Getting Paid

& the importance of staying mad

I wanted to write this as a very polished essay, but with all the things I’ve been working on to finance my life, I just didn’t have the time to really percolate. Then I thought, this is exactly the problem. Despite my best efforts I will now have to give you a few rambling paragraphs on an ode to really, actually, getting paid.

Over the last few years I worry I’ve become a little jaded. I’ve always kept much of my enthusiasm suspended—a survival tactic borne from the anxiety that whatever I have can be taken at a moment’s notice. People often come up to me and say that it must be amazing, wonderful, and a dream come true to be a writer. I’m not so romantic about it.

I had given up becoming a writer for many years, thinking about how institutions had never really rewarded me for being smart. Everything I had was built from having style, charm, and telegraphing well. I always say that before I was a writer, I was myself first. I would occasionally get cast in a commercial, I would work as a nanny, a hostess, and even a few times, a West London party promoter. A combination of what my friends jokingly call “Pretty Girl Jobs” and “Woman’s Work.”

People are familiar with the complaints from freelance writers. We invoice when the piece is done, often being paid when the piece is published which could still be months. I’m still waiting on a kill fee from the New York Times from a year ago which I have forgotten about since I’ve given up sending demoralizing emails that go unanswered.

Everyone says why don’t you get a full-time job. A job in Marketing. Marketing for those who don’t know is on a downturn with layoffs. Agencies are taking a leaf out of the tech world and calling it “efficiency.” The Artificial Intelligence boom will touch all white-collar jobs first (another rant for another time).

With the writer strikes I was confounded by the fact that those were the writers everyone says I could become. “After your book, maybe you could write for Television.” What was once what novelists did in the 1930s to earn a better living was now the bottom rung. If the jobs I was to “sell-out” to get were being improperly compensated, imagine what was happening to the rest of us.

The most financially secure I’ve ever been was during the pandemic, when the Canadian government gave individuals $2000 a month for up to seven months. I finally went to the dentist and could go to therapy again. I could get a new computer, replacing my 2012 Macbook Air that had put me through university. I still bought one off a friend for $750. This period of time was the greatest argument for Universal Basic Income.

Tweets put me together with Sally Rooney or Emma Cline. As though all of a sudden I had reached this kind of stature and had become a part of that kind of literary institution, though nothing had materially changed for me. I did not have the best-selling numbers of Rooney or the inherited wealth and million-dollar book deal of Cline (why does no one remember her family invented the Jacuzzi?).

I wanted to do the publicity correctly and give the book a fair shot, the kind of shot books at bigger publishers with bigger marketing budgets already had. I wanted to represent myself accurately and under my own terms. I was published by independents, and whatever advance people might think I got, think of it more like a tax return. What many people don’t know is when you sell a book you get around a dollar or so with each book sold. This is not a complaint, I knew what I was getting into. No large publisher wanted it, they said they didn’t know how to “market” it. In that way I am a bit scrappy. Deep down I am still a sixteen year old selling zines at a book fair.

I am stubborn and I am MAD! In no other industry can you receive acclaim, reach a certain kind of public success, and not be rewarded for it. In 2021 I was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel award. Shortlisted authors got $6000 and the award winner would get $60 000. At no other time—neither being profiled by NYMag or being mentioned in the New Yorker—did I respond so viscerally. I bawled my eyes out for half an hour because even a whiff of the kind of financial security the award could provide was so shocking. I didn’t win, but the $6000 helped pay down one of my credit cards, and financed me being in New York to promote HH when it came out stateside. I just do not care about a touch of fame or being noteworthy, I have only ever cared about being respected. What people don’t realize is, when you aren’t appropriately compensated for your talent, you’re prone to losing respect…for yourself 🙃

Substack is an interesting development, at least you get paid right away and it’s up to you to create your own market. But again, why am I suddenly my own marketing team concerned with converting subscribers? Why am I looking at data? I worry that I’m doing something wrong, or I’m writing something people don’t care about. My concerns are centred around promoting, sharing, growing my subscriber base, and each time I post I feel guilty of being repetitive. The thing is, these are not the concerns of an ARTIST.

I have always known how to make the most of a dollar. My clothes, which people always point out as a frivolous expense (“maybe if you bought less, you’d save more”), are less about money spent and more about the time it takes searching for them. Anyway, add the clothes to the marketing budget. I’m at a point where it would be easier and more financially stable to become a full-time influencer… but there’s that annoying moral sense of ickiness bubbling up again. Maybe I could be an editor and leverage my title to become an influencer in a more covert, sneaky way (this is something I’ve seen become popular these days.)

I have been working since I was fourteen. I wrote most of Happy Hour between juggling a million jobs and university. Everyone asks me about a second novel, but I am TIRED. I don’t have the kind of indefatigable moxie of youth anymore. I will write a second novel DESPITE it all, but I will still be mad that all these factors put constraints on what I aim to do. It’s terrible because so much of this impacts the time artists have to experiment and play with things out of curiosity. To fail and fail again without it being the be all or end all. From my position, I know my various identities also put me at further disadvantage. I’m a Woman of Colour! Yes, yes, I know.

I am not saying this problem is more urgent than anything facing teachers, nurses, etc. It is just one small facet and example of society’s devaluation of labour. The corporatization of art is a plague. Everyone wants to pay nothing for entertainment, especially the people who profit the most. Everyone should be mad about the conditions we live in. The labour movement feels urgent and NECESSARY.

I’m no longer worried about being gauche when talking publicly about money. What do people expect? Money was a defining theme of Happy Hour. It’s not a concern that I was simply dabbling in for the story. It annoys me because frankly, money offends my sensibilities. It’s ugly! It’s grotesque! The lack of it has radicalized me into being a nightmare—if only money knew! And honestly, if I could strike a match to start a fire, I would.