Issue #16 - A Rant and a Comfort for Writers
My Complaints about Publishing
First, no one asked.
Second, let me clear the table and invite you to conversation I've been having with a lot of writers and artists. The following has kept me grounded.
I don’t deserve to be published in some “top-tier” magazine or land a six-figure book deal. It’s not a right bestowed upon the geniuses of which, of course, I am :) Probably a lot of those people that do get published don’t deserve to be there either. And what is “there”? Is it some Olympian board room in which glowing favor is bestowed on the few worthy individuals? The gods’ decisions obscure to mortals, but ultimately just and good for us if only we'd accept our fates.
The one author I’ve met who had a six-figure book deal and then was given the executive producer reins on the television adaptation of his own book is a ball-of-nerves worried that he won’t be able to land a second six-figure book deal. In our conversation over a beer watching the cheating Astros win the World Series, he lashed out at what he perceived as the Cthonian forces besetting him on all sides. His last piece of writerly advice as he walked away was, “Don’t marry crazy, French women!”
I got that on lock, buddy. My wife comes from sane, Alsatian stock.
Dear reader-who-might-be-a-writer, I bring this up because I’ve just switched tabs over from a well-known poetry magazine that is embroiled in yet another grievous offense. They published someone who should not have been published–not because the poem was bad, but because he was a bad person. To be fair, the entire issue of the magazine was devoted to people who were incarcerated, but his particular crime for which he served time according to the state’s definition of a humane sentence, cannot ever be expunged. Why should he be able to write a poem? Surely his humanity and any hope for redemption were lost the moment some part of his psyche was bent to commit a crime so heinous. Any poem he writes shall bear the mark of Cain, and he shall wonder the earth, dirty poems in his pockets, searching for a city that will let him in. From the city walls, he can hear them dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean.”
I know. The problem isn’t that he wrote a poem, it’s that a flagship poetry journal published it and gave him a platform while all the other poet-revolutionaries wallow in the gutters of online journals that pay in exposure. It isn’t fair.
You’re absolutely right.
But nobody owes me anything, and I don’t write because I want a platform. I write because I’m trying settle things in myself, and sometimes, when I do it just right, that settling can become universal. A benefit to others who feel themselves disturbed, and might be quieted by the form I provide.
But what if it wasn’t about the platform from which we can launch our career (That’s a carrot on a string anyway. More on that later), but about the hopeful humanity expressed in a poem. Let’s be generous for just a second and give our criminal-poet the benefit of the doubt, which all ex-cons are hoping for as they enter back into society. Maybe the punitive measures of the state were effective. Maybe he truly repented of his ways and received the psychological help he needed while incarcerated. Maybe he has emerged with some bit of evidence that a person plagued with evil tendencies can actually find freedom, and in the form of a poem, demonstrates it in a universal way. What if some reader with those same tendencies, despairing in his shame, reads that poem and begins to see some glimmer of hope that he doesn’t have to act on his broken desires? It’s a long shot, I know, but isn’t that what we think literature might be capable of? Instead, what that despairing reader will find today is the massive storm of shame heaped upon that ex-con poet. Do you know what doesn’t motivate actual change in a person? Shame. Do you know what shame actually does?
Maybe it’s my Calvinist tendencies, but I know that I’m depraved. Look at my record and you’ll probably see someone well-adjusted to society, but thank God that God is the only one who knows my thoughts. The streets of my imagination flow bright red with the blood of my perceived enemies.
If you have ten minutes, read this review and despair: The Death of the Artist
If you don’t have ten minutes, then here’s the TL;DR: The economics don’t make sense.
When Hemingway was writing in 1920s Paris, he could make $50 per story (adjust for 2021 inflation=$651). His apartment cost $24.
The most I have ever been paid for a story was $500. The story took nearly five years to find a publisher. The only reason I was paid that much was because I won a contest (which had a $20 entry fee). Not to mention the magazine had my story for two months before I heard anything, which in the lit mag world is lightning fast, but in any other marketplace is extremely slow. Houses sell faster than that. Also, out of everybody who was published in that issue of the magazine, only two of us were paid anything. My mortgage payment the month I won, and the 360 surrounding months, was three times what I was paid for that story.
Another factor is the glut of labor. There are 200+ MFA programs graduating thousands of history’s most educated writers every year, not to mention anybody with a high school diploma who should be able to write, funneling into the same industry, which is kept largely by five four major corporations.
Then the literary magazine market which must involve thousands, if not tens of thousands, of magazines occupying every niche from BIPOCLGBTQIA+ to inspirational Christian romance. Most of these, for economic reasons of their own, don’t pay anywhere close to a wage which the hours of work warranted. Like most artistic marketplaces, all of the dollars are being siphoned off by middleman platforms. Spotify for musicians; Submittable for writers.
Here are some numbers from my “career:”
$977.69 (90 submissions), on Submittable over eight years. (That does not include other magazines with their own submission platforms).
In all, since 2011 when my first story was published (at a top-tier magazine), I have earned $950 for “creative” writing.
From the Death of the Artist review above:
Creators need to cater to the market’s demand for constant and immediate engagement, for “flexibility, versatility, and extroversion.” As a result, “irony, complexity, and subtlety are out; the game is won by the brief, the bright, the loud, and the easily grasped.”
In short, the bad economics make for bad art. An unhealthy market rewards the wrong things. And the craziest part of all is that the reward is an illusion of a career that might eventually go somewhere. A carrot on a string.
Here’s a dirty, obvious secret: nobody reads literary magazines. The only people who do are other writers who are trying to get into that literary magazine, and they are reading those stories to understand the market, rarely out of love for the art. The picture at the top of this email are a sample of the literary magazines to which I’ve subscribed in the last four years. Do you know how many of those I’ve read cover to cover? Two. Who has the time, or money?
One of my friends reads, voluntarily, for a new literary magazine. They’re reading for Issue 2 and already she has a slush-pile of 300 submissions. And they don’t even pay.
Here’s the thing, as a writer I don’t write so that I can add to my CV while my stories turn to dust, unread on shelves or decaying in landfills. What’s the point? I’d rather write a story and read it to my kids and that be the extent of my audience. If the Olympian board room ever turns its glowing favor on my work, then I'll enjoy those benefits, but I wouldn't expect it to last.
Taped to my laptop:
Just because I’ve spent an inordinant amount of time developing a skill, nobody owes me a living from it.
Lest I leave you in despair, here is my attempt at a solution:
I Believe
- I believe the local imagination to be sufficient. the local marketplace for art-in all its forms- exists but needs to be trained, especially through the patron-artist relationship.
- local artists need to pick up some of the old craftsmen ideas to create art. Create something useful for everybody, not simply personal expression. (That relies on the celebrity of the artist anyway, and not on the quality of the work).
- the days when artists grew incredibly rich from a national or international market were an inflated bump on the historical market. We should scrub that from our expectations.
- we should embrace the idea of the amateur rather than the specialist. The root of the word ‘amateur’ is love.
- That said, we should raise the skill level of the amateur. All the farmers I knew growing up were constantly learning, adapting their methods, and collaborating with their neighbors. They were amateur engineers who designed and manufactured their own implements. They were amateur geneticists who bred their own drought-tolerant strains, or mild-mannered dairy cow. There was no professional “farming school” they had to attend before they could put a seed in the ground.
Despite all of the above, I'm actually in a pretty good mood about being a writer these days.
If you agree or disagree, then please join the conversation by responding to this email.
I'm Seth Wieck. Thanks for the company.