The majority of literature is written not for money but because people want to write. Most books do not even get bought by publishers. Most books that do make next to no money. Few books even recover the cost of publishing them, much less produce a meaningful income for theirs authors. Many because the books themselves are dreck, of course, but many also simply because it's easy to write. Anyone can write a novel. Not everyone can write a good novel, but enough people do that there isn't a big enough market for most writers to be motivated by money.
It is because people badly want to and enjoy writing that we have vast quantities of books. If people looked at writing as a commercial endeavour, most of us would never, ever consider writing a novel - it's a crazily oversaturated market, to the point that writing a novel to make money is much like playing the lottery: You invest far more time that you could have spent on other things, and the potential payout for the vast majority of authors is below minimum wage most places.
We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that their income might cause them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead of writing the best they could. Maybe. I'm not convinced.
That said, outside of writing novels, things are different. You can probably earn more writing for a sketchy content farm than most of us will ever earn from writing novels, so the point is not entirely invalid, but it is not a good fit for literature.
EDIT: Changed second to last paragraph for clarity, see response for mangled original.
Looking at the publishing industry through the lens of most written works rather than most revenue generation misses the point spectacularly.
Works, in Schopenhauer's time, and today, are commissioned, written, edited, and promoted for their commercial potential in ways that are directly addressed by Schopenhauer's rant.
The works which aren't (excepting those written or promoted for propagandistic value, itself a major share of promoted works) rather prove his point.
The essence of Schopenhauer's concern is that information and entertainment should be intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated. Trying to please the public, or tap into the revenue stream (typically advertising), or feed the algorithm, etc., rapidly leads to corruption and devaluation of content, which is what I was addressing.
Even where good works are promoted this often happens without benefitting the original author or creator. Sometimes in literature (Mark Twain struggled financially his entire life, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby only entered the American canon during WWII, as a cheap paperback shipped overseas to soldiers, long after Fitzgerald's own pickled death). The music world (both classical and popular) and art world are similarly rife with examples of this as well.
Old Art was a very sour puss, but with good reason.
> Looking at the publishing industry through the lens of most written works rather than most revenue generation misses the point spectacularly.
Sorry, but I can't agree. He explicitly argues for fewer but better works, and laments that this can't be achieved as long as you can profit from writing, but the fact is *this can't be achieved*, as we can se from the fact that most writing is not profitable today, and never has been.
Thinking that if only the commercialisation stopped, literature would suddenly be in a better place is utter nonsense that is based on a fantasy world where writing well is far easier than it is.
It's not commercialisation of writing that is stopping us from getting better literature, but the difficulty.
While there certainly is a lot of commercial writing one can easily dismiss, the notion that a profit motive prevents writers from writing from extrinsic motivation ignores that most literature is written by people who can never in a lifetime hope to life of their writing.
There has never been more books written with extrinsic motivations.
As I pointed out, there may well be a point here in that some types of commercialised content often is pure dreck. But only a fraction of a percent of literature is "commissioned, written, edited and promoted for their commercial potential".
A lot of it for good reason, because a lot of that content is also pure dreck. But even fantastic authors often struggle to get published and only a fraction of them make a living of it.
The argument that Schopenhauer is espousing a fantasy probably does have merits, and we've the benefit of another century and a quarter of publishing (the novel really only emerged into mass culture during the 19th century). There's the challenge of recognising greatness as it first appears (it almost always takes at least some time for that awareness to dawn), and the sheer arbitraryness of assessments as well.
That said ...
We're still left with the fact that what financial compensation promotes is at the very least appeal to a minimum common standard. That lesson has emerged again and again in the history of mass-media, beginning with street carnivals and players, the penny press (both newspapers and "penny-dreadful" fiction), the mass media of radio and television (Murrow's "Wires and Lights in a Box" and Minow's "Vast Wasteland"), and the Web, mobile media, Reddit, and Facebook (once Literally Harvard, now ... not so much).
In the case of online content and services, it seems that true gems are virtually always underfunded. (The constant gripes aimed at Wikipedia's apparent mostly sufficient endowment are a rare exception.) Sites such as LWN eke out an existance, Linux Journal ultimately folded --- for all that adtech supposedly pays for the Internet, it certainly failed there.
Looking at collections of great books, what strikes me is how many of them predate not only recent history (say, the past 50 years), but all of modernity. How much of this is measurement bias and a varianty of the Lindy Effect, and how much is a well-placed assessment on whatever truth there may be in merits is of course very hard to say. But it's quite persistent.
As I read through works (fiction and non), what I'm struck by is how little of what is recent is truly novel. The refrain from Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun, isn't entirely accurate, but it's far more so than it has any right to be. I suspect it's a combination of pressures to publish and an ignorance (often cultivated through deliberate presentism and deprecation) of earlier literature that leads to this.
