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TIL Making a living writing books is more or less as rare as becoming a billionaire
(www.theintrinsicperspective.com)
this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Given the respective numbers of professional book writers and billionaires, I doubt it very much.
I am sure there are many more people who are writing books than who are billionaires. His point was, how many are making a living at it as their primary career.
Did you read his breakdown? He made a pretty compelling case that that number is about 500.
Frankly the whole article is just bizarrely defining metrics to fit the narrative.
Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?
My metric is based on “how many bizarre metrics are in this article”.
Just one then, there are 43 billionaires in France (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by_net_worth).
And there are around 40 people in the French Academy alone. That's only a small part of French writers.
And 43 billionaires is a rather big number. Compared to Pakistan or Colombia where the comparison would be even more skewed.
Just looking down the list of academy members and grabbing some at random I see:
It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don't know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn't an argument that it isn't hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.
Again: The argument is not that writers don't exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don't know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance -- maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play -- but regardless of that if you didn't like that guy's fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.
You're really getting out of your way to miss my point. The number of professional writers is some orders of magnitude bigger than the number of billionaires, so much so that taking some arbitrary subset of writers of approximately the same size is easily done.
Another counter example (because I'm really nice like that): some contemporary French writers, just from memory:
Yes I know, it's not 43, but I could easily go to my local bookshop and find 180 more, and again 43 billionaires is a lot for 70 million inhabitants. In any case the number of 500 writers in the article is laughable.
But that's not the main point. What gets on my nerves is that the author of the article is cherry picking facts to entertain an idea. I could deliberately try something like "but you know there are more astronauts than true painters" and refute everything opposed to this with No true Scotsman fallacies.
The article proves absolutely nothing and the author makes a mess of logical thinking, while managing to blur what the wider perspective is supposed to be.
How many of those people are making more than $50k per year at it though?
It’s not “no true Scotsman” if there’s a defined dollar value that makes someone, so to speak, a Scotsman. I mean for all I know you are right and there are plenty who are supporting themselves doing it- but the point is not that writers don’t exist; it is that the number of them who are making a living without some other means of support is way smaller than it should be.
👍
Come on, have another go! It's fun to critique things and tell people they are wrong; I wanted to have a turn.
Because they didn't write an article, they're just critiquing one.
"Critiquing" is a pretty charitable description
It kind of gets into the napkin math. But it's sort of silly.
If most writers can spend the first third of their career focusing on journalism or some type of corporate writing, and then the middle third on publishing novels or whatever, and then the last third teaching, or maybe just riding the fame of the one book that got turned into a movie... Yeah I think trying to be a writer sounds easier than becoming a billionaire.