Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living

In 2013, Manjula Martin and Jane Friedman founded Scratch, an online journal dedicated to exploring the intersection between writing as an art and publishing as a business. For two years, they published work about the economics of writing by both well-known authors and authors who struggle to pay the rent. In Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, Martin continues the conversation with a collection of powerful essays and interviews.

Writers who need information on how to write a query letter or prepare an estimate for writing a white paper should look elsewhere. This is not a how-to book. (However, Choire Sicha's essay "Monetization" is a funny and informative look at how Internet sites make money, and Cheryl Strayed gives a clear description of how author advances really work--both useful to anyone with dreams of a writing career.) Instead this is a series of candid and generous discussions of the often problematic relationship between writers and money.

The essays are fundamentally personal and oddly transgressive. Writers share stories of debt and bad financial choices, as well as details of their publishing contracts. They consider the nature of financial security and the artistic value of having a non-writing job. They describe life in and after MFA programs. Several discuss the lie of "writing for exposure."

The collective lesson of these essays is that writing is work and should be treated as such, or as Susan Orleans put it, "I ran the widget factory and I was the widget." --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

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