Apparently, the New York Times is all about writing about writing lately. Hurray for us! The Sunday Book Review will have a piece that plays with the idea of a “bailout for writers.” I promise to find something uplifting for the next post. In the mean time …. topical!
… overcapacity of farms and farm produce was driving down crop prices, and that elimination of that overcapacity was needed.
Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. …
So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.
Of course, this is all theoretical and satirical and junk.
However, I took the real-life version of a writer bailout for a year; I worked in advertising. And now I don’t. So I guess bailouts are only for the greedy or the stupid. Burn! Take that, insurance, airlines, auto, banking …..