, until I really looked into what getting a book published entails and the meager chances of true success.
I ended up writing fanfic. It isn't glamorous and it pays nothing (although that seems to be the situation for most writers anyway...), but it scratches the itch. I have no interest in playing industry games; I'm just happy I can share what I made and have people read it and tell me they liked it.
Fanfic is awesome. There are so many amazing novels on there for free. It blows my mind. I read fic for shows I've never even seen, because a lot of "alternate universe" fics aren't even about the show.
Plus, I love that you can write just about anything, and as long as you tag it appropriately, the comments will be positive and supportive. Whenever I want to write something weird or experimental, it goes on AO3.
Well, that's fantastic news! I'll get back to you. Actually what made me do a major pivot into nursing was being an end-of-life caregiver to my mother-in-law and to a lesser extent for my grandmother. I've been ruminating on those experiences for the past 6 years, since my MIL died. I'm sure I'll write something about them before too much longer.
Also it's worth noting that if I hadn't left my career, I wouldn't have been available to provide that care to my family. So my lack of regret has compounded with each of my three kids and then those two situations. We're fortunate that we can get by on my husband's salary (though for a long time, it was touch and go.)
I think that's the right perspective. I made $3,400 from my first book in the first year (small publisher, no advance, just royalties). But I love to write, and it's rewarding to hear from readers who appreciate my books.
In my genre, the market is saturated with self-published authors willing to write basically for free. Readers complain if an ebook isn't on Kindle Unlimited and/or priced at about two dollars. Amazon owns the market and has turned it into Spotify: Readers expect unlimited books for $10 per month. It's hard to imagine that we'll ever go back. After all, I wouldn't pay $16.99 for an album these days.
Anyway, the authors trying to do it full-time seem miserable. They constantly churn out low-quality books and beg readers to join their Patreons. It's not glamorous at all. Meanwhile, my day job allows me to write what I want at my own pace, and I don't have to stress about sales.
My day job involves data and statistics. I don't post my pen name on Substack for privacy reasons -- plus I write for a tiny demographic in a niche subgenre, so chances are it wouldn't be your thing anyway.
But if you really want to know, if you tell me your email or Twitter handle or Reddit (something with DM capabilities) I'll send you the link. :)
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.
I was always pretty much purely mercenary as a freelancer, so I definitely would have taken their money. But as you suggest, it's very unlikely they would have ever tried to give me some.
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 mean... what is there to satirize? It's all completely artless - I am moral, you are not, the wheels of power should turn to serve my ends, even (or especially) if that means crushing you. Not a lot of good material there.
Lots of people are satirizing the new elite consensus, but the satirization's metapolitical footing is not a metapolitics the Gawker set would even understand how to set a little pinky toe upon. This isn't to say Gawker is "left" whereas, say, Bill Burr, is "right." But Bill Burr isn't Gawker's metapolitical tribe. And he, unlike them, can still crack a funny joke at the new consensus's expense.
"What is there to satirize?" I think satire works only in a specific cultural context, where reacting strongly and negatively to barbs is seen as a sign of moral weakness. So when screaming in indignation at the slightest touch is seen as as a sign of moral strength and clarity, at least among the empowered elite, what purchase can satire find?
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.
Your experience definitely jibes with mine. In the end, though, especially after Gawker itself was folded, what stopped me going to Deadspin with such regularity wasn't a sense of trying to tear myself away, as if trying to quit cigarettes, but rather just boredom.
Deadspin was always feisty, but it seemed like they were trying to pick a fight with any and everyone in sports media for their abject failure to be Deadspin. First it was Barstool, which, sure. Then it was SB Nation. Then, finally, it was The Athletic. I'm still not sure what their problem was with that last one. They hated SB Nation for not paying writers enough. They hated The Athletic for...paying them too much? I think?
I mean, dislike the monster media entities. Criticize them. But if you've arrived at the point where everyone else is bad but you, and they are bad for their failure to be you, you're really the only common denominator there.
So, yeah, your experience is at least representative of two people.
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.
