Issue #341: How to Earn Money from Your Writing

you were just another cog, just the smallest possible pinion in the engine of global progress, one of mass culture’s million tiny underwriters, dispersing risk.” “And how was I doing that, exactly?” “It was your whole starving artist ethos, that whole rebel-without-a-cause motif. Back then, we really believed that the worst person in the entire sou

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Untangling the question of what I want to make from what will sell feels like crawling out of a very deep well.

First, do we want to live in a world where people pay for content? I’m not sure. For one, it presumes the most valuable things should be closed, when the beauty of the web is that that zero marginal cost of production means the most valuable things should reach whomever they are relevant to.

Illustrator Karlotta Freier recalls being mocked by her art school classmates for asking about how to make a living as an illustrator. “No one would make fun of a plumbing student for asking about the business side of things,” she says, “so why don’t I get to ask?” For decades, the promise of a creative career was the alleviation of the worst parts

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