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This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor. It’s best to start at the beginning:
As I mentioned in a previous essay, I’m Holding Out for a Hero, in capitalism, everything is connected, and there’s really no pure action we can take. If you’re not interested in reading that essay, totally fine! Grace Blakely says it really well in her book Vulture Capitalism. This is an extended excerpt, so feel free to skim, but I think it’s worthwhile:
“When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you probably do is pick up your phone. That phone is made of rare earth metals, which were likely extracted from a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebel groups use the revenues from mining these minerals to purchase weapons. But that fact will be far from your mind as you check social media, eking out a little ‘you time’ before the day begins. In doing so, you are surrendering information about the most intimate parts of your life to companies like Facebook, which has been accused of promoting far-right extremism, facilitating child sexual exploitation and interfering with the outcomes of democratic elections, or Twitter (now X), which was recently purchased by an egomaniacal, union-busting billionaire who fires the platform’s employees when his tweets don’t receive enough likes.
You roll out of bed, and pull on some clothes manufactured by a multinational corporation that outsources production to Bangladesh. After thousands of their peers were crushed to death when a garment factory collapsed in Dhaka, the workers who made those clothes organised themselves into a union, but they’re still paid poverty wages. You see an old piece of clothing on the floor that doesn’t spark joy, so you remind yourself to take it to a charity recycling bin. The item of clothing may then continue its journey to a huge dump in Kenya, where impoverished children pick through the waste to find a few items of re-saleable quality. You rush out into the brisk cold air, which is mercifully slightly warmer than the air in your house. Just as they have utterly failed to deal with the housing crisis that forces you to pay two-thirds of your income in rent, your government has failed to insulate people from rising energy costs too.
You jump guiltily into your car, knowing that your decision to drive yourself to work is part of a problem that’s causing global temperatures to rise at an unprecedented rate. But you might console yourself with the knowledge that your car runs on petrol, given Volkswagen’s record of lying to the world about the impact of its diesel engines on the environment and your lungs. By the time the day ends, you’re exhausted – physically and emotionally. You open a food delivery app and, when the delivery driver arrives, you give him a small tip. He’s very grateful for the extra cash because his motorcycle is on its last legs and he’s been faced with a choice between taking out a high-interest payday loan to fix it, or using his bicycle instead, which will mean more work and far fewer deliveries. As you drift off to sleep, you plug in that mobile phone, which was manufactured in a warehouse in China where nets have been installed to catch workers who have tried to throw themselves out of the window.
This may or may not be an accurate depiction of your life. Perhaps you’re reading this book in a home that is now entirely your own, having left your days of drudgery and toil behind you. But you may also be aware that your children seem pathologically incapable of saving the amount of money required to purchase their own homes, let alone enough to retire as comfortably as you have. Or perhaps you are one of those lucky people who really, genuinely enjoys their job, loves their co-workers and believes they’re really contributing something to society. But maybe you also struggle to escape the sense that something isn’t quite right in the world around you, even though you feel entirely unable to do anything about it – other than purchase products marketed to you as ‘green’ and ‘ethical’. Elements of this story will resonate with everyone because it describes what it is like to interact with the systems that govern the societies in which we all live and over which most of us have little control. The luckiest among us might be able to insulate ourselves from some of them, but no one can extricate themselves from the webs of labour, production and consumption that underpin modern capitalism entirely. And, as a result, most of us at some point in our lives will feel a little powerless. Many people will spend nearly every waking moment being controlled by these systems. And for some, that feeling of alienation drives them into a deep sense of despair.”
For anyone who says that anything other than capitalism hasn’t worked out/capitalism is the only thing that works, please listen to this podcast because that’s just NOT FACTUALLY TRUE.
Or message me for book recs 💖
As I explored earlier, there is something really appealing in thinking that if you’re an artist, if you’re working for a non-profit, if you’re doing paid labor that you love, then you’re somehow above the system. There’s a slight moral superiority there. Like, “I don’t work a 9–5, or I’m not devoted to the man, I am an artist.” And this individualist line of thinking (thank you, existentialists, for this emphasis on the individual and our personal choices) further divorces us from collective progress. At least I’m not one of the bad guys, is not the same as, We’re all in this together.
But, even if you’re getting paid the big bucks as a writer and getting really juicy advances, is it really possible to avoid the man? And is it really possible in this system to “sell out”?
In Jessica Knoll’s op-ed for The New York Times, she says:
“I decided I could not consider myself successful unless I was somebody powerful, somebody nobody could hurt. Success became a means to wrest back control, literally to increase my value.
There is a metonym for that: money.
Success, for me, is synonymous with making money. I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie studios to pay me for option rights and I want the screenwriting comp to boot.
To accomplish this, I spent months researching the publishing marketplace before sitting down to write my first book. I pushed to be the one to adapt it for the studio. Now I am working toward producing, directing or running my own show. TV is where the money is, and to be perfectly blunt about it, I want to be rich.”
