Issue #341: How to Earn Money from Your Writing
There is a problem with Project Gutenberg. It all started when researching for what I wrote this week. The topic of the major essay in this issue is William Dean Howells’ incredible contribution to American literature, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business.” I read this essay in my first year of graduate school and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Like everything published before 1926, Howells’ essay is in the public domain. This means that it is available to read in no shortage of places, including in printed and bound form in numerous low quality editions derived from the Project Gutenberg version of the text. It makes getting details about the history and original publication of the text difficult, especially because there is no mandate in public domain texts to attribute a work to any original publication date or venue. Likewise, the abundance of worthless reproductions of the works’ raw text dominate search engine pages and push any criticism to the inexorable depths of google.
My SEO is not great, so I don’t think this issue of Paradox Newsletter will solve the problem. It is, at least, trivial to find the information I am looking for using academic search engines. But not everyone has access to those. Everyone, publish your critical essays about William Dean Howells so we can stop the flood of product listings for the Project Gutenberg version of the book.
Writing and Enrichment
There’s been a lot of discussion over the past couple of weeks, on Substack, about the business of Substack. I’m not very interested in any of the business particularities of Substack, mostly because I don’t believe they are very particular. The question of business and its relation to art is an enduring one. I don’t think the coordinates of the discussion have changed very much since the earliest discussion of the value of literary serials to the art form. And it’s William Dean Howells’ discussion of the topic that is as yet unsurpassed in its insight.
Howells, as a novelist, enjoyed a reasonable amount of success. Today, I think he is a bit understudied, but The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is still taught as a paradigmatic work of 19th Century American realism. He was also a prolific essayist. Among his many pieces of criticism, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” (1893) is my favorite. Published in the October 1893 issue of the Scribner's literary magazine1, the essay has been widely republished, anthologized, and packaged as a book by disreputable publishers of any written material available on Project Gutenberg.
In the essay, he writes in opposition to the commercialization of art and literature in particular. He sets literature apart from two other examples, painting and sculpture, as distinct:
Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the arts. It cannot impart its effect through the sense or the nerves as the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is the mind speaking to the mind … if it fails to express precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say HIM, [sic] it says nothing, and is nothing. So that when a poet has put his heart, much or little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor has modelled [sic] a statue to order.
Literature is the subject of the essay and Howells’ own art, so of course the distinction he draws on the basis of the precision of the meaning it conveys makes sense. But Howells believes the exchange of art for money has inherent problems:
people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this … the work which be truly priced in money cannot truly be paid in money.
There are a couple of interconnected assertions here that Howells goes on to substantiate as he continues the essay. First, the profanity, impiety, or impropriety of the transaction involving a work of art. Second, the fact that art’s value doesn’t correspond to its utilitarian function:
The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective value … meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them. But there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction.
Every element of Howells’ argument leads back to the same fundamental thesis, however. Business and literature are incompatible, and the business of literature generally diminishes the quality of literature. In Howells’ context, the tension exists among the venues and form of literary publication. Should a work be published as a completed novel, or a serial? Should it’s venue be a book, magazine, or newspaper? Though he doesn’t assert the artistic superiority of one form over another, he considers the economic incentives and the audience as the primary forces that determine the broader possibility of quality literature to be socially recognized. For Howells, magazines provide the greatest renumeration and most discerning readership, “The young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine has achieved double success, first, with the editor, and then with the best reading public.” But the magazine itself, and the public that supposedly determine quality of work, also present problems for the literary milieu as a whole:
even the highest class of readers, who are the magazine readers, have small love of pure literature, which seems to have been growing less and less in all classes. I say seems, because there are really no means of ascertaining the fact, and it may be that the editors are mistaken in making their periodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, economics, and the timely topics which I will call contemporaries; I have sometimes thought they were.
The criticism he is leveling here is twofold: either the audience’s tastes are at fault, or the editor’s assessment of those tastes diminish the potential for serious literary writing. Likewise, Howells claims more generally that work of a lower quality has higher potential of enriching its author:
if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or better or worse still, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, promises impropriety if not indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean success with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public[.]
