Writing is a poker game.

On the value and downfall of "The Believer," the similarity between poker tournaments and paid literary submissions, the flaw in paying in "exposure," and the reason we should quit and drive Uber.

NOTE: Before you dive into this week’s long email (frankly, it’s not good, you should delete this email now and go outside), I want to say thanks to everyone who sent a kind note about last week’s newsletter about epilepsy. I also want to mention that I forgot to announce our new copyeditor, Elizabeth Conard, in the newsletter. Her bio: She is awesome. I’d advise skipping this newsletter and heading straight to “Bird Bones,” a short story by Danielle Shorr. You could even read about new books that came out this week. Anything but continuing to this email. Anything!

Dear Identity Theory Readers,

In the wake of this week’s news that The Believer magazine is shutting down, I’m going to spitball about the economics of lit mags and writing. I’m not an expert, and this is not a manifesto but rather an interrogation. I’ll leave the comments open on the web version of this post, and you’re also free to reply to the email if you want to share your thoughts. Please don’t take it too seriously as I’m just typing my thoughts spontaneously as always in this Friday space and I don’t know anything about being a literary writer.

As you may know, Identity Theory has never been a paying publication. I don’t make money from it, and neither do the other editors or contributors. In the early years, the process of publishing one of our long-form interviews would take many hours: Robert Birnbaum would read the book (maybe 3-5 hours or more depending on the length), then he would drive from Exeter to Boston (2 hours round trip, or longer in winter) to conduct an interview with the author of the book (about one hour of talking, and the author wasn’t paid either, so that’s 2+ combined unpaid hours), then he’d return home and transcribe the 10,000 words (several hours) and review the transcript, then he’d send it to me, and I’d work on editing it and formatting it for the web for a few hours (web production was much harder back then). Collectively, the overall time it took to produce one interview was probably equivalent to a 20-hour workweek. And no one got paid. And we repeated this process nearly 200 times.

In addition to that, I was handling external submissions and managing the website and writing this newsletter and working a regular job (usually).

In 2003, The Believer came along and took on some of Birnbaum’s interviews in its early issues. Presumably they paid him. Not many mags were willing to invest the paper costs on a 10,000-word author chat back then, so it was nice that that magazine stepped up to give those interviews a real-world space. In his bio, Birnbaum jokingly referred to himself as the CFO of identitytheory.com, a nod to the fact that there was no money here.

Eventually, Ross Simonini joined our staff as music/interviews editor and conducted perhaps a hundred or more interviews, mostly with bands. Fortunately, he was then able to find a home as the interviews editor at The Believer and stayed with them until the bitter end. Presumably they paid him.

In that way we were a sort of minor-league team to The Believer, a place to showcase talent that would eventually lead to greater fame and compensation.

The problem was that The Believer wasn’t making money, either. Its publishers hit a wall in the mid-‘10s and eventually sold the magazine to UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute to try to keep it afloat. UNLV dumped money into it for years and then quit this week, citing the pandemic and a shift in priorities. Part of it had to do with the fact that its leader got caught with his pants down (but a mesh shirt on) in a Zoom meeting.

So, this week there was some scuffling: The Believer staff rightfully felt wronged by the decision; other friends of UNLV’s writing programs felt like The Believer was a money pit detracting from fellowships and other programs directly helping writers in need and were happy to see it go; and cries of despair were Tweeted from hipster coffee shops from Brooklyn to San Francisco as readers and writers wished for some other wealthy benefactor to step in and take on the financially unsustainable magazine.

Which got me thinking more about the economics of literary publishing.

As someone who earns most of his money playing poker, I often compare the economics of the literary world to the economics of the poker world. In 2005, I talked with poet Katy Lederer about the similarities between poker and writing. Some of the commonalities break down like this:

The goal of being a professional poker player is as pipe-dreamy and demanding as the goal of being a professional literary writer. The success rate is about the same.

It takes less than five minutes to learn the rules of poker, but poker is an infinitely complicated game. It’s easy to overestimate one’s own abilities at poker because the basics are so simple.

Writing feels similarly easy to people who don’t understand the complexity involved in being a professional writer. Early on, aspiring writers lack the tools to evaluate the quality of their own writing in the same way that aspiring poker players don’t have the capacity to identify their own mistakes.

Both pursuits are hotbeds for the Dunning-Kruger effect; both pursuits can require years of struggle to become profitable; and in the end, only a tiny percentage of people who attempt to become professional poker players and professional literary writers succeed.

