What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing For Money

Here’s a hint: It’s money.

Whenever someone offers me a job, I think about how they’re going to make money off of what I am doing for them—and how much money that is. They’re not offering me a job out of the goodness of their heart. They have something that needs to be done, and they don’t have the time or the skill or the desire to do it. They want me to do it, and they’re willing to pay me. But they can’t pay me so much that they don’t make money off of what I am doing. If they did, I’d be no use to them.

(I know you know what “working” is but sometimes it helps to spell these things out.)

Writing is a job. It can be easy to forget this because there’s so much free writing. Anyway, words (theoretically) cost money. No one person can write enough to fill a whole publication, so the publication’s money is distributed to several writers who can.

Now, there are many publications that don’t make any money at all. A rich person is paying for the thing to exist, but the rich person got rich before the publication, not through the publication. How did that person get rich? People did work that the rich person did not do; he sold whatever it was they made and then he paid them but he did not pay them all or even close to most of the money he got for whatever he…