Certainly the most likely outcome is that they spend most of their time going after Greenwald and Taibbi et al, just like every other liberal outlet out there. I like Leah Finnegan and she has some tendencies against the current herd - I think she was one of the few public voices against the Gawker union - but there is simply too much risk in going after anyone but woke-approved targets. But time will tell.
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."
Famous librarian - thank you, true but still a librarian. Tho--a secret--all this stuff we are talking about?? if we (librarians) don't make sure it is safe for future generations it's gone. I get a lot of books from used bookstores that buy up library discards and sometimes they leave in the old check-out cards and famous writers --never circulated...so be nice to your librarians. When I started writing on the Internet here and there I decided I would use my name because that would make me think a little bit before I hit send.
"if we (librarians) don't make sure it is safe for future generations it's gone."
In the shower this morning I was thinking about some of the stupid and embarrassing things outlets like the WaPo and the NYT have been publishing lately, and whether and how they might scrub them in the future from their own websites, the Wayback Machine, LexisNexis, etc. I suspect this is inevitable. And then where will we be? The past will be whatever the "Paper of Record" wants it to be.
But they can't scrub microfiche.
I remember using the microfiche readers when I was in college. Not for any research, but just because it was fun to read the daily newspaper from, say, 1936 or some other year before I was born. But I don't suppose newspapers are recorded on microfiche anymore, are they? and I recall reading a depressing article recently about how libraries are destroying microfiche because of the space it takes. Is that really happening.
I hope not because, librarians, you're our only hope.
O funny. My first job was microform librarian and govt documents. A lot of libraries are getting rid of them (the light bulbs are so hard to find) but there are plenty safe guarded. It's not even 100 years ago that microfilm was "the" hot topic among librarians. I wrote about this a while ago: https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/microphotography
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.
I read the meta meta meta novel by Ben Lerner (10:04) that had scenes about a writer getting huge advances but his attitude toward librarians and archivists was so mean to people earning 1/100 of his advances that I hated him. He probably doesn't understand that librarians and archivists are the working classes of "writing." I put the book in a Little Free Library and it's still there a month later with spiders on it. (yes I donate to Little Free Libraries a lot because I have so many books). meta meta meta--they all learned a new word.
I moved to Reno five years ago and Little Free Libraries are all over the place here. I'd never seen them before (in SoCal). I thought maybe they were a regional thing.
"The real author money has never come from the advance anyway, it comes from backend stuff like foreign rights, film rights, lectures, etc."
Is this true? I don't know much about the economics of this. I only know that James Ellroy (a personal fave) has said film rights are nothing compared to book royalties.
Successful genre writers (crime/thriller/romance), rare as they are, make book royalties out the wazoo. The topic at hand here, though, was literary authors, who cannot and should not depend on such royalties or books sales. They're the ones who end up teaching at MFA programs so they can make ends meet, because they sell maybe 1000-5000 copies. But an Ellroy or a Danielle Steele or a David Baldacci doesn't need to do that because their books fly off the shelves by the millions (literally). Just a different animal.
JE should be read by everyone talking about conspiracy theories. That style...I would like to have someone somewhere discuss him and how he knew these things. I went to Dallas and traced his story. (The Adolphus is owned by Marriott now.)
I sound like a fan girl. The American Library Association was meeting in Dallas so I skipped a few sessions to go where JE went including Book Depository but I went through JE's eyes.
In college, I received an award for poetry at the Southern Literature Conference. A handful of my wonderful friends and a few professors came with me. We attended my event, then we skipped out to go to Square Books and Faulkner's house, where I picked up a pecan off the ground and tried to get it to grow in a pot on my apartment balcony. (Sadly, it didn't; and even worse, I just learned via google that the pecan tree died in 2016)
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.
You can try to make fun of youtube influencers but most of your audience won't even know who almost any of them are because the audiences are so niche and siloed off. You can make fun of influencers in general but that's a pretty dry well.
"You can make fun of influencers in general but that's a pretty dry well." For the gamers in the audience, I gesture towards the Calypso Twins in Borderlands 3 as a prime example. Fun loot 'n' shoot game, don't get me wrong, but the attempt to make a parody of influencers resulted in a pair of very mediocre villains.
