US Edition 
Whatever happened to writing for love, not money?
The internet could help revive the romantic ideal of the novelist
The life of the starving writer has long haunted the imagination. William Hogarth’s The Distrest Poet shows a young man in a filthy garret getting his wife to fend off the milkmaid. Hogarth’s work was a satire, but in the Romantic era the same image turned into an aspiration. Suffering proved authenticity; rich writers had sacrificed their ideals at Mammon’s altar.
The argument between the practical and the romantic has become sharper for writers in recent years as book advances have dwindled and earning a living from sales become more difficult. The current brouhaha in the US between Amazon and the publisher Hachette is about whether writers are being done out of a living by one side or the other. You can’t go on a writer’s Facebook page or meet them for a drink without the discussion turning to what their publisher is doing – or not – to boost their sales, who the most ruthless agents are, or where to get the best-paid creative writing gigs.
I know they have to eat, but when did it all become about the money? The time when writers could live comfortably off their income was an anomaly of the Eighties and Nineties. These days, apart from a few big-money payouts for the next big thing, publishers are going back to being as cautious as they were before. And why shouldn’t they? Everyone else is tightening their belts.
Call me a romantic but it might actually benefit a writer not to rely on books as their main source of income. A talented friend of mine recently had an interview at a large literary agency. The first question they asked was: “How can we help you make a living from your writing?” The answer turned out to be to make her rewrite her novel to make it more commercially appealing. It seems bonkers that publishers will only look at a manuscript if the author has an agent; that means the first port of call is the moneymen who, being moneymen, will ask questions in their own interests. Alternatively, I have heard it suggested that, rather as the bankers were bailed out by the, state so authors should be given public subsidies – the perils of which should be obvious. This isn’t China.
Luckily, the freedom offered by the internet offers a chance to resurrect the idea of writing for love, not money. You can distribute poems and stories on social media – the equivalent of the Renaissance poet handing sheaves of poems to friends – or self-publish them on a website or as an e-book, charging a nominal amount or nothing. So far online self-publishing has been the preserve of fan fiction and erotica but it can’t be long before high-quality fiction starts to emerge. Right now there is a distressed writer sitting in front of her computer somewhere, worrying not about whether she’ll make enough money to give up the day job or how many copies she will sell, but obsessing over form and language, meaning and truth. Exactly what, in the long term, readers will always be hungry for.
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