Issue #341: How to Earn Money from Your Writing

Recently I met with Bill Ivey, the former chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts. He told me that we sometimes think the alternative to the Starving Artist is what he calls the Subsidized Artist, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Art needs money. We can deny it all we want and pretend starving makes for better art, but starving o

People need to eat and pay the rent. “An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint,” said artist Ben Shahn. “A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.” Whether an artist makes money off his work or not, money has to come from somewhere, be it a day job, a wealthy spouse, a trust f

I could dump all the money in your lap tomorrow, of course, but that wouldn’t really help you, would it? Margot is worried about your future, and if you can make this magazine work, then your future is settled. You’ll have a decent job with a decent salary, and during your off-hours you can write all the poems you want, vast epic poems about the my

But this opens up an important question: certainly important to me, because my ability to feed my family depends upon it. If I turn my art into a gift… how do I live? Of course this is not my unique, personal problem. It’s not even a  new  problem. It’s the universal problem faced by all artists, throughout history. 

Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this, author, publisher, and reviewer have joined forces.

Never before has so much culture been available to so many at such little cost.

There’s just one tiny problem.

Where’s the audience? The supply of culture is HUGE and GROWING. But the demand side of the equation is ugly.

In many cases—newspaper subscribers, album purchases, movie tickets sold, etc.—the metrics have been shrinking or even collapsing.