The Matter of Money

Economics and writing

My novel, Glass Century, continues to circulate. The Wall Street Journal has said it is “absorbing . . . charged with heart-in-throat suspense . . . the amplitude of Glass Century is also its greatest strength. The people it depicts are as textured and as durable as their city.” Believe it! Get your copy if you haven’t already. And please rate on Goodreads if you enjoyed it.

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I consider myself a lucky person. In the mid-2020s, amid the great upheavals in my industry, I am able to carve out an upper middle-class living as a writer. I can pay my rent in New York City. I don’t worry much about grocery prices. I can travel when I want to, and I can dispense extra cash into a savings account. My life is adequately bourgeoise. I don’t mind this at all; there’s a writer’s cult built around precarity that I believe, for the most part, is a bit silly. Those who glamorize precarity haven’t lived that way themselves. It’s easier, on the balance, to create art when one isn’t starving or desperately staving off eviction.

Writers, and those working in media, get uncomfortable when talking money. Having been a working journalist and essayist since 2011, holding down everything from staff jobs to contract work to pure freelance, I’ve experienced all financial arrangements. I don’t have wonderful advice to offer when it comes to making money as a writer or a journalist. If you can secure a staff position, take one. If you can’t, freelance and have a backup plan. Before entering media, I was certified to teach high school English in New York public schools. My own preference, today, is to have copious amounts of freelance and contract work, as well as pull an income from my newsletter. This fits my lifestyle, and I earn a good living—better than I would, at this point, on most staffs. I’m a rare creature in today’s world of media tumult. As a writer, I’ve earned anywhere from $50 for a piece to more than $10,000; my books, generally, do not make me a great deal. The biggest advance I’ve received, for any of my published books, is $25,000. Glass Century, appearing with a very small press, was a simple royalty split, with no upfront advance at all. One reason I won’t run for office again, beyond the fact that I love writing too much, is that my year on the stump cost me a great deal of money. I could barely work and the campaigning cut far too deep into my savings for my liking.

There’s a new fight on the internet over the media and money. n+1, a small but prestigious magazine, recently posted a job for a managing editor that pays between $58,000 and $64,000 a year. On X/Twitter, a writer for the Atlantic called the salary a “fucking joke.” The consensus, among some in media, is that the salary is too low, even exploitative, for a New York City role with serious job demands. The counterargument, which came just as fiercely, is that an Atlantic writer is out of touch because her magazine is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the wealthiest women in the world. Of late, the Atlantic has been boosting salaries, even offering some writers as much as $300,000 to lure them away from other publications. n+1, conversely, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, like The Metropolitan Review, the magazine I co-founded. These sort of nonprofits, if flush with donor cash, can pay high salaries, though they typically do not. It’s certainly plausible n+1 is capable of paying a managing editor more, but it’s also very possible there just isn’t a great deal of money to go around. Billionaires, generally, aren’t lining up to subsidize magazines like n+1. The founders of n+1, as Emily Gould recently pointed out, worked for free in the early years of the magazine, which isn’t very surprising to me. I currently work for free as editor-in-chief of TMR. This is not my goal long-term. We hope, in the coming months, to raise enough funds to compensate myself and our talented editors, to renumerate the great deal of labor put into the magazine. But for now, all funds we have flow to the writers. I am glad, at least, the writers do get paid. Publications should always compensate their writers.

Who is right in this little dust-up over n+1? One dull answer is both sides have a point. I did enjoy TMR contributor Luke McGowan-Arnold’s retort that plenty of people in the United States live on far less than $58,000 to $64,000 a year. His point, of course, wasn’t that this is a good state of affairs—simply that, if you spend enough time around the working-class and poor, you’ll find a significant number of them would be ecstatic to earn anything close to that amount of money. I’ll add, as a lifelong New Yorker who has seen the cost-of-living here surge even further since the pandemic, $60,000 does not go nearly as far as it once did. In 2014, I was able to live in a one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend while earning, at best, $50,000, and it wasn’t too much of a strain. The apartment rented for $1,100 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and it was quite functional. Not long afterwards, we moved to a better apartment for $1,450, and this even came with a parking space for my car. Such prices, in this city, are not to be found today. It is harder and harder to find any one-bedroom apartment in any neighborhood for less than $2,000, if it’s still possible if one makes various compromises over quality.

One complication of the n+1 listing is not so much the salary itself but the sheer number of responsibilities. A managing editor must oversee all three print issues, supervise fact-checking and proofreading, serve as “product manager” for n+1 Books, plan and execute magazine events and fundraisers, read submissions and respond to pitches, hire interns, and “assist with the management of n+1 programming and day-to-day operational tasks.” That’s a great deal of work. A low stress office job with a remote option at $60,000 isn’t a bad deal at all. This is management, editing and business alike, and I’d argue for the responsibilities required, a higher salary is in order. This is where the Atlantic writer has her point to make. But she should also, as they used to say in the 2010s, check her privilege. It’s why, as a general rule, I don’t publicly comment on other people’s salaries or job listings. I know I am privileged. My assumption is this writer is not one of those Atlantic superstars clearing $200,000 or $300,000—I don’t know her writing very well—but I would make a strong guess she’s earning into the low six-figures, given her revulsion at the n+1 listing. There may come a time, given the chaos of media life, she comes begging for such a post one day. There may come a time when I am begging for it too. Who can know, really, what the future holds. My philosophy has always been to hustle hard, have fun, and earn as much as I possibly can. You never know when the carousel stops spinning.

The great problem, for the media and writing worlds broadly, is that they’ve grown so hostile to the working-class. There are fewer and fewer jobs available, and those that are doled out often end up in the hands of applicants with prestige degrees and several alluring internships. They tend to be the children of white-collar professionals, and their early years are subsidized; their parents pay for college, pay for rent, pass along spending money. It’s wonderful the Atlantic is paying more for writers, but that doesn’t do much to help a kid who grew up in a poor exurb of an unfashionable city, or even someone of an outer ring Brooklyn or Queens neighborhood devoid of industry connections. Jeffrey Goldberg is not scouring the rolls of CUNY for his next interns or writing fellows or whatever they might be called now. And neither are the major Substack publications, like Matt Yglesias’; the current Slow Boring fellow (who is doing quite a good job, by the way) is the daughter of a United States Senator. n+1 was founded by Harvard grads, and it’s not obvious they’ve found much more class diversity since. I grew up middle-class, the son of federal workers, and I had a comfortable childhood. Still, the fact that I graduated from a SUNY and achieved a higher position in the worlds of writing and media makes me, today, something of an outlier. Thirty, forty years ago, this was far from true. Two of the most famed tabloid columnists of the twentieth century, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, did not have college degrees. Elizabeth Hardwick graduated from the University of Kentucky. Philip Roth transferred from Rutgers Newark to Bucknell. Samuel Delany dropped out of City College. There were plenty of Harvard (John Updike, Norman Mailer) and Yale (William F. Buckley, Harold Bloom) kids at the top, but there was much more of a blend in the last century, high and low colliding, strivers ladder-climbing to meet and occasionally defeat their highly educated overlords. That’s how it should be. Having visited Yale this year to speak and meet with students, I can say the undergraduates there are as brilliant as advertised. I’ve been no less impressed, though, when I’ve given talks at St. John’s or Fordham or interacted with CUNY students. There’s a wide, deep reservoir of talent out there. I hope our institutions can be robust enough—and wise enough—to take advantage of all of it.