I think the point is that nobody here would probably recognize any of them, just as they probably don't know who Freddie or Wesley Yang or Matt Taibbi are.
I agree with that - that doesn't mean Nu Gawker won't have a reason to exist! It just means that 99% of the people here (including me) won't get much out of it.
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.
"...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..."
"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."
I was so impressed by your writing, both in this post and on your web site (the Bathory piece), that I went to Amazon to look at your books. To my surprise they weren't in the fields of social commentary, or fiction, but botany. Talk about practicing what you preach!
What a wonderful essay to find in a Substack comments section. Thank you for taking the time to explain all this for us, though I suppose you enjoyed writing it as much as I enjoyed reading it. It was quite eye-opening, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of it. It certainly conforms with my suspicions anyway.
Thank you. I love writing, i always have. books saved my life more times than i can say. And i read constantly, i think most writers do. As well I love talking about writing and especially how to make a living at it that works and is accessible to all. I read so many articles that say that you can't make a living at it so why bother. Or that writers are horribly paid. Or that . . . . whatever. It is true for some but it does not have to be. If it is in your blood and you are willing to be real and write many books then it is not as hard as they make it out to be. as John Gardner once put it, a good writing teacher and a monkey with a typewriter can write what passes for most novels these days. or, in other words, the writing world is a paper tiger, if you write the genuine, and you write a lot, sooner or later it will happen for you. Especially now since there are so many options to NY. It was the hippies that first began to form their own tiny publishing companies and broke the distribution monopoly of the NY presses. Amazon took the place of a corrupt Sears. NY presses forced out unprofitable imprints and subjects, small presses started, taking the imprint names, buying all the titles being given up, and printing more of the subjects deemed unworthy by NY. Inner Traditions started this way. They make a LOT of money. Just think about it. A thousand titles that sell one thousands copies a year is a million copies sold. (NY rarely keeps titles in print that sell even 3000 copies a year. They want 10k a year or more.) A $20 dollar book returns to the publisher about a $7 profit, so that is 7 million dollars a year which ny thinks is paltry but for a small press is a very nice income, esp since this is bread and butter money, year in and year out. new titles often sell far more than that. (I have one with them that is up to 65,000 copies at this point.) They are always looking for new titles. nonfiction. They get 10,000 submissions a year, they publish 60. the acquisitions editor can tell from the first sentence or paragraph of the book whether he wants it or not; he is very fast. most of the writers do not read, most have never thought about writing or the craft, most are overly schooled but not educated. Any kind of decent book that is well written has a shot there or at one of the other small presses. Not making money as a writer is like starving and not eating at a banquet. yes it is hard work; i often worked 80 hour weeks for years to make it happen. facing the empty page is often difficult. and writing the genuine is often terribly frightening. as barry lopez once said, if you are not scared you are doing something wrong. when i get stuck i just ask myself, what is it i am afraid to say out loud? Right now, here in this room. it has always worked, for over 25 years.
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.
it was fairly good through the 70s, until the large NY publishers were bought up and became part of unrestrained corporate capitalism. Ludlum's first editor worked with him for 2-3 years to help him develop before they published his first book. this was common then. it isn't any longer. they expect publishable copy from the beginning. most decent editors have been fired and poorly paid MFA grads have taken their place.
that was when it was fun and real and it was people living a life that wrote not graduates of MFA programs who mostly have not lived at all. Before, many working class people wrote. most people in the newspaper industry were working class. Now most newsrooms are mfa graduates; it makes a huge difference in tone and orientation. I find the newer writers colorless for the most part, insipid, and boring. that is why i support people like freddie on substack. they are original voices, writing with style, saying upsetting things that simulate thought, parsing difficult truths and simplicities. it is great fun.
There's no modern day counterparts to Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Studs Terkel or Mike Royko who all sprang from the working class. Instead the percentage of Ivy Leaguers at elite media institutions like the NY Times has soared.
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.