As much as it feels kind of icky to hear a writer talk about wanting to get rich, she’s at least being honest about her goals of aiming for financial independence (or in terms of my argument, more time) through her writing. (I just want to note that Jessica Knoll is a blonde, white woman. See Tressie McMillan Cottom on The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blonde.)
But how possible is it for most of us to reach Knoll’s goal of being rich? In his Substack “Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire,” Erik Hoel says:
“The economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild, and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.
To truly understand the bleak reality requires a comparison. The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. And I think it’s arguable that becoming a cultural billionaire is just as rare as becoming an actual billionaire (under an admittedly broad calculation of equivalency).”
Then he does a bunch of math that you should read. But he’s able to conclude that 585 non-celebrity authors are making a living from their books. A living he defines as starting around $50,000 a year (with most people hovering around this mark). Think back to what I said about the minimum living wage for a city like Denver and Olympia, and see how $50,000 before taxes measures up.
Hoel concludes:
“[This is] roughly in line with the semi-annual surveys from the Author’s Guild, which finds statistics like:
When looking at full-time authors whose books are in commercial markets (i.e., excluding academic, scholarly, and educational books), the median book income was $15,000...
This reveals that even among authors who identify as “full-time,” they are mostly supported by parents or spouses and bring in only supplemental or partial income. Overall, I think we can indeed conclude that the group size of self-made billionaires and non-celebrity authors making a living (enough to decently support their family or at least themselves) are surprisingly close in number; basically, each looks like a pool of just hundreds of people across the nation.”
This means that even if you are INCREDIBLY LUCKY and you’re able to sell a book with a $250,000 advance every 5 years, you will still only make around $50,000 a year, and this doesn’t incorporate taxes into the equation. And these are the best of the best! These are the ones who have made it. And, whether you like it or not, if you’re not going the indie publishing route, to get one of those fat advances, you must play into the market.
I subscribe to a great Substack called Sub Club, and they often give workshops about finding an agent. In one workshop about why comps matter (comps are books that are similar to your book that you include in a query letter that you send to agents), the host, Kailey Brennan Dellorusso, says:
“[Comps] show agents that you understand the market. Unfortunately, we’re writers, we want to just love our art and care about that, but if you want to be traditionally published, you have to think about your book as a product and you have to understand your product’s market.”
Caro Claire Burke, author of the forthcoming book Yesteryear, who got a big advance for her book and screen rights (who, I should note, until very recently, was blonde), says in her podcast Diabolical Lies with Katie Gattie Tassin (also blonde):
But I think the important thing to note in this conversation is that anyone who is a musician or a podcaster or a writer or a director... You have to be so nakedly ambitious to succeed in these industries. Every single day, all of the momentum is taking you in the opposite direction to not continue to do what you want to do. To become a staff writer at The New Yorker, or to sell a book that allows you to write more books, or to run a financial platform, or to write and direct your own movie that appears in Cannes, that is so hard. It is so competitive. And you have to make decisions constantly that set you up for financial viability. And so you are always opting in. And I think the game is that part of opting in is that most people have to also pretend or feel they have to pretend that that is not a part of it. And that there is like a sort of purity at play. And I think that that is part of the performance of being an artist in the same way that politicians get into the game and go... ‘I never thought I’d be president or like, I’m just in it to change people’s lives. I never thought that I would be in this position.’ It’s like, dude, you’ve been positioning yourself for three decades. What are we talking about? But it’s part of the contract because people don’t actually like when you are honest. I should add that. Like Jessica Knoll’s op-ed was not received well by writers. People don’t like being honest about what’s taking place here, even if they’re also a part of it. And I think that those are just like the point-counterpoint rough waters of trying to be heard is that you have to be unbelievably cutthroat and frank about what it means. And then you have to kind of like sweep up the path behind you and pretend that it was effortless.”
I think Caro is spot on. We shouldn’t impose on artists this belief that you’re only a real artist if your work and your work alone pays the bills, and you’re a failure if you haven’t traditionally succeeded and make your money doing taxes for H&R Block.
Because doesn’t it kind of play into the system to internalize the belief that you can’t save for retirement and have a comfortable life and be an artist at the same time?
Self-publishing as Guerrilla Warfare
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, if you get a book deal, you are considered a “real writer,” but if you self-publish, you are often ostracized by the cultural literary elite. It’s considered taboo to self-publish, and if you’re a serious writer, self-publishing can come with an element of shame, like “I guess I just couldn’t hack it, I guess I am not good enough.” But if we consider traditional publishing through the lens of labor-time, if you get published by a big publishing house, you’re given special, fancy privileges like book launches and cool parties, but based on how much money you’re actually making in exchange for your time, you’re still a member of the working class.