On your "difficulty* point: part of the cause is also the haste and rush to publish leading to just plain sloppy work. That's not entirely new, and the practice can even be an art form (Kerouak's On the Road). But far too many leading works --- bestsellers and the like --- are riddled with poor editing, rambling structure, typings and misspellings, and poorly-checked facts. There are of course exceptions, but again it seems that the pressure to publish and transact leads to poor results.
(Self-published works can of course exhibit this to a far greater extent, but they're also produced under profit pressures, and with far fewer available resources than traditionally-published works, for the most part.)
I suspect that underlying this discussion are two questions that haven't been asked yet, so I'll ask them:
1. What makes a work "great"?
2. What are the circumstances in which such works emerge?
If you could provide any examples of "recent" (I'll give you anything published since Schopenhauer wrote, so 1891, though more recent would be more compelling) books meeting both the "great" and "not commercially motivated" criteria, either fiction or not, I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with.
(Others can contribute as well.)
... I actually think that would be more interesting than continuing the debate above. I think your argument has some merits though I'm not fully convinced.
I don't have time to respond fully now, but as for a work: Kafka, "The Trial" immediately sprung to mind.
Though I'd argue almost no published novels other than possibly subsequent works by bestselling authors are generally commercially motivated.
As someone who have published two novels: If you write to get rich, you're an idiot. It can happen, but it's so fundamentally unlikely that it's grossly irrational to write with that as motivation unless you've already been signed to a publisher. Even then it's a dubious gamble.
Kafka's a good choice. Newberry Award picks in children's literature have been a personal favourite. I'd probably find a place for Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L'Engle, and Douglas Adams (very much in the spirit of Jonathan Swift IMO, and still underappreciated as such).
I've had the experience of trying to keep a friend well-stocked in audiobooks, and have made something of a practice of seeking out "best of" lists (best short-stories of the year, best books of the year, etc.), and ... find that there's not a whole lot that shows up in any decade that's especially good. Their own tastes tend to mid-century, relatively classical, and literary, and tends to discount themes increasingly prevalent in post-1960s literature (I feel the exposure would do good, but we're talking preferences here). Literary awards, "best books of" anthologies, etc., tend to improve the pickings but remain slim.
And again, financial motivation isn't helping, and by promoting far more low-quality literature, further clouds the field. For books --- big, solid, meaty, information-dense objects that take hours or days or weeks to assimilate, quality assessment itself is difficult. And financial motive, in authoring, publishing (cultivating authors, commissioning works, encouraging production, editing and rewriting assistance, packaging, marketing, and promotion) don't help the process.
Schopenhauer's argument isn't that most authors are financially motivated. It's that financial motivation leads to worse writing.
Again, you're focusing on anecdotes and "most authors" rather than the industry's own revenue focus. I find both uncompelling.
There are of course legions of writers (of books, of music) ... and other creators (art, photography, etc.) who do chase that dollar. Back in the day, Writers' Market was full of all the standard encouragement and secrets-of-the-trade for breaking through. That same advice is now much more scattered, but you'll find it online, much in the form of YouTube videos on storyboarding, either generally, or using writing tools (Scrivener seems popular) specifically oriented for that task. The objective is to quickly create cookie-cutter literature that fits a market's wants and needs, not creation of great literature.
Typical current advice (there are many video results):
The issue is that creative media (print, visual, video, music, etc.) follow power laws and tent-pole effects. There are a few big hits, there are an awful lot of also-rans. Ironically, the more global the market, the fewer winners (rather than numerous top-ten contents, there is only one --- any practice based on cardinality, that is, ranking, is inherently zero-sum. One of the better treatments of this I've found is in Charles Perrow's Complex Organizations (1972, 1979, 1986) (https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-criti...), in the chapter addressing the music industry. Interestingly, its discussion of hit-making, labels, talent, backing performers, and corruption-dependent distribution systems (radio payola and the like) has eerily strong similarities with the tech sector's VC, founders, tech talent, and overly-credulous tech media (and lately, mobile-device app markets). There's a powerful lesson for HN's audience here.
I meant to write that we might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that their income causes them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead of writing the best they could.
It is because people badly want to and enjoy writing that we have vast quantities of books. If people looked at writing as a commercial endeavour, most of us would never, ever consider writing a novel - it's a crazily oversaturated market, to the point that writing a novel to make money is much like playing the lottery: You invest far more time that you could have spent on other things, and the potential payout for the vast majority of authors is below minimum wage most places.
We might lose some great works from that tiny proportion of writers who earn well enough that their income might cause them to make more commercial choices in their writing instead of writing the best they could. Maybe. I'm not convinced.
That said, outside of writing novels, things are different. You can probably earn more writing for a sketchy content farm than most of us will ever earn from writing novels, so the point is not entirely invalid, but it is not a good fit for literature.
EDIT: Changed second to last paragraph for clarity, see response for mangled original.