where to suss out more writer income details
It's always been brand money if you think about it
Evidently New York mag has perfected the tax season angle by getting 60 New Yorkers to anonymously divulge their income, heavily selecting for the kind of person whose financials that the chattering class most love to debate: writers. Cue screenshots a’flying.
There’s the Substack ghostwriter making $165K (it is not me, sorry to inquiring texts), and the NYT bestselling author bringing in $49K, inclusive of $30K from a book advance (we can assume that’s just one payment out of the entire advance, which may be closer to $60K-120K — though the bigger story here is that oh! You can make $7K a pop on teaching a writing retreat? Interesting…who wants to start a newsletter retreat DM me pls).
And of course, there’s the mysterious fashion Substacker making $275K, more than half of which came from brand partnerships (which I assume includes affiliate earnings). Everyone scouring the Substack fashion & beauty leaderboard trying to sniff out who this might be should perhaps consider…the gender factor. In my experience, the professional girlies are much more careful when talking about money, having listened & learned amid every round of the Refinery29 Money Diary witch hunts from our youths. No chica is taking that kind of reputational risk! (They’re also too busy pulling that $275K in per quarter, I’d wager.)
Separately, I found it fascinating for Hamish to say what I naively assumed was the quiet part out loud once and for all: Substack is not an email business; it’s a direct relationships business.
While we’re obsessing over writer financials, you should read this correspondence between Ann Friedman, she of the radical $15/year newsletter pricing, and Jade Chang, which may calm down some of the heavy breathing that reading those numbers above induced. Per Jade on how to relate to other writers in non-competitive ways:
…even before i had the terminology, I thought of it as an ecosystem. I feel like we are united in the desire to be part of a reality in which deep thinking and engagement with the world is both fun and necessary. Awards or good reviews or prestigious fellowships are not the prize. The prize is the existence of this reality, and it can only thrive if we all contribute to it
And if you’re really hungry for more money specifics, Scratch is coincidentally back this week! The Scratch brand started as a Tumblr by Manjula Martin called “Who Pays Writers?” in 2012; it joined up with Scratch magazine and produced the iconic 2017 Scratch anthology of essays and interviews about how writers make a living. It returns, of course, in newsletter form: the first post contains pre-tax income details galore from the founders (honestly very happy to find out people are still making $1.5-$2/word out there!).
The former managing editor of the LA Times and BuzzFeed News, the ferociously smart Sara Yasin, has finally made her next highly anticipated move: launching The Key magazine with PalFest to focus on reportage, interviews, essays, and analysis on Palestine. “What is neutrality if mere existence is made political?” Yasin asks in her opening letter. Your move, legacy media!