Humanities & Cultures

According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.

Today, by some estimates, the average freelance journalist is paid around $0.25 to $0.50 per word, and at the highest-paying glossies, rates have hovered around $2 per word for more than a decade, even as inflation has diminished the purchasing power of that seemingly handsome fee. Trump’s slashing of hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants in May 2025 may have been unique as an expression of political malice toward the arts, but otherwise it was on trend with years of cuts to fellowships of all types. Even the Stegner Fellowship has suffered from tightened budgets: in August of last year, Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Stegner founded, gathered twenty-three of the program’s lecturers and announced that their current contracts were being terminated.

People at all levels of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are mostly mum on money matters, perhaps even more so in private than public. At so many parties or book launches, a quick way to earn the scorn of attendees is to ask: “How do you really make a living as a writer?” How did the twenty-seven-year-old freelancer who wrote all of three New Yorker features a year buy her Brooklyn Heights two-bedroom? By what magical means did the short story author for all the hot lit mags convert pennies and prestige into health insurance? Could book reviews, even brilliant ones, pay for bicoastal lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, or even bohemian ones in Lisbon and Berlin?

Worse than being curious is appearing confused when no (credible) answers are given. This silence, of course, conceals the way in which cultural capital is underwritten by capital capital; the ways in which literary legitimacy is made possible because someone subsidized it. It’s ironic that we call this supposedly tactful silence “class” when one’s class status is precisely what it conceals.