Just to pile on: he's correct. The big transition now is the declining value of TV ads as a) fewer people <65 watch linear TV and b) the capabilities of internet advertising grows. Once internet advertising has come closer to the physical limit of what it's capable of, and linear TV doesn't exist, that's when we'll start seeing some real consolidation.
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.
I agree that it was somewhat relevant, but again I think not because these institutions were reactions to this counterculture, but because they exemplified it. Thanks to these sites, everyone on earth could experience the vibes of "talking to smug people at a Brooklyn party in the 2000s."
"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."
Two hipsters walk into a bar. Ten minutes later, they walk out.
"That place has gone to shit," the first one says.
"Yeah," the second one says. "It used to be cool. Now it's full of goddamn hipsters."
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.
Good comments sections are dead, imho. I used to *love* the comments section at the AV Club, but I think you're right that twitter has filled that gap these days.
Comments sections are only good when they're paywalled, which makes me wonder how Freddie thinks commenting privileges should be distributed under communism.
> Comments sections are only good when they're paywalled, which makes me wonder how Freddie thinks commenting privileges should be distributed under communism.
LOL
That reminds me of a 'communism shower thought' I had a while ago – don't 'the means of production' reasonably include personal computers, and human brains, or even pencils, paper, or not too long ago, typewriters?
No! Other people are encumbered by employment considerations and reputational bullshit. I trust you, I have a sense you will be forthright and fulsome: real.
His "wall" was both YUGEly expensive and completely ineffective (which, now that I think about it, describes Trump himself pretty well ...)
And I agree with Freddie: there isn't really much for him to say here. I presume he just expects the forthcoming marxist/socialist revolution to dismantle all borders ...
Trump never intended to actually secure the borders, because his peeps (the 1%) are very fond of illegal-immigrant slave labor, just like Trump himself is at his resort properties and (back in the day) construction projects.
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.”
I am so curious about what your field is and what they titled your book ...
Anyway, fun fact: one of the engineers who was key in the development of the cooking process for Pringles, Gene Wolfe, is also one of the all-time great science-fiction writers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/obituaries/gene-wolfe-dead.html
I had told my daughter that she shouldn't read BotNS until after high school ... Wolfe's treatment of his female characters can be, well, let's say problematic.
Did you know that Wolfe was a devout Catholic (with a shrine in his home to Mary), AND believed (or at least claimed to believe) that the Roman Gods were real powers in the world who were now diminished for lack of worshippers (and who did not deserve to be worshipped). Which reminds me of a Star Trek episode ...
As someone in an academic field apparently of similar size to yours, I read this comment twice for double enjoyment. "Trendy Word Vomit"...inspired! I think I'll read it again!
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.
Well it's a bit tangential to the larger point of the piece, but I would say
1. Don't write for money; the vast majority of people who try make terrible wages and eventually give up.
2. Understand that first books are hard to sell and that second books are even harder to sell because that first book very likely didn't sell.
3. Never write a book under the pretext that the advance money will be sufficient to make you rich/pay off your loans/enable you to be a professional writer of books because it won't be.
4. Have a day job.
5. Please no more writers who are embarrassed to be writers writing books that are embarrassed to be books. Write it or don't. Save the scarce publishing resources for people who are unashamed of wanting to write and what they write.
1 and 2, true for NY, not so much for the small presses. Again, it is possible to make money as a writer, i believe that money is important but about third on the list of importance to a writer. doing it solely for the money is stupid and without integrity and yes, the first one is harder to sell as there is no track record. second books are only harder to sell in NY, they want a winner the first time around. the small, independent presses don't care. 3: always true. 4: it took me 5 books before i could live on my royalties, this is generally true for those writers who make money at it. never put all your money making in one basket, have multiple sources, always. 5: many people want to write simply for their vitae, kind of like a business card sort of thing. they are not writers. writing is a sacred craft; there is a long tradition behind each of us who become writers. betraying that is a sin. still, as my mentor john dunning (the mystery writer) once put it: illigitimi non carborundum and never expect to find the word integrity in a publishing contract.
