On getting paid as a creative

I had the pleasure of chatting with best selling author

Katherine May

on Not Too Busy To Write podcast this week. Katherine is one of the most honest and thoughtful authors who speaks and writes about creativity and I really wanted to dig into why Katherine enjoys Substack as a platform so much (you can listen to her in full on the episode).

Katherine May by Alexa Loy Dent

Katherine told me that to her, Substack feels like blogging did in the 2000s, a place where you can build genuine community, where you can write with nuance rather than reduce everything to a pithy sound bite. She also told me that when she started her Substack, she said it would never be paid. She laughs when she mentions this because she has changed her mind about that and for a very good reason.

During her years blogging, Katherine can now see that she was taught that her work, and the work of fellow (mostly female) writers, had to be free to be of value. She now knows that they were impoverished by this and that in order to do her best work, she simply can’t be available all the time, for free. This got me thinking about my own reasons for coming to Substack.

I had been meaning to migrate my newsletter list over here for well over a year. But partly out of lack of time to give it some proper thought and partly out of confusion about how I would still keep lists to sell my writing coaching (and other boring business stuff), I kept putting the move off. But something tipped me over the edge which made me finally make the move.

In October Spotify announced paid members could now listen to up to 15 hours of audiobooks for free each month. I typed the name of my first book into the app and low and behold, there it was, available to me for free, along with tens of thousands of other audiobooks. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The Society of Authors put out a statement to say that as far as they knew, no authors or agents were approached for licensing or permissions for streaming deals made between major publishers and Spotify.

The majority of authors are already paid very poorly for their work. There is also the constant expectation that authors be available to readers online, all the time. Most author events, unless they are a large literary festival, are unpaid. And without enough support from publishers, and a noisy market, authors are also doing huge amounts of unpaid pr and marketing, just to give their book the slightest chance of reaching readers. But a for-profit streaming service, giving our hard work away, without paying us for it? Reader, it was the straw that broke this camel’s back.

I am passionate about artists getting paid for their work (I recently got into an argument on Instagram with a major feminist account for posting footage recorded from INSIDE a cinema because it’s theft - don’t come at me it is, it’s illegal and it’s unethical, you are stealing, even if you tag the female director - you may as well say you are paying them in exposure FFS!). I grew up in a household of creative freelancers and I have always been a creative freelancer. I have slowly seen a seeping away of creatives being paid for their work in both my previous career as a photographer (I won’t even begin to go into how much worse off photographers are today than 20 years ago) and now in my work as a writer.  But I also want my work to be accessible.

When I began working as a non-fiction writing coach, this was a conundrum. I want to get paid properly for my work but I also know that sometimes the writers who need support the most, the ones without the contacts who can mentor them, and without any knowledge of the industry, are often the ones who can’t afford the services of a writing coach. They’re also the writers we desperately need to tell their stories.

So I made the decision that I would not make my work cheaper, I would make it more expensive. And I would always give some coaching away for free to low-income writers instead. If this is something you are interested in – check out my website here.

But what about content? Podcasts were a really accessible way for me to feel inspired and part of a community back when I started writing again after many years break. So having a podcast available for free feels really worthwhile to me. I love having the conversations, they help me as a writer and I know they add value. It takes a lot of time (a LOT), but it feels worth it.

But what about everything else? How is it possible to produce all that content when we need to get paid (hello, single parent with two kids) and also do deep creative work?

It’s just not possible to do everything for free, for everyone who wants it. And I think that’s ok. And it’s ok to keep our best work, our deep creative work, as paid work. Like Katherine told me during our conversation, we should not be impoverished by our work.

Over the coming 3-6 months I will be doing more on substack for paid subscribers. Some of it will always be free. But, like Katherine, I want this to be a community of value. And free doesn’t always equal valuable.

If you are a writer who struggles to feel you deserve to get paid for you work - I would urge you to listen to Katherine’s wise words. I think as a whole community we would be better off, if we all got paid what we are worth.

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