5 ms·
A little tangent, but > With a peak circulation of forty thousand—enormous for its time How was it possible to make a living - I imagine a full editorial team
by ricardobeat 2mo ago
A little tangent, but
> With a peak circulation of forty thousand—enormous for its time
How was it possible to make a living - I imagine a full editorial team, writers, printers, office workers - with this volume of sales, while today, magazines with zero distribution cost, and with millions of subscribers are going under. Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives?
- Exoristos 2mo agoWhat percentage of Condé Nast's or Bertelsmann's gross receipts do you think goes directly to editorial and print workers?
- Swizec 2mo ago> Were magazines insanely more expensive at the time? What gives? The standard of living was much lower and people’s expectations of reasonable income were lower too. It was common in those days for blue collar workers to do 12 hours of hard physical labor and live in cramped conditions with multiple people per room. What we would now consider worse than a homeless shelter. In comparison just working a desk job was already a luxury. Even if you were barely making ends meet Quick Google search says a newspaper writer would make $400 to $800 per year in Poe’s time. That is about $20k/year in today’s money, which is just above poverty level
- michael0church 2mo ago[dead]
- nephihaha 2mo agoI was reading about 19th century Russian writers recently. Very few of them made much money and some like Turgenev and Tolstoy were personally wealthy.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 2mo agoChekhov went from rags to riches. But this was closer to the end of the century.
- arbuge 2mo ago> Writing professionally was basically gambling in the 19th century. Plus ça change...
- michael0church 2mo ago[dead]
- a96 2mo agoThe expression "starving artist" does exist for a reason.
- nephihaha 1mo agoYes... But ironically what we see nowadays online is poor people working for free or giving their work away for free. Even before AI generated "literature" takes away much of the market, we've got human writers giving their short stories and novels away. That is a luxury many people don't have.