You’ve certainly put in your time in this community and have a lot of experience and expertise in various arenas. You’ve worn at least as many hats as I have.

Perhaps weirdly, I don’t feel so much that I want to “demand” a living wage (though I certainly don’t begrudge authors who do feel this way, and I agree that some other countries certainly put a higher value on the production of art in terms of cultural and economic support–then again, some countries value these things even less, or persecute artists.) As I discuss in Part II of the piece, money just isn’t “why” I write, even on a small scale, and I think this is true for so many writers/artists. We in the indie trenches have followed our passions fully–something very few people in the world really do, and that is a luxury in a global sense. So on some philosophical level, while I do grieve our culture not putting a higher premium on the arts, I also feel very lucky to have the life I have, where I do what I love, and have come to terms with this not necessarily translating to financial gain . . .

But . . . yes, well, “but” . . . of course I don’t mean by this that writers don’t “deserve” to be paid. Obviously, as a writer and editor, I do feel we work hard and I completely concur with your points about how long it takes to produce a book, etc. And to take that further, I believe there is true value to what we produce, which certainly cannot be said of all things that ARE financially rewarded in the culture. So I recognize the disparity in this, even though I’ve come to terms with it, and in no way want to “re-evaluate” what I write in order to make a buck, ala Lance’s suggestion (though again, I do know writers who have made that choice, and who now earn enough money to have quit their day jobs by focusing on work that’s more commercial, so this is a very individual choice . . . )

Mainly, I agree that the failure to sell short stories is in large part the failure of marketing departments–I think this has to do with the lack of easy marketing tag lines, because collections tend to possess so much variance, and to a large extent publishing’s economy has become driven by marketing departments, not editors or writers. So, I mean, in a short-attention-span society, I’m constantly asked why I think short stories aren’t MORE popular, as they really cater to how much people want to read in one sitting these days, etc.–and I think the explosion of online lit mags proves that people do still read short fiction (albeit for free, online.) But big publishing doesn’t really pursue this because the books are just harder to market and “niche-i-fy,” to completely make up a nonexistent word, ha.

I don’t have experience selling e-books exclusively, or self-publishing, but I recently ran a workshop in Tacoma with a poet who had managed to make a decent sum of money self-publishing a book, cutting out the middle-man of distribution, and just selling the book online. More and more writers are making this work, though I would suggest that the task is hard in terms of finding readers and spreading the word about one’s book, and people already well-connected in the lit world may have a much easier time than just the typical writer who has toiled in anonymity and then produced a book–without a huge existing online platform, it would be challenging to market and sell one’s own book with no help from a publisher or distributor, I believe. But for writers who can do it, yeah, it provides a financially viable model that allows a tapped-in writer a lot of control and freedom.

I always like hearing your views on these things. Thanks for weighing in. And remember all those tales about Hemingway and Fitzgerald using short fiction as a way to support themselves WHILE they toiled on those long, years-consuming novels? How different the climate must have been then. I’m fascinated by the major cultural shift in terms of what short fiction is “for” and who its audience is, and what it is economically worth . . .

Also, Lance, I think you’ll agree with me here that writing is real work and deserves real money in payment. We should not judge writers for expecting to earn a living wage, no matter what form or genre they choose. It’s all hard work.

Interestingly, other countries pay their artists living wages and cover some of their expenses because these governments recognize that art of all disciplines is important to culture and politics beyond the corporate bottom line.

In the US, though, it’s feast or famine and way too many good writers are left to wither on their own.

It’s a societal thing, though. People don’t understand that it takes an author years to write one book. They think books are written overnight and then they automatically get published and the author then make tons of money.

Not. Even. Close.

We should, however, take the industry to task for all the $$$ it takes from the publishing process pool; it leaves the writer with nothing but a pittance after everyone else (but the writer who produced the product) takes their “fair” share of “living wages” which are quite a bit more than that.

The industry itself has operated on a failing model since the 1970s and it’s about time that it paid attention to the needs of 21st century readers and writers instead of looking only at the bottom line.

This is largely why they flail now, and largely why I support–wholesale!–the small press and the e-book industry. They exist for all the right reasons, even if they aren’t making blockbuster salaries doing it. (Well, maybe Amazon and iPad are raking it in…)

It’s the industry, by the way, which has determined there’s no money in selling short story collections, despite the fact that I’m surrounded by ordinary people who read them all the time, and I know many authors who’ve gone the e-book route and made money on their titles that they’d never have seen had they gone the traditional route.