Katy said it more eloquently:

I think both professions are incredibly tough. I mean, I'd say there are only about, oh, a handful of literary writers out there who can make a really good living with their writing. Almost all of the "successful" writers I know actually make their livings by teaching and/or drawing on trust funds. In this, writing is a lot like poker. Only about thirty poker players I can think of make serious money year in and year out playing poker. The rest make a killing one year, lose the next, or lose all the time and lie about it. In both writing and poker, people either consciously or unconsciously exaggerate their financial successes and downplay their failures. Both writing and poker function as economies of status and prestige, and both require a survivalist's iron will. That said, they both are such elegant and beautiful art forms. Both appear on the surface quite simple, and it is only after some time spent practicing them that it comes clear how incredibly complex they can be. The sign of both an expert writer and an expert poker player is that they make their respective endeavors look easy.

The thing is, neither pursuit is easy. It took my brother [Howard Lederer] two years to make any money at all playing poker. It took me ten to become proficient enough at writing that I could pull off a full-length prose narrative. In both art forms, it is possible to make money in dribs and drabs—to do well intermittently. What separates the professionally successful in these fields from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book. Similarly, it is one thing to play a single, phenomenal hand when the deck's on your side, another to patiently wait when the deck has run cold. The person who can pull off the latter is the one who is eventually paid off.

I’ve been thinking about this because the model of pay-to-play in the literary magazine world feels eerily similar to the model of tournament poker. Both involve static entry fees and a prize pool distributed to the top 10% (or fewer) of entrants. For example, let’s say 100 writers pay $30 to enter for a chance to win publication in a journal. $3000 is collected, some of which goes to transaction fees and overhead, and then maybe 1-10 people get published and paid with the unpublished writers’ money (along with their own fee) minus what the banks take. The same would be true of a 100-person poker tournament with a $30 entry fee, with 1-10 players getting paid with the losing players’ money and their own fees and some of the money going to the casino house take.

In both instances, a large percentage of entrants have no shot. Most writers who enter will not yet have the talent to get published, and most poker players will not have the talent to win the tournament (though in the case of poker, the short-term luck factor can help offset the skill discrepancy).

When people talk to me about implementing a model that involves charging reading fees in order to pay writers at Identity Theory, the first thing I think about is how terrible it would feel to have to reject people who don’t understand that they’re not quite ready to win the game. It feels like exploitation, constantly taking money from less talented writers and giving it to more talented writers. Maybe this is a subconscious projection of guilt from my poker career, where I regularly extract funds from people who don’t have the knowledge or talent or discipline to compete, but as I mentioned, short-term luck always gives less talented poker players a chance to win (and many players don’t expect to win, they’re just there for entertainment), whereas less talented writers don’t benefit from that extra baseline “luck equity” in the lit-mag game. That’s why the pay-to-play lit-mag scheme feels more exploitative to me than a casino game, and I can’t coax myself to go there at this point.

But exploitation isn’t always about money. It’s often about reputation. Some people love to make a buck off every opportunity they can find; other people love to boost their ego and reputation at every turn, often by denigrating others or piling on to easy targets when someone makes a public mistake while protecting their own reputation at all costs.

Take the example of The Believer indecent-exposure incident. If The Believer were a sociopathic, next-level-beyond-late-capitalism entity, it would have found a way to profit from the incident. Maybe by selling neon mesh shirts that said, “READY TO ZOOM.” Maybe it could’ve taken a page from the alt-right playbook and sent fundraising emails saying, “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK FROM THE RADICAL LEFT WOKE LITERARY COMMUNITY, PLEASE SEND MONEY NOW.”

But it can’t do that, because it’s a literary magazine; it’s supposed to be sensitive and inclusive and enlightening. Its capital is its ideology and its reputation.

It also can’t do that because its leader spent years sending virtue-signaling, token-filled emails about the greatness of what he was doing at BMI. His job was to boost the reputation of the institute and by extension inflate their capital. He traded on an inflated reputation, and once his reputation got demolished in the bathtub Zoom incident, his capital was gone, and so was some of The Believer’s. UNLV bought The Believer to boost its reputation, but once the magazine’s reputation took a hit, it was no longer of value to the university.

I bring up reputation because it’s vital to the discussion of payment in literary magazines.

