The Begging Creator Economy
Ernest Hemingway, the House of Medici, and AI bulls conspire to (not) pay creatives on the internet
The Hemingway problem
Twelve days ago, I decided to put aside some of my writing for paid subscribers. While I stand by the decision, it comes with an awkward, icky feeling, like I walked through 19th-century London and now have to scrape the filth and soot from my exposed skin.
Then, I think about Ernest Hemingway and the feeling fades.
In a Defector essay on Hollywood nepo babies and compensation for creative work, Kelsey McKinney notes,
Writers are paid less now than they were 50 years ago, for the same work. Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That's more than $21 per word in today's dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn't exist1.
There is an obvious way to read this: we have devalued human creativity in the form of writing (and other media, but writing’s the one I know best). About a year ago, the UK’s Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre surveyed ‘primary occupation authors’, or people who (aim to) make a living primarily from their writing. I’ll skip the small talk.
In 2022, primary occupation authors earned a median income of £7,000 [~$9,300] in respect of their self-employed writing activities… This suggests that writing in itself cannot on average sustain an income that is consistent with a minimum wage
For reference, £7,000/year is less than a third of the UK’s minimum wage. From the same source,
Fewer authors now earn their entire income from writing alone, suggesting this is becoming an unsustainable career path. Writing is also an increasingly unequal profession, with the top 10% of earners taking home almost half of all income.
There are a few exceptions of authors that turn a bestseller into a movie and TV series, but those are exceedingly rare. We have reshuffled the value we give human creativity into an even more skewed distribution with a long tail — the handful of winners attached to a near-infinity of struggling hopefuls. Several authors I admire have had multiple books published by the Big Five publishers and have won several awards. They need a day job to pay rent. (The same may be true for literary agents.)
Yes, if your last name is Obama and you launch a (ghost-written?) biography, you’ll do fine. Same for popular self-help books that contain not a trace of an original idea2. Some technical writing pays decently. But if your bookshelf contains fiction (it’s good for you!3) from authors other than George R.R. Martin or J.K. Rowling, your favorite authors are probably struggling financially if their primary income is their writing4.
Thank the muses for Substack, Patreon, and the rest of the platform pantheon.
Right?
The patronage platforms
The House of Medici was one of the wealthiest and most powerful family dynasties in modern Western history. Their ascent began when they founded the Medici bank in 1397 in Florence and between the 15th and 18th centuries, the family consolidated their wealth and influence. Several popes and queens came from the dynasty’s ranks. The Medici developed a reputation for ruthlessness, hedonism, and the pursuit of power at all costs. They also funded a major renaissance in art and science. Perhaps as a display of their power and wealth, the Medici were generous patrons to, among others, Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, and Galileo.
Good news, these days patronage has been democratized. (Read that in a sarcastic voice.) Through Substack, Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-Fi, or a similar platform, artists and creatives can now set themselves up for public patronage.
Is that really the case, though? In Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the acronym TANSTAAFL plays a key role — there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
All the public patronage platforms take a share of donations, which makes sense. Running that infrastructure costs money and businesses need to profit5. But this does put the artists in an odd position. They’re creatives seeking patronage, but they’re also products for a profit-driven platform. These two roles are not mutually exclusive; they have always been combined. Yet, the best artists aren’t necessarily the best products, and vice versa. Popularity drives public patronage and whether popularity reflects artistry… Let’s say that’s an open question.
Through whatever combination of factors, some creatives on public patronage platforms end up on the leaderboard and a few thousand people send them maybe ten bucks per month. That adds up. But that’s not the reality for the overwhelming majority of writers/artists on those platforms. Those creatives who beg you for small change are the churn that keeps the patronage platforms and the yachts of the big hitters afloat. Just like the long-tailed distribution of writing income (a head of hopefuls and a tail of few successfuls), the creator economy doesn’t have a middle class, or,
The current creator landscape more closely resembles an economy in which wealth is concentrated at the top. On Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage…
On Spotify, for instance, the top 43,000 artists — roughly 1.4% of those on the platform — pull in 90% of royalties…
Because the internet has made it more possible than ever for almost anyone to share their creative exploits, we might argue that the endless sea of (often free) content is mostly low-quality material. After all, if you’re a good writer or artist, surely you’d have been picked up by a gallery or publisher or literary agent? So, are you, as someone who wants to support the arts, better off simply buying a book from an established writer? Far be it for me to make that judgment (or to judge anyone else’s creative endeavors); that’s subjective. But most traditionally published books don’t earn out their advances. Most startups fail. Most drugs never make it to market.
When confronted with critics who decried the low quality of science fiction, author and literary critic Theodore Sturgeon replied with Sturgeon’s Law:
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
It’s not science fiction (or internet creativity/writing) that is crap; it’s a big chunk of everything that is. You, consumer, have to search for quality in whatever field you’re interested in and cherish it when you find it.
Who’s to say that you can’t find a little gem somewhere in the churn?
The virtual elephant
We need to address the virtual elephant in the room. Or rather, the AI bull in the writing boutique, blindly stomping around in an attempt to mimic the reviled Apple ad that crushed symbols of creativity.
Whether it’s for digital art or writing, generative AI tools are popular in a certain segment of ‘creators’ (with big, frowny quotation marks). After all, if you can churn out more content, you can claim a bigger chunk of the churn. You can make your content mimic others’ past successes. You can finally lean into all the get-rich-quick schemes that rely on pushing quantity and little else. And, perhaps, hopefully, you can fool people into paying you for what is essentially a copy-paste job.
