Today I Learned

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.

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.

Piers anthonys advice for becoming a professional writer was having a spouse who works. He pretty much gives his first wife the credit for his success (she passed away, they did not get divorced)

Art doesn't pay. Capitalism ~~can't exploit it as much as manual labor~~ exploits 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)

Given the respective numbers of professional book writers and billionaires, I doubt it very much.

50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year

Yikes.

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

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.

The secret is to just be a machine that looks human, like Sanderson, fucker writes whole books as secret projects

This article gives the impression that most people who studied English literature are now considered to be doing some equivalent of flipping burgers.