Excerpt: It’s a lifestyle many writers yearn for: unhurried, complacent, lots of manufactured insouciance, and lots of money to write about it all.
Fyre Fest, the disastrous “luxury musical event” that left thousands drenched on an island with no food or drinking water after depriving each of them of tens of thousands of dollars, is at least a source for metaphors about our times.
In the late spring of 2017, 5000 people showed up on the island of Exuma in the Bahamas to partake of what they had been promised would be an experience like no other. There would be supermodels (code for: “orgies with hot women”), celebrity chef dinners and, of course, music. The only part that turned out to be true was that the “festival” was like no other. Having landed, attendees found ripped and torn tents for sleeping quarters and no working toilets—and that was just the beginning. They were left to fend for themselves and even stole from each other to survive, like people in Lost but without the camaraderie. None of the promised gourmet meals materialised and the few lucky ones got soggy cheese sandwiches in foam containers.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Fyre Festival as a metaphor for publishing, as in the world of magazines and online outlets as well as that of book publishing. I write, a lot, about the conditions of writing and the publishing world in general. One of the more baffling issues I’ve tried to understand is the extent to which fellow writers will persist in not only enduring the terrible conditions of publishing (bad pay, very late pay, massive pay disparities and more) but refuse to agitate to change them. Sure, Not All Writers, but many if not most.
A few months ago, I put out a call asking writers to let me know what they thought should be a set of principles for better conditions. What, I asked, might be a decent amount for an advance, for instance? I was working off a great piece by Rob Spillman, where he suggests that instead of giving “absurd” advances to a few like Lena Dunham, publishers give all writers $100,000 (it’s a bit more nuanced than that, and you should read the entire piece, which is very good and very necessary). Personally, I think the amount should be double that because advances aren’t paid out in their entirety, but (usually) in quarters (halves if you’re lucky) and agents will usually get their cuts, around 15 percent. But about $50,000 for starters is a good amount that will pay for rent and general expenses, freeing up a writer to simply focus on writing a book. It struck me as both democratic and transparent to suggest that we should simply think about supporting writers without fetishising the work and, yes, yes, craft of writing by throwing massive amounts at a few for no reason at all. It’s highly unlikely that Lena Dunham’s millions of followers on Instagram are buying her book Not That Kind of Girl even as they coo and wave at her in her posts, or that she ever recovered her $3.7 million advance for Random House. Kristen Roupenian received upwards of $1.2 million for a two-book deal after her blah short story “Cat Person” went viral on the New Yorker site. To the best of my knowledge, her first book, an anthology titled You Know You Want This (even the title is engorged with irony) has disappeared without a trace.
The problem is not the individual authors who get these advances (unless they happen to be Dunham, who has been demonstrably racist and doesn’t have a principle she can stand by) but the system itself. Roupenian is young and white and at least upper middle class, so she’ll be fine, and if she’s had good financial advice she’s mostly set for life (to repeat: she is young and white and at least upper middle class—and her book is to be an HBO series). She may well write another book or more, and will probably still get great deals for the rest of her life because, let us remember, she will always be white even when she is no longer young and of the class that knows how to demand and get money even for mediocre work. There will always be other writers who get meaninglessly large amounts of money for not much promise, and not all of them will be white ( Roxanne Gay’s career is a mystery, given what a terrible writer she is), but it will still always be the system, not the individuals that we need to critique and criticise.
And yet, and yet, and yet: writers persist in believing that they, each one, will be the exceptions. Writers, by and large, have subsisted on a central myth that structures their writing aspirations: that someday Very Big Publishers will pay them Very Large Advances and they will become the next Stephen King or the next Lena Dunham or [Insert Name Here]. The truth is that writers like King and John Grisham and Danielle Steele and others like them are the blockbuster names that do actually sell millions of copies, but the idea of paying for a guaranteed bestseller is old school by now (please don’t snark about the quality of their writing just because they’re also best-selling authors: good writing is good writing, regardless of genre or popularity). Dunham’s advance wasn’t paying for her writing skills (which are fine, like that of a promising sophomore) or for the prospect of selling books but for the fact that she is Lena Bloody Dunham: she proves that the publishing world is tied to Influencer Culture and has nothing to do with actual writing. You might wonder, Dear Reader: how does the publishing world survive if it pays so much for books it knows won’t sell? The long answer is a complicated one, for another day—I’m working on it and believe me, getting financial information on publishing is like trying to enter Fort Knox with a fake i.d. The short answer is: Fyre Fest.