I just bought a little book about surveying to understand geodetic markings. The writer is clear, lucid and insightful. I never heard of him, but I bet he makes a lot of $$$ beneath the radar. Also bet he's never been to a party. __Geodetic Datums Made Simple: Step by Step Guide (Surveying Mathematics Made Simple) (Volume 19).
well, not the kind of party you and i would go to.
I went through a pretty similar process: I wanted to be an author, until I really looked into what getting a book published entails and the meager chances of true success.
I ended up writing fanfic. It isn't glamorous and it pays nothing (although that seems to be the situation for most writers anyway...), but it scratches the itch. I have no interest in playing industry games; I'm just happy I can share what I made and have people read it and tell me they liked it.
Fanfic is awesome. There are so many amazing novels on there for free. It blows my mind. I read fic for shows I've never even seen, because a lot of "alternate universe" fics aren't even about the show.
Plus, I love that you can write just about anything, and as long as you tag it appropriately, the comments will be positive and supportive. Whenever I want to write something weird or experimental, it goes on AO3.
I would like to read a writer's observations on nursing.
Well, that's fantastic news! I'll get back to you. Actually what made me do a major pivot into nursing was being an end-of-life caregiver to my mother-in-law and to a lesser extent for my grandmother. I've been ruminating on those experiences for the past 6 years, since my MIL died. I'm sure I'll write something about them before too much longer.
Also it's worth noting that if I hadn't left my career, I wouldn't have been available to provide that care to my family. So my lack of regret has compounded with each of my three kids and then those two situations. We're fortunate that we can get by on my husband's salary (though for a long time, it was touch and go.)
I think that's the right perspective. I made $3,400 from my first book in the first year (small publisher, no advance, just royalties). But I love to write, and it's rewarding to hear from readers who appreciate my books.
In my genre, the market is saturated with self-published authors willing to write basically for free. Readers complain if an ebook isn't on Kindle Unlimited and/or priced at about two dollars. Amazon owns the market and has turned it into Spotify: Readers expect unlimited books for $10 per month. It's hard to imagine that we'll ever go back. After all, I wouldn't pay $16.99 for an album these days.
Anyway, the authors trying to do it full-time seem miserable. They constantly churn out low-quality books and beg readers to join their Patreons. It's not glamorous at all. Meanwhile, my day job allows me to write what I want at my own pace, and I don't have to stress about sales.
What's your day job and can I have a link to your books?!
My day job involves data and statistics. I don't post my pen name on Substack for privacy reasons -- plus I write for a tiny demographic in a niche subgenre, so chances are it wouldn't be your thing anyway.
But if you really want to know, if you tell me your email or Twitter handle or Reddit (something with DM capabilities) I'll send you the link. :)
sure! it's my first name dot my last name @ gmail
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.
I was always pretty much purely mercenary as a freelancer, so I definitely would have taken their money. But as you suggest, it's very unlikely they would have ever tried to give me some.
I have an image of you wearing a cloak that obscures your face, typing furiously by candlelight. Freddie the mercenary.
Freddie the Sellpencil
Sellword
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 mean... what is there to satirize? It's all completely artless - I am moral, you are not, the wheels of power should turn to serve my ends, even (or especially) if that means crushing you. Not a lot of good material there.
Lots of people are satirizing the new elite consensus, but the satirization's metapolitical footing is not a metapolitics the Gawker set would even understand how to set a little pinky toe upon. This isn't to say Gawker is "left" whereas, say, Bill Burr, is "right." But Bill Burr isn't Gawker's metapolitical tribe. And he, unlike them, can still crack a funny joke at the new consensus's expense.
"What is there to satirize?" I think satire works only in a specific cultural context, where reacting strongly and negatively to barbs is seen as a sign of moral weakness. So when screaming in indignation at the slightest touch is seen as as a sign of moral strength and clarity, at least among the empowered elite, what purchase can satire find?
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.
Your experience definitely jibes with mine. In the end, though, especially after Gawker itself was folded, what stopped me going to Deadspin with such regularity wasn't a sense of trying to tear myself away, as if trying to quit cigarettes, but rather just boredom.
