Ted Weinstein has some scary things to say about writing.
“There’s less pay,” he warned me when I reached him by phone last week to talk about making a living as a writer. “People’s attention is divided. And per-column inches, the revenues are dropping.” The representative of such high-profile clients as NPR’s Math Guy and the 826 Valencia writers, Ted’s a fast talker, and I scrambled to keep up with his rapid-fire no-nonsense portrait of the writing industry.
His observations might come across as bleak, but Ted’s refusal to sugar-coat is appropriate considering just how bleak things really are. The facts are simple: “As a percentage of the population,” he summed up, “a much smaller percentage is going to be able to make a living.”
OKAY. Times are tough. Got it. Writers are giant lumbering lizards and we’re nearing the end of the Cretaceous Period and it’s time for us to either evolve into nimble little birds or lay down in defeat and turn into an oil field over the course of several million years, only to be eventually sucked out of the ground by some despotic regime so that we can be set on fire. Yup.
And some writers are perfectly satisfied to become oil. The real Andy Rooney, for example, is not to my knowledge among the numerous Andy Rooneys on Twitter who are currently complaining about public transportation or dress shirts with snap-buttons. Andy’s perfectly happy to run down the clock, doing what he does. Fine.
And then you’ve got that guy who created The Wire who simply “doesn’t believe” in bloggers, as if he’s on the Texas board of Education and he has the power to make the theory of evolution disappear by not believing it. (I’m sympathetic to David Simon’s complaints, of course; it sucks that rigorous journalism is being replaced by cheap knock-offs. But what are you going to do, fly backwards around the Earth until time goes backwards and it’s 1978 again? Come on, David Simon. For real.)
But a lot of writers, especially the youngsters, are learning to adapt; and it’s in describing them that Ted’s tone turns from doom and/or gloom to an up-by-their-bootstraps gumption that sounds, dare I say it, optimistic.
“The people who are going to succeed,” he says, “are the people who treat their careers as a profession and are businesslike and aggressive.” His clients aren’t just writers; they’re successful brands. They’re in the business of being recognized.
For example, I saw a talk by Dan Roam, author of the fantastic Back of the Napkin, back when I worked at Lucasfilm and Dan was on a whirlwind networking/speaking tour. I don’t know how many books he sold after his hour-long appearance — lots, I would think — but book sales aside, he certainly made a memorable impression on some Important People at an Important Company.
The point is that being a writer means more than just writing.
“When your rug gets pulled out from underneath you, as the Internet does,” Ted told me, “you’ve got to dust yourself off, pick yourself up, and decide, ‘I’m going doing to expose my words in lots of different outlets and I’m going to become a new business and be a multimedia empire.’”
That’s right — a multimedia empire. It’s a point that he made last week at his How to Get a Book Published” discussion, and one that I wanted to hear more about. “What does a successful multimedia empire look like for an author?” I asked.
“It doesn’t look like anything,” he answered. “Every writer has a different model for it. It depends on their strengths.”
He went on, “The days of ‘oh I’m a newspaper journalist’ are long over. Writers have to be very dispassionate and analytic about ‘what strengths do I bring to this? How many different media are there where I can expose the contents of my brain to the people who would be interested? … Writers can sit in their ivory tower and be curmudgeonly and cliche, or acknowledge that we live in in a celebrity culture.”
Well, who doesn’t enjoy a good curmudgeoning now and then? But it doesn’t pay the bills — visibility does. Ted described a strategy of identifying media outlets that are strategically useful for showcasing your writing. “Start at the outlets that pay the best and have the greatest prestige,” he said, “and worst case … Huffington Post.” Oh zing! I do love a good dig at HuffPo, even though it really wasn’t meant that way; they have as legitimate a place in the media food chain as anyone else.
And a personalized “media food chain” is exactly what each writer needs to develop for themselves: a list of media outlets that match the writer’s strengths, listed from the best personal fit at the top (it could be the NY Times, or it could be Cat Fancy) to “at least it’s free advertising” at the bottom. Foster relationships with the outlets that need to have your writing — even if they don’t realize yet that they need you — so that you can always slip them your latest pitch.
Fostering those relationships is no small task, obviously. “How much time should a writer be devoting to writing versus marketing themselves?” I asked Ted. “It’s always been 50/50,” he answered. “You should be billing at an amount that allows you to make a living writing only 50 percent of the time.”
That’s a difficult point for writers to hear — I for one enjoy writing much more than I enjoy selling my writing — but fortunately, for writers that are willing to do the required post-writing work, it’s not impossible, or even all that overwhelming. “There’s a million ways for writers to get their words out,” said Ted, citing media outlets, the social web, and personal appearances as he dismissed my concerns about a lack of opportunities for exposure as “bullshit.”
“Stop thinking of yourself as an artist,” he emphasized as our fast-paced conversation wound down, small birds encircling my head. “You’re a businessperson. And the business is you.”
Related posts:
- Big Time Literary Agent Ted Weinstein Talks About Forming Your Own Nitty Gritty Literary Committee
- How TJ DeGroat Escaped the Blog-Post Ghetto for Social News Networking
- Writers Getting Paid
- NewsTilt: A Brand New Market for Journalism
- Don’t Fall For Free: Harlan Ellison and How Unpaid Amateurs Mess Things Up
I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 