If you self-publish, even if you have to use one of the dreaded platform industry tools (looking at you, KDP), you won’t fully be a member of the capitalist class because you still don’t own the means of production, but at least you own your own labor.
Self-publishing is one of the most powerful things you can do as an artist in a capitalist system. It’s also pretty badass.
Not only are you not being exploited for anyone else’s financial gain, but you’re not exploiting anyone else’s labor—Queue Princess Leia #rebel.
Obviously, you still have to face issues with the platform industry, and it would take A LOT to actually generate any meaningful income, but at least you’re a little more free. Also, you can make different choices, like your distributor and the cost, for example.
When I published When Darcy Met Lizzy, I chose Ingram Sparks because I didn’t want to be a part of the Amazon hellscape, and I wanted to make sure my book could be sold in indie stores, and most indie bookstores won’t sell your book if it’s not available on Ingram.
I thought self-publishing would make me feel like a sellout, but instead it’s been one of the most powerful and self-affirming experiences of my life because:
I believe in what I wrote.
I like what I wrote, and I genuinely think it’s good.
I worked with super-talented people who are way smarter than I am to edit the book (thanks again to Evelyn Hampton! And Alyse Knorr, you are a gift to humanity).
Even though I have made negative money off of it, I have been able to interact with readers more directly through this book than The Family. I’ve done readings at local bookstores in both Denver and Olympia, and I managed a Kickstarter, which allowed me to connect with people all over the world.
I get to decide the price; I can give my book away for free to little free libraries if I want to, or donate it to queer organizations. I have the power of what I created.
Given everything I said about the publishing market and the list I provided above, is it any wonder then that the capitalist class tries to discourage self-publishing through cultural expectations of what makes a real writer?
But don’t get me wrong, I am still seeking a traditional publisher for my memoir. I still want a fancy hotel room on a book tour in Paris like the one Miranda July describes in All Fours. I recognize the extreme hypocrisy in this desire.
But I no longer feel that traditional publishing is the only viable option or that self-publishing makes someone a failure. I feel empowered and in control of what I create, and I know I can choose which avenue I want to pursue for each project.
I know that all my choices are valid and all I have to do is decide what is important to me.
I feel free and I hope you do too.
I want to have my cake and eat it too
When I was younger and I got my first job in tech, I met the writer Jerry McGill. He and I had similar jobs and we often took afternoon tea and coffee breaks together. He drank English Breakfast tea and I drank coffee. From the moment I met Jerry I admired him. Not only is he funny and playful and always caught me off guard with his candor, he is a Writer. Writer with a capital W. Like a real writer.
In his life, Jerry’s written three novels and published two; he’s also written and published a beautiful memoir. When I found out he was a writer I quickly bought and read his memoir. His writing moved me with its vulnerability and ability to be both beautiful and sharp.
Jerry’s worked in tech now for twelve years. He writes every weekend. He’s now working on trying to get his screenplay turned into a film. He’s devoted to his craft and he doesn’t let his day job get in the way. Working a 9–5 has never made him less of a writer. If anything, it’s shown that he is absolute and unshakable in his devotion to his craft.
The truth is, I am not sure anyone ever thought I wasn’t an artist because I don’t make money as a writer. This dichotomy between artist and sellout that I’ve spent the last few weeks discussing is most likely self-imposed.
I was the one who was afraid that admitting I wanted to be good in my career, that I wanted to take pride in my work, be promoted, and make more money, made me less of an artist.
But the result of this insecurity was that I was living a sham of a life. I didn’t want to own up to my actual real-life choices: to take a well-paying job with benefits, to write in my non-work hours and not try to make my creative life pay the bills. I wanted to pretend I didn’t want the really nice things capitalism has to offer, like European vacations, or facials.
The pressure I put on myself to be a ‘real’ writer in the eyes of others degraded my integrity and my sense of self. I allowed my insecurities to overtake my daily decisions. I am writing now from a place of clarity, but it has taken years for me to come to this understanding and, for those closest to me, it hasn’t been an easy road. When we don’t have faith in ourselves or our choices, we can inadvertently harm the people we love the most.
The truth is, like Jessica Knoll, I care about making money. I want to live a comfortable life. I don’t want to die the way my father did, vulnerable to a system that does not care about us. I want to do well at my tech job because my job has given me stability and security like I have never known, and I am so grateful for the opportunities it has provided.
But the choice, sellout or artist, was a false choice. I never had to choose between being an artist and taking pride in my day job. Just because I don’t like the system we’re subjugated to, just because I know that capitalism is an unfair and dirty game, doesn’t mean that I can’t do my very best because it makes me feel good to do work I am proud of.
As bell hooks says, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.”
Or as Toni Morrison says, “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”
Still, even with a strong understanding of capitalism and art and how generating content just to feed the beast is a lose-lose situation, it’s still easy to fall prey to the trance of the platform industry. In the next three newsletters, we will talk about social media and the artist. Stay tuned!