Likewise, a general decline in the quality of popular literature coincides with a disinterest in literary criticism, both qualitative and hermeneutic:
I am not sure that the decay of the book is not owing somewhat to the decay or reviewing … A well-trained critic, who is bound by the strongest ties of honor and interest not to betray either his employer or his public, has judged it, and his practical approval is a warrant of quality.
Howells ultimately offers advice to writers to avoid the realm of business and write for a different, more idealistic purpose:
The book may be one of the best and wisest books in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it, the readers of it, and worse yet, the purchasers will remain few, though fit … The best you can do is to write the book that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as much heart and soul as you have about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to reach the heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That, and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.
In some sense, as contemporary fiction and essay writing has shown, popular work is a race to the bottom. People seize on moneymaking trends for the sake of making money, the precise opposite of how a writer should approach the serious work of writing. But for every viral listicle, there are thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that get no attention whatsoever. Howells’ way of accounting for the 19th Century equivalent is that people’s tastes are arbitrary:
The only thing that gives either writer positive value is his acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to month wholly uncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion, like this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown.
The essay is long, but there are other scintillating and prescient insights within its pages. Howells suggests writers are at their best in the early stages of their work:
An author’s first book is too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but a painter or sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can give himself.
One can imagine any number of NYHC groups that fit the model of the author as opposed to the sculptor. He also critiques the tendency of literary magazines to condemn authors based on their political opinions and suggests the enterprise is futile:
The Afreet once out of the bottle can never be coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the newspapers have made cannot be unmade by the newspapers. They consign him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the land, and they keep visiting him there with an uproar which attracts more and more notice to him.
More than anything, Howells’ insight is about the work of writing rather than the business of it. He sets out the paradigm that one should only write for themselves, and satisfy their own tastes first and foremost. But he also believes writing to be a productive activity of a certain kind:
After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of letters ever a business man? I suppose that, strictly speaking, he never is, except in those rare instances where, through need or choice, he is the publisher as well as the author of his books. Then he puts something on the market and tries to sell it there, and is a man of business. But otherwise he is an artist merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage-workers who are paid for the labor they have put into the thing done or the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it.
“The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” outlines the paradigm of publishing and vicissitudes of writing in a way that is eternal in its relevance. There is no niche one can occupy, business plan one can execute, or blueprint one can follow to be a successful writer. Being a writer also has nothing to do with how much money one makes doing it. Writing is a vocation, not a profession. The idea of writing for money is an illusory one, which is precisely the problem Howells points to. Whatever the writer is paid for, it’s never truly about their writing, is it? It’s about popularity, whims of the reader, personal investment in an author. The monetary exchange is never without its desirous excess that goes beyond what is written on a page.
The advice he gives is, like much of the essay, for all time. Writing of any kind must be done with the motivation of producing work and satisfying one’s own tastes. There is no venue or medium, magazine, blog, newspaper, newsletter, that will constrain the writer. If one method of publication becomes unavailable, they will find another. Money may be necessary to live, but to the act of writing it is incidental.
Weekly Reading List
D.O.N.D.O.N. cover of Crucifix is so good here.
I watched this event live a little over a week ago, randomly being recommended it when I logged into youtube. I was struck by a couple of things. The production values of Gran Turismo competition are ridiculous. I had no idea they put on such a great show with a huge live audience. However entertaining the actual gameplay, I found this to be awesome.
The other point of interest for me is just thinking about the nature of how one designs a game meant to simulate a real competition. Every choice, from the perspective of creating a gameplay engine, is not to produce the optimal skill testing competitive environment or create the most rewarding gameplay loop. Instead, it’s to bring something into existence that is as close to the real thing as possible. It wasn’t something I had thought too much about before seeing the high level competition in the game.
Take it or leave it, but I might tune in for another one of these.
Until next time.
Thanks to Jeanine F. Jewell and Dr. Jewell’s dissertation, The Social Life of Magazines (2005) for documenting this information.