“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.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“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.”— Choire Sicha, amazon.com
“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.”— Choire Sicha, amazon.com
“Forty percent of my income comes from teaching, thirty percent from speaking, and about thirty percent from writing.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“I love teaching and I love the security of a regular paycheck, and I especially love health insurance.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“The gift economy didn't give back. Every post I made was on a platform I did not own. My access was free, and my labor was free, but I was investing primarily in someone else's business.”— Susie Cagle, amazon.com
“Exactly how much do I make writing other people's stories? For most books, I receive a flat rate -- anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000 in my case, plus or minus a percentage of the author's royalties.”— Sari Botton, amazon.com
“Being an extremely social, sociable, accessible person should not be the price of being a professional writer, but for women it almost inevitably is.”— Emily Gould, amazon.com
“Part of the fear of looking at the relationship between art and its financial context, perhaps, is the fear that something else is true as well: I am whatever these worlds paid me to be.”— Leslie Jamison, amazon.com
“What if we stopped thinking of money as the dirty secret of creative pursuit and instead recognized money as one of its constituent threads? Whether we like it or not, money's presence in art doesn't depend on whether we consider its presence. It's always already there anyway.”— Leslie Jamison, amazon.com
“Not thinking about money wastes my time, and I only have so much time to write. Thinking about money has saved me from writing another novel that probably won't sell.”— Kate McKean, amazon.com
“I know so many writers who say, 'just tell me what to write and i'll write it!' I do have that information, but it's not that easy. I can follow a sure-to-be-marketable idea and realize I have zero passion for it. If I have no passion for it, the writing will suck.”— Kate McKean, amazon.com
“After the excitement of finishing a whole novel had worn off, my agenting experience had kicked in: I could see the hook and the topic and theme of my novel wasn't going to work. And even if it worked it probably wouldn't sell. You'd think I would have caught this sooner, but I fell prey to what all…”— Kate McKean, amazon.com
“Building my career as an agent ate every spare moment I had. There would be no writing on mornings and weekends. I was making barely $30,000 a year as an assistant and I was struggling to pay my $675 Brooklyn rent. A few years later when I became a full-time agent, I went from a small salary to comm…”— Kate McKean, amazon.com
“It's also presumed Emily Dickinson's maid didn't go home and write poems after work. I bet she did.”— Manjula Martin, amazon.com
“I started to realize work wasn't what was holding me back; the ideal of The Writer's Life was. Once I let myself understand that statistically I would probably never -- yes, never -- be able to quit working, the hours I spent agonizing over having a day job became hours in which I could write.”— Manjula Martin, amazon.com
“The separation of art and commerce, while a noble aim, is in reality to an endeavor akin, in the rarefied and impoverished professional universe where writers actually reside, to the separation of smoking and drinking. A nice thought, but yeah, good luck with that.”— J. Robert Lennon, amazon.com