This is uncharitable of me6. Some authors might use AI as an editor rather than a text generator, some digital artists might use it for a few final touch-ups or come up with a whole new creative process. But how long will that last with economic pressures squeezing the ink and paint out of creators’ veins? How strong is the temptation to let the generative tools do ‘just a little more’? There’s rent to pay, after all, and your paying subscriptions have plateaued below the poverty line. It’s sink or swim. Floating is not an option when the demands of daily life drag you down.
Are there legitimate AI-generated artworks? Are there legitimate AI-generated essays? I don’t know. Would you pay for them if you knew?
There are plenty of articles on how AI will revolutionize the creator economy, but does that represent the artistic revolution you, me, we want to see? The companies making those tools available have one goal: profit. The marketing talk of ‘enhancing or democratizing human creativity’ is just that, marketing. If they wanted to democratize human creativity, they’d pay the creators whose works they use as training data7. They’d stop greenwashing their environmental costs. They’d stop traumatizing the workers who label their data for less than $2/hour.
Do we want to drown in a sea of virtually generated influencers that steal celeb voices to read AI-generated scripts and then ask you to buy their affiliate products, thank you, please? Do we continue to insist that online expressions of creativity need to be compressed into a daily posting schedule of seven-second videos or essays in bullet points that tell you how to become rich online, why celeb X is a hottie, or why [pick any group of people] is the source of all evil?
By sheer dint of quantity and ease of mindless consumption, those excesses of creator economy hijacking are out-competing the genuine, heartfelt, human creativity that seeks patronage.
A world without human art frightens me. Yes, even and especially the scientist in me. I work as a communication professional and I deliberately make sure my newsletter is not optimized for easy consumption. I could generate cardboard filler text in ChatGPT and tweak it to make it sound human — plenty of ‘successful’ creators and pseudo-intellectuals do this and I have enough writing acumen to do it well. Instead, I want my writing here to be challenging and interesting and playful and I want you to read it twice because, when unchained, I rarely write anything with only a single meaning8. I deliberately inject assonance, alliteration, and rhythm because these words must dance, not be suffocated by efficiency. My sentences flow until they suddenly, intentionally, turn; they have hooks and barbs, but also grow roses and ruffle their silver feathers. I want my personal writing to contain little parts of me. How else will we connect?
Isn’t that the point of creativity? To add richness and beauty to a harsh world that is burning, to unlock new perspectives, to break old habits of thought, to see each other as unique and connected? Even though the creative act - the writing, the painting, the sculpting - is often lonely, the intention behind it is anything but. We create to make our inner world visible, connect through doing so, and tell the universe, “We are here.”
Maybe we need a new renaissance. A creator economy that supports creators.
Would it be ironic to end with a subscribe button? Let’s give it a try.
Thanks for dipping into the churn to read this. If you choose to become a Subtle Sparks patron, you’ll get all the regular good stuff + personal essays (aka the jungle writing) + micro-essay collections called Coffee Shop Conversations (coming soon).
And you can click buttons. That also helps my writing survive the churn.
In short speculative fiction, which I have some experience with, you’d be hard-pressed to find places that pay more than $0.12/word… And those are more competitive than top scientific journals, with acceptance rates below 1%.
I can’t… help myself. (Admit it, that was a good one. Worth more than $1/word, surely?)
A recent meta-analysis that combines over 100 studies suggests that reading fiction has small but consistent cognitive benefits. More specifically, reading fiction improves your verbal ability, general cognitive ability, and empathy. And yes, those benefits remain even when comparing fiction to non-fiction!
If I look at myself as an example: a recent OECD report indicates that I fall in the highest income tax bracket in the world as a single, childless Belgian. Turns out that being single isn’t only soul-crushing; it’s also freaking expensive. A back-of-the-envelope calculation that takes into account Substack’s fees, Stripe’s percentage, taxes, and additional freelance fees (wtf, Belgium?), suggests I’d need at least >700 paying Substack subscribers if this newsletter would ever (and thus, very likely never) be viable as my primary income. Not that that’s the goal, but it does make one think.
Billionaires aren’t looking at these patronage platforms. They still throw millions at artworks to show off, but the people who rely on patronage platforms as either creators or supporters rarely have the resources to extend their patronage/income beyond small amounts. To any billionaire reading this, “Hi. Want some writing?”
On another note, I am not against large language models and other types of machine learning. I’ve seen from relatively up close how they can contribute to our understanding of the biology of cancer, neurodegeneration, and gene regulation, for example.
This does not seem to be the case. For example, in a recent The Verge piece we read that Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg “says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter.” So that’s how they really think about the creators whose work they steal… Not valuable enough to matter.
There is more to this, but that’s for a future post. Boom, marketing genius.
I've been making a living as a writer for 45 years. I may be the last of the generation of non famous writers to make a living churning out words.
I have been paid up to $6 a word to write magazine articles. But rates and opportunities have been on the decline since the Internet began killing off print publications.
The reality is "fun" writing - like essays and fiction - has always been a tough way to make a buck. There isn't a large paying market for type of stuff most people want to write on substack.
I still make a six figure income but it's largely for stuff like white papers ang ghost writing - that's where the money is. I still publish profiles and essays but I can't make a living with those as I did 29 years ago because the markets have dried up.
I think there will be great opportunities for people who are clever about developing an audience and monetizing their work. But I doubt it will be from patrons who are sponsoring art. More likely it will be companies who want to leverage the creators audience for marketing purposes.
Good writing Gunnar, and good research.