business of writing

How The Literary Class System Is Impoverishing Literature

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Today’s post is by Lorraine Berry, from the Literary Hub website, on December 4, 2015.  In her article, Lorraine examines the realistic views on the class system within the literary community. This is something can be expanded to cover the divide between “self-published” vs. “traditionally published” authors as well. While the self publishing world is making great strides, how much does having connections and opportunities help with getting a contract and attention with a publishing house? 

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How The Literary Class System Is Impoverishing Literature

On the Systemic Economic Barriers to Being a Writer

One of the things I was taught as an elementary school student in Illinois was that America differed from Europe in that it was founded as, and has remained, a classless society. These days, if politicians such as Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders bring up the disparities among the classes in America, they are accused by their political opponents of conjuring up class Piggy bankconsciousness in order to foment class warfare. Unfortunately, of course, Obama and Sanders are right, and my schoolteachers were wrong. And while class disparity manifests in all sectors of society, for those who seek careers in literature, class differences have a huge impact on who gets hired and who gets published. This, in turn has a real effect on the portrayal of class in literature, and in media depictions of the writer’s life.

In the past few years, countless essays, articles, charts, graphs, and surveys have been published making the case for greater gender and ethnic diversity in the literary world, that our literature might present back to us a truer accounting of the society in which we actually live. There remains a long way to go but we have slowly come to understand that by publishing more writers of color, by increasing the number of women’s bylines, by being more inclusive, we will increase the quality of our collective storytelling.

But very little has been explicitly articulated about the exclusion of the great American underclass, that perpetually poor group on the bottom tier of society that includes all races/genders/creeds. And as we winnow out opportunities for art about poverty, we lose so much potential for change.

One doesn’t learn to be a writer in college and then graduate with the same opportunities as everyone else. When it comes to looking for a job, or having the time to write, social stratification determines who gets the internships, and by extension who gets to forge the connections that help one find an agent, or get a job with a publishing house.

A colleague and I have the same argument at least twice a year, usually at registration time when he bumps into me in the office and complains to me about our students’ unwillingness to go after off-campus internships. Most of his scorn is directed at students who only want to do an on-campus internship, during the semester, rather than taking an internship over winter or summer breaks.

And, given that the college where I teach is a four-hour drive from New York City, he is brutal when discussing the failure of the students to feed at the Golden Corral of publishing internships that is Manhattan. And so, each semester, I have to remind him of the reality of our students’ lives. I start with the fact that NYC internships often pay at most a token salary of perhaps a thousand dollars per month. Apartment rents in Manhattan and Brooklyn cost more per month than that highest token salary, and even if you can find a sharing sublet for summer and live on Ramen, rice, and mac-n-cheese, most of our students must spend summer working as many hours as they can so that they can get by working part-time during the school year. A summer internship that has a negative impact on summer savings is out of reach for any student not supplemented in some way. Some students luck out because a relative lives in one of the boroughs and is willing to house them, but once again, while it’s not a guarantee of money, it is still the accident of having a relative live within commuting distance of New York City.

Read the full post on the Literary Hub website

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

The DBW Writers’ Survey

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 11/19/14.

The annual DBW Writers’ Survey is up!

Please consider participating and sharing. The more respondents, the more meaningful the results.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how those results are analyzed. In the past, the outcome of publishing paths has been the main focus of this survey, which does not help authors make decisions with their manuscripts. There is an implied assumption in those past results that authors can simply choose whether to traditionally publish or self-publish. And so aspiring authors who have not yet managed to get traditionally published do not have their $0 income factored in, while all self-published authors are counted.

Compounding the problem, hybrid authors (those who have published both ways) have been treated as a special case in the past. This is odd considering that the vast majority of hybrids have either been picked up because of success with self-publishing, or found success self-publishing a backlist that did poorly enough with a traditional publisher for the rights to revert. In both cases, it was the decision to self-publish that was heavily rewarded.

These issues can be handled in the analysis. One way would be to compare hybrids with those who have been traditionally published, as both groups represent the top fraction of two different freely made decisions: the decision to either query an agent/publisher or to self-publish. These two groups also have in common the ability to draw the interest of a publishing house, whether out of a slush pile or out of the pool of self-published titles.

 

Read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.