Deadspin was always feisty, but it seemed like they were trying to pick a fight with any and everyone in sports media for their abject failure to be Deadspin. First it was Barstool, which, sure. Then it was SB Nation. Then, finally, it was The Athletic. I'm still not sure what their problem was with that last one. They hated SB Nation for not paying writers enough. They hated The Athletic for...paying them too much? I think?
I mean, dislike the monster media entities. Criticize them. But if you've arrived at the point where everyone else is bad but you, and they are bad for their failure to be you, you're really the only common denominator there.
So, yeah, your experience is at least representative of two people.
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.
Certainly the most likely outcome is that they spend most of their time going after Greenwald and Taibbi et al, just like every other liberal outlet out there. I like Leah Finnegan and she has some tendencies against the current herd - I think she was one of the few public voices against the Gawker union - but there is simply too much risk in going after anyone but woke-approved targets. But time will tell.
Exactly. Your piece made me keep somewhat of an open mind. Who knows. Maybe I'll be surprised.
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."
O Felicity, you are so right. I should be working but these are so interesting. FdB posting during work hours too tempting, tho.
I had no idea what a woman of stature you are until I just googled you! Really pleased to be able to talk with you here in FdB's comments.
Famous librarian - thank you, true but still a librarian. Tho--a secret--all this stuff we are talking about?? if we (librarians) don't make sure it is safe for future generations it's gone. I get a lot of books from used bookstores that buy up library discards and sometimes they leave in the old check-out cards and famous writers --never circulated...so be nice to your librarians. When I started writing on the Internet here and there I decided I would use my name because that would make me think a little bit before I hit send.
"if we (librarians) don't make sure it is safe for future generations it's gone."
In the shower this morning I was thinking about some of the stupid and embarrassing things outlets like the WaPo and the NYT have been publishing lately, and whether and how they might scrub them in the future from their own websites, the Wayback Machine, LexisNexis, etc. I suspect this is inevitable. And then where will we be? The past will be whatever the "Paper of Record" wants it to be.
But they can't scrub microfiche.
I remember using the microfiche readers when I was in college. Not for any research, but just because it was fun to read the daily newspaper from, say, 1936 or some other year before I was born. But I don't suppose newspapers are recorded on microfiche anymore, are they? and I recall reading a depressing article recently about how libraries are destroying microfiche because of the space it takes. Is that really happening.
I hope not because, librarians, you're our only hope.
O funny. My first job was microform librarian and govt documents. A lot of libraries are getting rid of them (the light bulbs are so hard to find) but there are plenty safe guarded. It's not even 100 years ago that microfilm was "the" hot topic among librarians. I wrote about this a while ago: https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/microphotography
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.
I read the meta meta meta novel by Ben Lerner (10:04) that had scenes about a writer getting huge advances but his attitude toward librarians and archivists was so mean to people earning 1/100 of his advances that I hated him. He probably doesn't understand that librarians and archivists are the working classes of "writing." I put the book in a Little Free Library and it's still there a month later with spiders on it. (yes I donate to Little Free Libraries a lot because I have so many books). meta meta meta--they all learned a new word.
I moved to Reno five years ago and Little Free Libraries are all over the place here. I'd never seen them before (in SoCal). I thought maybe they were a regional thing.
"The real author money has never come from the advance anyway, it comes from backend stuff like foreign rights, film rights, lectures, etc."
Is this true? I don't know much about the economics of this. I only know that James Ellroy (a personal fave) has said film rights are nothing compared to book royalties.
Successful genre writers (crime/thriller/romance), rare as they are, make book royalties out the wazoo. The topic at hand here, though, was literary authors, who cannot and should not depend on such royalties or books sales. They're the ones who end up teaching at MFA programs so they can make ends meet, because they sell maybe 1000-5000 copies. But an Ellroy or a Danielle Steele or a David Baldacci doesn't need to do that because their books fly off the shelves by the millions (literally). Just a different animal.
Ah, that makes sense. Thank you for clarifying!
JE should be read by everyone talking about conspiracy theories. That style...I would like to have someone somewhere discuss him and how he knew these things. I went to Dallas and traced his story. (The Adolphus is owned by Marriott now.)
