Tag Archives: Tim Parks

Why writer$ write

Miscellaneous, ,

Tim Parks wonders about the correlation between quality of writing and the amount of income received from doing it:

Asked to write blogs for other sites, some with much larger audiences, I chose to stay with the New York Review, partly out of an old loyalty and partly because they pay me better. Would I write worse if I wrote for a more popular site for less money? Or would I write better because I was excited by the larger number of people following the site? And would this larger public then lead to my making more money some other way, say, when I sold a book to an American publisher? And if that book did make more money further down the line, having used the blog as a loss leader, does that mean the next book would be better written? Or do I always write as well or as badly as I anyway do regardless of payment, so that these monetary transactions and the decisions that go with them affect my bank balance and anxiety levels, but not the quality of what I do?

I don’t know about Parks, but the reason I keep up this blog is the huge stack of cash each post brings in.

(shrug)

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