Most new authors are subsidized by their day job. It’s a huge moment in an authors life when they start making money exclusively from writing. A moment most never get to.

Same deal with most board game designers. The vast majority are subsidized by their day job, and aren't ever going to make serious money from designing games.

I know a guy, for example, that worked two years in his spare time on one game, got picked up by a publisher, ended up in Barnes and Noble and was considered a success by the publisher (they even requested and released an expansion), and the guy got only $9,000 in royalties (with no advance) for all his efforts.

Pretty much the only people making enough money for it to be their sole form of income are either hired directly a publisher or are out there hustling constantly and signing like 8+ game designs a year, or have insanely cheap cost of living (one game designer mentioned how he made net income of $12k one year and was able to survive off that because they live super cheaply), or have somehow landed on a massive evergreen hit, like Azul or Carcassonne.

[1] https://twitter.com/JPacCantin/status/1647455444884156417

> Most new authors are likely subsidized by their wealthy families.

You think most new authors have wealthy families?

That is a very odd assumption, given how hard it is to write a book... and given how low the returns are... and given how many other ways there are to achieve prestige... and given how little people regard authorship these days as a measurement of it... and given how unlikely it would be for wealth to have an outsized representation in a career generally associated with poverty... and how all old authors were once new authors which would imply that most of them are wealthy too, which, not so.

I'm talking about contemporary literature. It has been this way historically and nothing about it has changed.

What historical data do you have?

Wikipedia. Most authors in the western cannon are descendants of aristocracy.

"Most authors in the Western cannon" as a group is not representative of most authors, Western or otherwise.

They are the representation of the _successful_ authors, though. Because they are the cannon now. So the OP is right.

He is not right. His original claim was that new authors are mostly wealthy. All he did was weaken his claim until it was (more, but not actually) supportable.

Further, to address your own point, they are not even the representation of successful authors. There's thousands and thousands of successful authors that aren't even near to being close to the gates of the Western canon.

Of course he is right. It's similar story to the early scientists whom all were independently wealthy. And your claim about 'thousands and thousands of successful authors' is just ridiculous when an average person doesn't even read a thousand books in his lifetime let alone considers most of the authors of these books 'successful'.

That's such a silly standard of success to think that one must be entered into the Western cannon to be considered successful. The number of authors that have made good money writing books far, far exceeds, by many orders of magnitude, the number of authors in the Western cannon.

In the 20th century, there have been hundred of thousands to a million different titles published. If even 10% of those authors made enough money to be considered a living wage, it absolutely dwarfs the number of authors in the cannon, which is on the scale of 100s, not thousands.

If the cannon is your standard, your standard excludes almost the entire industry.

If your standard of success is 'making good money' instead of leaving lasting impression and still being read hundreds of years after the author's death then you are still wrong. Only a tiny amount of all authors were able to make _any_ money from their books, let alone enough to live comfortable lives. Book publishing is like professional sport or entertainment, only the very top make any money. Hence if you are already wealthy you can keep trying and maybe finally you make it big. If you are poor you don't have that luxury.

I know plenty of authors and none of them are subsidized by wealthy families. All of them do it part time in the evenings out of a labor of love.

It is worth pointing out that there's nothing particular odd if it were the case that writing was subsidized by wealthy families. For the vast majority of the history of writing, writing was subsidized an left to monks, philosophers or aristocrats. It's only been in the relatively recent time period that writing was a potential occupation for anyone interested with enough skills/talent.

In my experience, in NY, the majority of people working in contemporary literature publishing are ivy leage graduates, mostly women, and they live off of their parents. I'm not judging, just stating my observation.

Literary fiction, yes. That market's so fucked that the vast majority of literary magazines don't pay at all and you'll often get sneered at for asking about pay.

Anyone trying to make any amount of money at writing writes genre fic of one sort or another. Fantasy or maybe sci fi, and probably "juvenile fiction" (tends to sell better to adults, too). Romance (which may or may not actually be straight-up porn, basically). Airport thrillers. Not lit-fic. Never, if your goal is to make any money at all.

And yeah, the publishing-side heavily favors people with money, lit-fic or not, for the reason that making a living at it requires excellent connections to get you directly into a high-paying part of it, or else years and years making less than it takes to live on in places like New York, to work your way up the ladder. Either way, that probably means family money. This phenomenon been mentioned, directly or obliquely, in IIRC all of: Bullshit Jobs (Graeber, 2018), Fussell's Class (1983), and The Official Preppy Handbook (Birnbach et al, 1980).