Why should Apple shareholders be getting rich while working journalists are getting fired? This is an unjust situation, and the libertarians in Silicon Valley are either moral idiots or liars.
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I think the tech corporations are like the nineteenth-century coal magnates, and the freelance writers are like the people slaving in the mines, the only difference being that the tech corporations can't stop congratulating themselves on how they've liberated everybody.
Who said it's the writer's job to be liked by everybody?
I haven't googled myself since the fall of 2001.
The publishing industry looks a lot like one of these bestselling teenage dystopias: white and full of people destroying one another to survive.
The market, I am told, just doesn't demand this kind of book... because white kids won't buy a book with a black kid on the cover -- or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way.
Your story doesn't end when your dreams come true; it changes.
I expected that once I sold my first novel, the hardest part would be over...I also expected that becoming a successful novelist would be difficult; that is the only expectation that has turned out to be true.
Plenty of authors who appear to be successful in public are, in private, struggling to get by on dwindling royalty payments, or working an unglamorous day job, or are married to someone with a much more reliable income.
I mean, sure, do what you love, but do it on the nights-and-weekends plan.
But look, a lot of the people who ask me for advice, they're not just asking about how to be a writer. Because everyone knows that: How to be a writer is: you write all the time, and you read all the time, and eventually maybe you'll write something worth reading. The question people are really aski…
When I do those books, I know it's a product. I know it's going to be shelved in a certain part of the bookstore. So what I try to do is inject it with as much artfulness and as much of myself and as much honesty as I can. But it never leaves me, the fact that I'm making something that's going to ha…
But what I quickly realized is, I'm not quitting my day job. I'm swapping one day job for another.
People hear 'NYT bestseller' and they think, 'Oh, he's a millionaire or something', which is just ridiculous as anyone who's been on that list can tell you.
It wasn't that I'd landed in ruin. It was that I hadn't landed yet.
But you get the sites you want to visit, and in the end, no matter how much venture capital they have, they'll continue to exist because of ads.
If you ever want to see something sad, ask a room full of freelance writers about their tax strategies. It's like asking a pack of baby kittens about space travel.
Forty percent of my income comes from teaching, thirty percent from speaking, and about thirty percent from writing.
I love teaching and I love the security of a regular paycheck, and I especially love health insurance.
I just have a relentless work ethic, I guess.