The publishing world is an economic system that runs on a peculiar set of principles that would make an average economist’s head explode. But it’s not just that it’s run by people who make decisions based on not very much logic, but that it’s sustained by people who really do think that its arbitrary and perplexing ways are absolutely meaningful because they might benefit from them: writers.
Consider Fyre Fest: why did so many people pay so much for tickets to an experience that was so absurdly over the top in its promises? The people who ended up going were people who hoped, not so secretly, to experience and perhaps even become part of a lifestyle that their favourite Influencers, like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid, had been showing them for years, the same influencers who were paid to tell them to pay for tickets. And, let us be blunt and put it as baldly as possible: more than a few of those who paid hoped to fuck a supermodel or two. They were promised a lifestyle they had all been dreaming of. Fyre Festival may never exist in the way it was intended but in one sense, it continues on Instagram and in the spectacularly successful careers of people like the Kardashians (Jenner is part of their demon spawn) and Hadid. Fyre Festival is a metaphor for the ways in which neoliberalism gives us nothing to hope for but the fantasy of unbounded success that it will only give to the very, very few. And if you get some of that success, why, it must be because you’re so very, very special!
Why do writers continue to be relatively compliant and even supplicate themselves to a publishing world that treats them like dirt and survives on hierarchies involving massive amounts of money for the very, very few and insultingly small amounts for the rest? Some years ago, I publicly and relentlessly called out publications like Guernica, OpenDemocracy, and The Rumpus for not paying their writers. Responses were irate and huffy, but at least both Guernica and Rumpus began to pay (the latter a ridiculously small amount, which it proferrs with great piety): I take full credit for the changes, even the shitty ones, because no one else was willing to publicly call out these outlets for their practices of not paying. Yet, even now, academics and independently wealthy writers continue to write for free or very little because they don’t need to and they sneer at writers like me who demand pay: Oh, heavens, there she goes again, talking about, ew, money! If Rumpus would demand of its readers that they finally subscribe for the work that they happily devour for free, it could pay its writers a lot more than the pitiful amount it currently offers. Writing still remains the province of People with Money: I’m a rarity, as a writer who makes the majority of her (small) income from writing—if not for donors and subscribers and benefactors, I’d be out on the streets, delusionally babbling on about my projects to anyone who will listen. Any writer who tells you that “it’s not about the money because writing is not work, it’s a craft” (actual words I’ve had to endure from writers) is someone with a trust fund or a partner with a well-paying job and health insurance, or a day job.
But their inherent comfort is not the main reason writers won’t challenge the system. They won’t challenge the status quo because most of them secretly believe that they will be the good and deserving ones, the ones who will get those million dollar advances someday. There was once a time when the world of successful writers was dominated by white men whose tales of lust and avarice were held up as what we should all aspire to. That has changed, but not necessarily for the better: today’s Successful Writer Lifestyle is more likely to be that of a wealthy twenty-something living in the depths of Brooklyn, walking distance from an artisanal plant jerky spot next to a store that sells handmade journals with covers embossed with flowers picked only under the blood moon. Her sex life consists mostly of encounters with older men which she then writes about with what can only be described as Breathless Boredom. It’s not quite the hedonistic orgies of yore, but it’s just as self-involved and, frankly, just as uninteresting. It’s a lifestyle many writers yearn for: unhurried, complacent, lots of manufactured insouciance, and lots of money to write about it all.
The truth is that this is out of the reach for most and this fantasy about a writer’s life obscures the realities behind it. In her memoir-ish book, Dunham writes about her success with Girls and everything that followed as if it were all just happenstance: she and her friends were just silly young things with these goofy ideas and suddenly one day, out of the blue, HBO came along, and oh, giggles and cheers, it all just happened, folks! Left out is the fact that Dunham is of moneyed New York stock, with two very successful artist parents who, even if they didn’t have mega millions (though more than enough to afford private schools and lots of therapy for their child) were and are part of an exclusive set of people with long roots and access to people with lots of money, including friends in the entertainment industry. It’s a world where not having money-as-in-actual-money is no impediment as long as you also know People With Money. Nothing that has happened to Lena Dunham has happened to her only because of her talent (it may surprise you to know that I actually think at least some of Girls is underrated): nearly all of it has come to her because of the advantages of wealth and connections into which she was born. Dunham’s narrative about herself boosts the idea that it just takes a combination of luck and daring to become a successful writer or director when the truth is the luck has to do with the accident of birth.
