Writers Are Opening Up About Money—And That’s a Good Thing

Historias Visuales / via Flickr

From a recent op-ed at the New York Times:

Writers may always have worried about money, but now seems a particularly fertile time for writing about it. … This spate of talk about writing and money has opened up broader conversations about who can afford to enter the profession today, and who gets shut out.

My magazine Scratch is mentioned, and my Scratch co-founder is quoted:

Manjula Martin, the cofounder of Scratch, told Op-Talk that “there has always been this tension for writers around how to make a living and how to make art.” However, she said, growing job insecurity in writing professions and beyond may have led to a new wave of anxiety: “As the economy is changing and as things just feel more precarious in our culture, that bleeds through to the literary culture. And I think a big part of that too is a question of, ‘is literature and are the arts going to continue to be valued in ways that we have perhaps always just assumed they would be?’”

At a time when authors seem to be more divided than united, I hope we can at least agree: Sharing our publishing experiences with each other—with as much transparency as possible—helps us all make better decisions for the long term of our careers.

Read the full op-ed.

The post Writers Are Opening Up About Money—And That’s a Good Thing appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Jane Friedman.