I sound like a fan girl. The American Library Association was meeting in Dallas so I skipped a few sessions to go where JE went including Book Depository but I went through JE's eyes.
In college, I received an award for poetry at the Southern Literature Conference. A handful of my wonderful friends and a few professors came with me. We attended my event, then we skipped out to go to Square Books and Faulkner's house, where I picked up a pecan off the ground and tried to get it to grow in a pot on my apartment balcony. (Sadly, it didn't; and even worse, I just learned via google that the pecan tree died in 2016)
On one long ride I went to Tupelo (Elvis) and Oxford.
What about the economies of e-books and audio-books? My biggest check was for a copy translated into Japanese. But just once.
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.
You can try to make fun of youtube influencers but most of your audience won't even know who almost any of them are because the audiences are so niche and siloed off. You can make fun of influencers in general but that's a pretty dry well.
I wouldn't know a single one. And I even have an Instagram.
"You can make fun of influencers in general but that's a pretty dry well." For the gamers in the audience, I gesture towards the Calypso Twins in Borderlands 3 as a prime example. Fun loot 'n' shoot game, don't get me wrong, but the attempt to make a parody of influencers resulted in a pair of very mediocre villains.
Influencers on TikTok and Instagram do *not* have siloed audiences.
I think the point is that nobody here would probably recognize any of them, just as they probably don't know who Freddie or Wesley Yang or Matt Taibbi are.
I agree with that - that doesn't mean Nu Gawker won't have a reason to exist! It just means that 99% of the people here (including me) won't get much out of it.
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.
As my decidedly non-literary brother would put it, NY can suck a butt. (The literary scene and also the Yankees.)
nicely put.
"...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..."
"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."
I was so impressed by your writing, both in this post and on your web site (the Bathory piece), that I went to Amazon to look at your books. To my surprise they weren't in the fields of social commentary, or fiction, but botany. Talk about practicing what you preach!
thank you, deeply appreciated.
What a wonderful essay to find in a Substack comments section. Thank you for taking the time to explain all this for us, though I suppose you enjoyed writing it as much as I enjoyed reading it. It was quite eye-opening, and I have no reason to doubt the truth of it. It certainly conforms with my suspicions anyway.
Thank you. I love writing, i always have. books saved my life more times than i can say. And i read constantly, i think most writers do. As well I love talking about writing and especially how to make a living at it that works and is accessible to all. I read so many articles that say that you can't make a living at it so why bother. Or that writers are horribly paid. Or that . . . . whatever. It is true for some but it does not have to be. If it is in your blood and you are willing to be real and write many books then it is not as hard as they make it out to be. as John Gardner once put it, a good writing teacher and a monkey with a typewriter can write what passes for most novels these days. or, in other words, the writing world is a paper tiger, if you write the genuine, and you write a lot, sooner or later it will happen for you. Especially now since there are so many options to NY. It was the hippies that first began to form their own tiny publishing companies and broke the distribution monopoly of the NY presses. Amazon took the place of a corrupt Sears. NY presses forced out unprofitable imprints and subjects, small presses started, taking the imprint names, buying all the titles being given up, and printing more of the subjects deemed unworthy by NY. Inner Traditions started this way. They make a LOT of money. Just think about it. A thousand titles that sell one thousands copies a year is a million copies sold. (NY rarely keeps titles in print that sell even 3000 copies a year. They want 10k a year or more.) A $20 dollar book returns to the publisher about a $7 profit, so that is 7 million dollars a year which ny thinks is paltry but for a small press is a very nice income, esp since this is bread and butter money, year in and year out. new titles often sell far more than that. (I have one with them that is up to 65,000 copies at this point.) They are always looking for new titles. nonfiction. They get 10,000 submissions a year, they publish 60. the acquisitions editor can tell from the first sentence or paragraph of the book whether he wants it or not; he is very fast. most of the writers do not read, most have never thought about writing or the craft, most are overly schooled but not educated. Any kind of decent book that is well written has a shot there or at one of the other small presses. Not making money as a writer is like starving and not eating at a banquet. yes it is hard work; i often worked 80 hour weeks for years to make it happen. facing the empty page is often difficult. and writing the genuine is often terribly frightening. as barry lopez once said, if you are not scared you are doing something wrong. when i get stuck i just ask myself, what is it i am afraid to say out loud? Right now, here in this room. it has always worked, for over 25 years.
