Asher Elbein: The majority of people flatly do not understand — and would be honestly shocked by! — how little money most publicly known writers make

The majority of people flatly do not understand — and would be honestly shocked by! — how little money most publicly known writers make

People assume that if they’ve heard of you, or see you around, you must be rich. If only that were the case!

Dana Gould used to talk about the “middle class famous” in a way that’s always stuck with me. Some of your favorite entertainers and writers are basically broke!

The people in most creative fields raking it in are the people you haven’t heard of, and nearly all of them are upper executives of one sort or another

Sometimes I worry about rising stars of any kind, esp. young ones because like, if you get popular and you get a stalker or something, how will you afford to pay for security?? It’s a very specific thing but I would be scared to be actually famous without a LOT of money.

The vast majority of the money mentioned in this article was the cost of executive protection I sent to the guy’s house in case he got SWATted or the asshole showed up. And that was only a couple of weeks.

Bungie wins landmark lawsuit against player who harassed Destiny staffwww.polygon.com Win empowers employers to protect employees from online harm

It's a particularly huge problem on YouTube, Twitch, Insta, etc., where the disparity between level of fame and level of income is magnified 1000-fold. Lots of YouTubers have talked about dealing w/ stalkers staking out their tiny studio apartments or harassing them at their bartending job.

Video/streaming/podcasts are some of the WORST when it comes to weird parasocial behavior from fans, too 🙃

[Sigh] yeah...

David Brooks once wrote about “status/income disequilibrium”—the folks who have nice lunches with important people on an expense account and then have mac and cheese in a tiny apartment for dinner.

I assume he wrote that smugly

I have to assume that he identified himself as one of the important people, and the poor person living in the tiny apartment turned out to be his future child bride

*cries in comics and animation*

Basically that this isn't just an ad, but a real thing: www.ispot.tv/ad/b9I_/uber...

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People don't understand the concept of the working artist (emphasis on WORKING). Outside of a batch of A-listers and people who have a very extensive back list (Stephen King, Nora Roberts, etc.), most of our faves are scratching and surviving.

This was the whole argument behind the paid blue checks, that they were flipping the script on the elites by making it so anyone could buy one except a lot of those elites were just like a Last Week Tonight writer

It’s more like “the fact that people have heard of you is compensation you get in lieu of cash dollars. If you want currency, go write prospectuses for mutual funds or something.” (I’m speaking as someone in the “write prospectuses or something” business 🤷 )

Honestly it applies to musicians, streamers, actors, etc. The fallacy that fame equated to success and stability.

When our UPS driver found out I was drawing Superman he couldn’t understand why I was living where I was instead of the wealthy part of town.

People correctly assess that there is a tremendous amount of money in the product and incorrectly assess — almost without fail — who actually gets it

The optimism of this naivety would be sweet if the reality wasn't also so crushing tbh - the people actually doing the work in creative professions *should* be the one getting more of that money, but alas.

Ever read Nicholas Negroponte's book "Being Digital"? He says we need to decide if we're in the business of atoms or the business of bits. Publishers have a lot of money invested in physical publishing and distribution, and a lot of the money one pays for a book goes to all that. It's not new, 1/2

18th C, Boswell quotes Johnson: "It is, perhaps, not considered through how many hands a book often passes, before it comes into those of the reader; or what part of the profit each hand must retain, as a motive for transmitting it to the next." www.samueljohnson.com/publishi.html 2/2

The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page: Quotes on Publishingwww.samueljohnson.com Samuel Johnson quotes on publishing.

We drew one issue of fill-in for Captain America and several people asked us if we got a cut of the MCU. The lack of understanding is amazing!

What issue was that? I’d love to see y’all on Captain America!

Oh, it was years ago and one of the Secret Empire issues, not worth tracking down! It was a rush job, so we couldn’t bring our A-game

It’s is great to be part of popular culture though. I’ve done a lot of work on Lord of the Rings video games and it’s great connecting with people that have played them.

Sliding in out of nowhere 'so y'all drew an issue of Secret Empire, was Tasky in it, do you remember? 👀'

(I know Tasky had a big, for him, role in SE, so I know he's there somewhere I just wanna track down you guys' issue, haha)

Goes to show that most people have an intuitively better sense of fair compensation than the arseholes who make the laws.

(One UPS guy to another) Comics. That ain’t workin’. That’s the way you do it. Money for nothing and your chicks for free.

It’s funny because being a jobber guitarist is about as thankless and pays about as well as an average cartoonist. Even the ones that got on MTV. Filming music videos was bloody expensive!

That little writer's got his own mac notebook That little writer, he's a thousandaire

My MacBook Air is 3+ years old now and I don’t know what I’d do without it

"You think that's bad, wait until you hear about what happened to the guys who *invented* Superman!"

Ain’t that gravy train with biscuit wheels rollin’ your way, man??

Back when I still had a proper verified tick, some people were mad at me for some reason and one of their complaints was that as a blue tick verified reporter, I must be rich. Yes. That's why I was renting a room in a random flatshare at the time, clearly. 🤪

You can be 'verified' on here by not having the .bsky.social at the end of your @. You have to link to your own domain, if you have one

I mean, verification here just means you can afford a domain name, so that’s cheaper annually than a blue check and arguably more anonymous (if that’s what you’re after).

But it also means if you are a someone who people know to have a website - an author, a comedian, a musician, whoever - then they'd know it was you

This is true, but then we’re relying on people being kinda famous for verification which..🤷🏽

Well, yes. They're the people I want to have verification. I want to know I'm not following some dickhead pretending to be whoever it is I really want to follow

I remember N.K. Jemisin being asked how her life changed after the success of The Broken Earth trilogy, and her response was 'I was able to pay off my student loans'. Turns out writing a wildly popular series is less "you're set for life" and more "you don't have to worry about health insurance"

It applies to musicians and actors as well. In Bruce Campbell's book "If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor" there is a chapter titled "Anatomy of a Paycheck." He breaks down what he got paid for doing Army of Darkness. That was an eye opener!

Excellent title!

Great book. Lovely man.

Most writers would be shocked how popular a writer has to be to be publicly known!

I'm sure companies are trying to pay them even less now that a lot of places are just having terrible "AI" write articles now as well.

They sure are. That’s been happening in all the creative fields recently. Fun times. 🙃

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