In case you’re an old person thinking of entering the writing world – which I put that way because the expectations of young and old people when it comes to the writing world may be greatly different – then you may have to rethink the old expectations. Freddie deBoer explains this using the bright flame that was apparently Gawker – and why New Gawker cannot work because old Gawker ate the food supply:
But the broader thing is that New Gawker couldn’t do what old Gawker did because everything old Gawker hated is gone. Gawker was, gleefully and often brilliantly, an anti-ideology. It was what it hated. And what Gawker hated is mostly all gone. Principal among them is glamorous, elite magazine and newspaper culture. It’s difficult to even remember this now, but Gawker’s original edge, back in the Elizabeth Spiers era, came from resentment at the money and privilege and (minor) celebrity that could be found in publishing and media – Tina Brown and Conde Nast and Graydon Carter and celebrity profiles and cushy gigs and expense accounts. Similarly, the publishing world which was intermingled with the media one had big-shot publishers and breathless profiles of hot young authors and three-martini lunches at Nobu. Spiers and those that followed her made great hay from mocking the people involved because those people really were enjoying immense material and social reward for having ascended in that world.
And in the most basic and direct terms, this world simply does not exist anymore. There are still overpaid people at Conde Nast, there are those who are lucky enough to get expense accounts (although I promise they’re not just handed a black card anymore), there’s excess and a few inflated advances in publishing, sure. But as it did in music, the internet opened a big fat hole in those industries … [charts omitted]
Here are two numbers that I have shared before, and which I insist that you young folk take very seriously: advances for books have dropped 40% in ten years, and in 2020, 98% of books sold less than 5,000 copies.
No, I never looked at Gawker. But I have to wonder if the Internet simply sucks up so much time that people don’t have time to read those magazines and books that used to garner high wages.
And are now written by “… 22-year-olds for poverty wages instead.”
I’ve often wondered if the creative class’ size would grow in relation to general population growth … and the fact of the matter that, to the extent that the Internet enables a particular class of artist to push their work to the public, the growth is greater than that of the population; instead, it relates to how access to the Internet grows for the potential audience.
BUT – the money that greases the creativity, as it were, did not, because the audience did not grow that much larger, and it has more targets, both inside and outside of the given creative class. Any economist will look at that and predict the fall of wages, just as deBoer observes.
Heinlein once said that if you ask a writer why they write, and they don’t answer “for the money,” they’re lying. But I suspect this is becoming less and less true. A few writers will do well, because they scratch the itch of general culture; most will target genres with precision, or genre fusions with either desperation or genius.
And I just have to say deBoer has touched on something very important here:
There’s still literary pretension. But, as I said recently, generations of writers who came up in the culture that spawned Gawker have been trained to see literary ambition as inherently ridiculous, and spend most of their books mocking the fact that they were so arrogant as to write one.
I shall have to meditate upon this observation. It suggests contamination of the literary world.