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.
People build imaginary castles, especially young people
it was fairly good through the 70s, until the large NY publishers were bought up and became part of unrestrained corporate capitalism. Ludlum's first editor worked with him for 2-3 years to help him develop before they published his first book. this was common then. it isn't any longer. they expect publishable copy from the beginning. most decent editors have been fired and poorly paid MFA grads have taken their place.
At its height, it employed people like James Thurber, EB White and Wolcott Gibbs, but admittedly that was a long time ago.
that was when it was fun and real and it was people living a life that wrote not graduates of MFA programs who mostly have not lived at all. Before, many working class people wrote. most people in the newspaper industry were working class. Now most newsrooms are mfa graduates; it makes a huge difference in tone and orientation. I find the newer writers colorless for the most part, insipid, and boring. that is why i support people like freddie on substack. they are original voices, writing with style, saying upsetting things that simulate thought, parsing difficult truths and simplicities. it is great fun.
There's no modern day counterparts to Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Studs Terkel or Mike Royko who all sprang from the working class. Instead the percentage of Ivy Leaguers at elite media institutions like the NY Times has soared.
no, there isn't, nor herb caen in san francisco.
Ha ha, I was just about to post the same examples. Can Herb Caen join that list?
Yup. I' m sure there are plenty of other names that I forgot to list.
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.
That's interesting
Just to pile on: he's correct. The big transition now is the declining value of TV ads as a) fewer people <65 watch linear TV and b) the capabilities of internet advertising grows. Once internet advertising has come closer to the physical limit of what it's capable of, and linear TV doesn't exist, that's when we'll start seeing some real consolidation.
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.
"nobody else in America cared about this barely existent counterculture"
But the people who cared about it very very much wrote the media. It was relevant for that reason alone, as twisted as that may be.
I agree that it was somewhat relevant, but again I think not because these institutions were reactions to this counterculture, but because they exemplified it. Thanks to these sites, everyone on earth could experience the vibes of "talking to smug people at a Brooklyn party in the 2000s."
I lived in Tampa when Hulk Hogan...so only reason I paid attention.
"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."
Two hipsters walk into a bar. Ten minutes later, they walk out.
"That place has gone to shit," the first one says.
"Yeah," the second one says. "It used to be cool. Now it's full of goddamn hipsters."
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.
Good comments sections are dead, imho. I used to *love* the comments section at the AV Club, but I think you're right that twitter has filled that gap these days.
Ahem, check out the comments section you’re in right now, bro!
Comments sections are only good when they're paywalled, which makes me wonder how Freddie thinks commenting privileges should be distributed under communism.
What was the joke about France?
> Comments sections are only good when they're paywalled, which makes me wonder how Freddie thinks commenting privileges should be distributed under communism.
LOL
That reminds me of a 'communism shower thought' I had a while ago – don't 'the means of production' reasonably include personal computers, and human brains, or even pencils, paper, or not too long ago, typewriters?
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 mean, I could but... aren't there many people who could do a better job than me?
No! Other people are encumbered by employment considerations and reputational bullshit. I trust you, I have a sense you will be forthright and fulsome: real.
My take: Trump was right. I ask you who gainfully employed in the media business would risk saying that right out loud. Nobody!
Trump was right about WHAT, exactly?
His "wall" was both YUGEly expensive and completely ineffective (which, now that I think about it, describes Trump himself pretty well ...)
And I agree with Freddie: there isn't really much for him to say here. I presume he just expects the forthcoming marxist/socialist revolution to dismantle all borders ...
The wall is nonsense, as compared to say a program of automated drones and motion detection systems operating 24/7/365.
His point about securing the borders? Far more prescient.
Trump never intended to actually secure the borders, because his peeps (the 1%) are very fond of illegal-immigrant slave labor, just like Trump himself is at his resort properties and (back in the day) construction projects.
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/