I believe that is a key blind spot in an industry which exists solely to make money (they lost their vision about supporting art and cultural production decades ago). A story collection is still a book, and if they’re in the business of selling books, they should be able to sell anything, frankly. For me that is an epic fail on the part of publishing, not a reason to denounce short story writers for demanding a living wage.

This reality is mostly unfortunate for readers, nowadays; the 21st century is making space for deserving authors who can still succeed without the greedy meddling of corporations, thank goodness for self-publishing and POD and e-books, but it still requires that readers accept new ways of reading (electronically, online magazines, downloads), and we’re still in the infancy of that change. Which means readers are still not going to be connected with the writers that could move them because of hardware considerations.

We’ll get there, though, if Amazon’s reports on e-book sales surpassing print books is any indication. The e-book industry can only survive on the reader buy-in, and it appears to be happening…

Sorry for the ambling post but we’re at a critical point in the future of publishing and I’m still sorting things out from my multiple perspectives as a published writer, former small press electronic publisher, and independent editor.

Somewhere in there I believe all aspects of the reading process–the writers, the readers, the publishers, the producers, the distributors–need to return to the idea that literature is not toilet paper to be sold on a pallet at Costco (like Sara Paretsky once described at a writers conference I attended back in 2003) but rather a package of ideas and intellectual property that deserves better.

Thank you, Gina.

Few of us who write expect to get as rich as we would by working for Goldman Sachs. However, it’s not unreasonable for someone writing, say, genre fiction to expect, once published, to be able to make enough money for the occasional undrawn-upon sofa or to help with the preschool tuition. Yes, that does require writing popular fiction (a category that extends beyond vampire romances), which I realize some consider unworthy. And oddly enough, there’s even a market for long-form literary fiction, which garners all the press, awards, and acclaim even if not as many people buy it as they do mysteries, romances, sci-fi, chick lit, horror, fantasy, YA and all the other genres that keep bookstores alive.

If, however, you follow your muse to, say, poetry or short stories, it’s not going to work out for you monetarily unless your name is Frost or Lahiri. That’s not a flaw in publishing; it’s having made a choice to fish in very poor waters. And it’s nothing new. You wouldn’t have made any money thirty years ago, either, before the publishers turned into megaconglomerates and ebooks threatened to upend the world.

It may well be that you can reach 100% of your audience by handselling eight copies through each of the few remaining indie bookstores. But that’s your chosen niche, not the entire publishing world. Ultimately, it’s about the choices we make. If you’re okay with your choice, then it doesn’t matter how much you get paid (or not). If you’re unhappy with the results, it may be time to re-examine the choices that led to them.

Your book is waiting for me at my local Indie bookstore (Brookline Booksmith). I admit, when I called the store, I expected to have to order a copy and wait, but they had it on hand, which is wonderful.

Jessica

Still, I think the concept of “business” is exactly what I’m interested in exploring here.

Yes, if writers are in it solely (or even mainly) to make money, not only would it be foolish not to pursue the 35 sales at B&N (over the 8 or whatever at an indie store) but it would be foolish to write short stories, or really even “literary fiction” in general: one would write whatever the prevailing bestsellers of the day are: vampire romance or chick lit or what-have-you. Or, better yet, don’t write ANY fiction at all, since clearly for every bestselling genre writer getting rich, there are hundreds or thousands who can’t even get a book published after spending years writing it, or whose publications–even in popular genre fiction–fail to result in big bucks.

If one is seeking monetary success, being a writer at all is probably a shoddy way to go about it. There are just no guarantees. If a steady, good income is what one is after, go to medical school or pursue any of dozens of careers where one gets a predictable paycheck.

So to some extent, any type of writing career (spare, maybe, writing speeches for politicians) constitutes following one’s heart, I think, rather than one’s pocketbook. And so, being a writer has always (not just recently) existed in a kind of realm outside the common sense business model. Clearly, writers write for other reasons. And publishers PUBLISH them for other reasons–both in corporate publishing (at least until very recently) and certainly in indie publishing.

So why do ANY writers do it–why does anyone take the chance, knowing the odds?

That’s why what Richard is talking about is something else, I think, which is what I try to cover in Part II of this. Writers write in order to find readers who care deeply (which I would venture to say is not always the same as “in quantity”) about their work. Human connection has always been part of any art form, whether musicians, visual artists, stage actors, writers . . . to say it isn’t or shouldn’t be is to overlook the initial human impetus to make any kind of art at all, isn’t it?