So, what we should take from this is that any foray into any art is useless, therefore we should surrender any and all creative impulse to faceless companies.
Fuck no.
I’d rather distribute my work for free and have it read and enjoyed nonetheless than not write at all.
Why are people focusing on the numerical comparison between writers and billionaires? Whatever, it doesn’t really matter.
The point of the article is that writers and authors are seemingly less valued than they ever have been. One reason for this is probably the change in media consumption habits which renders writers mere employees and underlings in the film and television industries (along with everywhere else). People no longer read books, which are the main format by which writers can become self-employed and self sufficient.
As always, it comes back to the homogenizing aspect of capitalism which tends to absorb everything into an interconnected web of economic dependencies. Instead of small businesses, we have overarching retail behemoths like Walmart and Amazon. Similarly, instead of a multitude of independent writers and authors expressing their own thoughts in books, they are compelled to work in teams to construct artificial, corporatized narratives due to economic necessity, yielding film franchises and television series along with all of their advertising and merchandising income.
Art doesn’t pay. Capitalism
can’t exploit it as much as manual laborexploits it more than anything else so there’s no money in it, unfortunately. On top of that, we have to constantly deal with people demeaning artists as useless and trying to bury us in favor of celebrities.(Not a writer, but an artist nonetheless)
Capitalism can’t exploit it as much as manual labor so there’s no money in it, unfortunately.
Doesn’t that mean that art is exploited even more?
This article has some elements of truth, but skips over some important stuff. In particular, the odds of making a living writing books when on salary, writing the books for a big company or celebrities etc, are vastly higher than just writing your own books. You don’t have to beat insane odds if someone hires you for 70k/year to write books…you simply make that 70k/year. It’s the same as e.g. people working in the video game industry. The odds of earning a middle class income as an Indie Game developer are super bad, but there are many thousands of people working salaried jobs in the mainstream AAA game industry who are definitely ‘making a living’.
Also, this is nothing new. There is a reason ‘starving artist’ is a common term. For centuries, a lot of the most well known people in all creative fields were people who already had money when they started e.g. nobility, and some of those people were able to become famous, largely because they didn’t have financial pressures that the vast majority of people had.
Given the respective numbers of professional book writers and billionaires, I doubt it very much.
I am sure there are many more people who are writing books than who are billionaires. His point was, how many are making a living at it as their primary career.
Did you read his breakdown? He made a pretty compelling case that that number is about 500.
Frankly the whole article is just bizarrely defining metrics to fit the narrative.
Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?
My metric is based on “how many bizarre metrics are in this article”.
Side note, why are substack posts shared consistently, when it looks basically to be blogspam? If I was linking to “billionaire vs books metrics” or whatever, and posted it from blogspot, or tumblr, or even a facebook post, itll be rightly shit on.
But on a substack? Its discussed like it wasnt written by random internet person instead of a valid source