But stories like those of Dunham and Roupenian and [Insert Several Names Here] who magically get Very Big Deals are what keep writers cathected to a publishing world that treats them with such disdain and contempt: the relationship between skill and payment is utterly intangible. As the deeply lamented Gawker pointed out, Dunham got her book contract on the basis of little more than pages from her journal; the rest of us spend months or more fine-tuning proposals and sample chapters to send to publishers. Roupenian had no publishing track record beyond a clumsy short story that happened to plug into the zeitgeist.
I could go on but let me end here: Publishing offers dreams the way Fyre Fest offered people the chance of a lifetime to lie on the beaches with famous and glamorous people (and to fuck them), to finally, actually become part of lifestyles they had only so far watched from afar. Most of Influencer culture is a giant lie and a large number of Influencers will either burn out or worse, unable to bear the hype and the stress of being spectacles and commodities. Publishers don’t overtly lie to writers about what they might achieve. They don’t have to, because writers lie to themselves all the time, firm in the belief that if they just keep ignoring the inequities of their profession—do just one more unpaid gig, write one more unpaid piece about left politics for Substack or Medium, do one more interview with a Famous Celebrity that’s a barely disguised promo because it might go viral—they too will get multi-million contracts. All of this while ignoring that places like Substack and Medium could actually afford to pay all its writers and get them healthcare, but they choose not to pursue that model.*
I don’t write this to say that having money is evil. Listen: give me a million-dollar-contract, and I will be happy to take it and if you think I should abjure it for some high-minded reason, you’re either someone who has always had enough or is fine with living in rat-infested spaces and going hungry for days. I also don’t begrudge writers their giant advances because, listen, money is hard to come by in this profession and if it’s offered to you, you should take it and run (also, deliver on the books, of course), even if you’re Lena Dunham and a mostly untalented hack with demonstrably shitty politics. One of the problems with how we discuss money as writers is that we personalise it so much. If a writer, especially a woman and, oh, horrors, a person of colour, gets a large advance, writers instantly fall upon the deal with fangs and claws out and gripe and moan and whine about the unfairness of it all.
What if we took that energy and turned it towards the publishing world and actually demanded real change? There are writers of colour who gripe and moan that white writers routinely get bigger advances, and that’s a legitimate concern and problem. But as long as you’re only concerned about not getting the same amounts of money, you’re not really changing the system: you’re just hoping to shift the odds in your favour. [A side note: I find something similar happening in the art world where a lot of people are demanding that some kinds of white artists, like Balthus, should not be exhibited and that we need more women of colour in the art world. But no one in that lot, as far as I can tell, is actually challenging the deeply problematic and completely irrational art world that bestows value upon some artworks and creates institutions and individuals who get to be gatekeepers deciding what counts as “art” in the first place.]
The question for the left has always got to be: do we simply want to change who gets to be part of exploitative systems or do we want to raze the system to the ground and build a better world from the bottom up? Until writers resist and refuse the logic of a publishing world that ascribes arbitrary value to some and denies support to many others, we’re stuck with a system that knows it can continue to exploit us. Until we bring about actual change, publishing will be like Fyre Festival, offering dreams of celebrity and worlds of luxury but only giving us soggy cheese sandwiches in the end.
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You can find more about my writing on writing in these pieces. If you use “publishing” as a search term on this website, there will be more. I’ve written a lot about the issues.
*This paragraph was lightly edited for clarity on August 28, 2021.
“’Cat Person’ Will Never Die.”
“The Politics of Publishing.”
“I’m a Freelance Writer. I Refuse to Work for Free.”
“Jacobinned: The Story Behind the Story Jacobin Refused to Publish.”
“Undocumented: How an Identity Ended a Movement.“
“Is Your Reading Material Ethically Sourced?”
“Scabs: Academics and Others Who Write for Free.”
“Scabs and the Seductions of Neoliberalism.”
“On Writers as Scabs, Whores, and Interns, And the Jacobin Problem.”
“Make Art! Change the World! Starve!: The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice, Part I.”
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Image: At the Seaside, Walter Merritt Chase, c. 1892.