
A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it - laurex
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/27/a-dirty-secret-you-can-only-be-a-writer-if-you-can-afford-it
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wutbrodo
> According to a 2018 Author’s Guild Study the median income of all published
> authors for all writing related activity was $6,080 in 2017, down from
> $10,500 in 2009; while the median income for all published authors based
> solely on book-related activities went from $3,900 to $3,100, down 21%.
> Roughly 25% of authors earned $0 in income in 2017.

I feel like the author is smuggling in an ill-defined notion of what makes
someone a "writer". I've played the piano since I was three, but don't get
paid for it: am I "a pianist who got paid $0"? I also took a one-off front-end
engineering contract once: should I be shifting the statistics of what the
median front-end engineer makes for every year that I don't work in frontend?

Fundamentally, the author is describing a fulfilling hobby that pays a partial
income, and bemoaning the fact that it doesn't guarantee a full career. I'm
not unsympathetic to where she's coming from; the reason I'm a longtime
supporter of UBI is because I think that things like the ability to engage in
arts and hobbies should be supported at a baseline for every citizen. But this
article somehow casts writers as uniquely poorly off, ignoring all the people
who would love to do any of a number of hobbies full-time but have career
paths that are far more limited.

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GreenJelloShot
The title should be changed to:

"You can only be a [mediocre, full-time] writer if you can afford it"

