September 5, 2006
Writers don't often make a living from their writing
Perhaps this one can be filed under "totally obvious," but this week's signandsight.com magazine roundup points to this article in Le Nouvel Observateur, which is glosssed.
French sociologist Bernard Lahire demonstrates once again that the life of a writer is a difficult, laborious business, in his empirical study "La condition litteraire." He talked to over 500 French authors about their circumstances and financial situation. As Bernard Genies relates, first and foremost, the writers spoke of their "monumental frustration. Because the modern writer simply doesn't exist. Or better: to exist, he has to be something else." Lahire quotes Paul Fournel: "No one asks a filmmaker: 'And how do you make your money?' But with a writer it's the first thing people want to know . . . I've heard it a thousand times." Many have to earn their livelihood in "sideline jobs" like teaching, journalism or translation, because earnings from book sales are often pitiful: "In 2003, 44 percent of the respondents didn't earn a penny with their writing. 9.3 percent earned less than 200 euros, 6.6 percent less than 5,000 euros, and only 9.3 percent topped the 10,000-euro mark."
This is, of course, both reassuring (I'm not alone!) and depressing (We're all broke!). I am incredibly lucky to publish as much writing as I do—thank you, booming art market—but have made nowhere near enough money to support myself by doing so. When people ask what I do, I answer, "I edit other people's writing about art. And I write about art as well." Anyway, this blurb offers me the opportunity to send readers back to the National Arts Journalism Program's The Visual Art Critic, a report published by the organization in 2002 that maintains its ability to fascinate despite the time-sensitive nature of the survey data it is based on.