Literary magazines are almost always unprofitable and usually pay in a small amount of money or in “exposure.” Pretty much everyone involved in the creation of literary magazines, from the publisher to the editors to the contributors, would make more money taking any random terrible non-literary job. (I’m talking about standalones, not magazines who pull money from universities and external donations in order to survive.) The expectation that a person can make livable money writing for lit mags or publishing them is unrealistic. Even when a writer gets paid reasonably well by a literary magazine, it almost always represents a poor financial decision, because they usually could’ve made more money driving Uber in the time it took them to conceive and write and edit and submit the piece. There’s always a hidden cost to being a literary writer.

Does that mean the value of lit mag publishing comes from exposure? I wouldn’t put it that way. Exposure is an outdated term lit mags used before every writer seeking exposure had five social media accounts and a newsletter and a blog. It’s a useless term now. Exposure isn’t hard to get—the same writers who wail about mags that pay in exposure can often be found spending entire days on Twitter churning out 100 free Tweets a day to stay relevant and popular and sell their books. Exposure is accessible to nearly anyone who makes eyeballs their primary goal. You don’t need a lit mag to get exposure for your writing anymore. I could get plenty of exposure by throwing on a mesh shirt and hosting a Zoom meeting from my bathtub and reading my high school poetry. But nobody wants to see or hear that.

When people send out submissions or apply for jobs, they don’t mention the number of people who have been exposed to their writing. They include their publications and sometimes education (and hopefully in our case, a dog photo). When they got published in Tin House or a similarly prestigious magazine before it folded, it’s unclear how much they got paid or how many people got exposed to their writing, but it’s clear they improved their long-term reputation as a writer. Ultimately what literary magazines pay in is reputation, not exposure. Contributing to a prestigious literary magazine may in some small way help a literary writer get a job that will offer meaningful compensation and a situation that allows them to write more stuff that won’t make much money. It may give them credibility among the small group of people who care about literary magazines. With some post-publication luck, it may even lead to a book deal. But it will never pay them what their time and their writing is worth in the short term. Expecting literary writing to pay the bills is almost certainly going to lead to frustration and disappointment, and that expectation often gets taken out on literary magazine publishers.

So, what is a good model for a lit mag? If we’re not going to shamelessly funnel money from less talented writers to more talented writers (or people in our immediate writing cliques, as some publications do), and we’re not going to get enough ad-viewing readers to pay writers what their writing is worth, what can we do?

Why do literary magazines exist if they can’t offer enough money to pay anyone’s rent?

I don’t have the answer. At least not yet. Some people despise this reality and say to me, “If you can’t pay staff or writers and can’t make money yourself, why bother?” It’s a fair question. I’d love to get rich publishing this website. I’d love to pay our editors and contributors a million dollars. I’d be far better of financially if I were doing any remotely profitable activity besides writing this weekly newsletter right now.

But I’m straightforward about that. No one is forcing me to publish this site. I’m not forcing anyone to work on it. I’m not forcing anyone to submit. There are thousands of other literary publications out there who thought they could make a difference! Go to them if you want something else! Or make your own publication! As for me, I love reading and publishing and writing, and I’m going to keep doing it even though in my case I don’t have a lofty reputation to protect and I have no interest in building a fancy reputation and I have nothing to gain from exposure and I know there will never be money in this adventure for me.

I’m just here, putting out words. Maybe someone will come along and give someone else a job because of it. Maybe there’s a place in the world for ventures that exist outside of money, reputation, and exposure. Maybe I built this site to try to find that place. Maybe that’s what the people who contribute to this site are seeking, too.

Life’s a mystery. Perhaps I’ll wake up tomorrow with a genius idea to feed every emerging writer for life. I don’t know anything about capitalism or money or reputation building, so that’s unlikely. If you have a million-dollar idea about how to run a lit mag, go start it right now! And if you think there’s a better way for us to run our site, feel free to share it. I’m not here to argue with anyone about money. I’m just here to read and write.

ANYWAY, HERE’S SOMETHING BETTER TO READ

We loved this story by Danielle Shorr. It’s called “Bird Bones.” My favorite part is this clip, but the story is full of good stuff:

What makes a mother? For 22 years I was that and that was all I was, what I wanted to be, what I had always wanted, and now I wondered whether I was still. I thought about my friends and their children, now grown but alive somewhere, out in the world, functioning, existing, at a distance but no further than a phone call away. My friends were mothers, fathers, parents to someone, even if the role no longer held the same weight of responsibility. The abrupt shift in my life flashes a constant reminder. I was a mother and now I am only someone who was one, who no longer knows who she is and what she is, if she can no longer be that.

AND ANOTHER THING

We are looking for a volunteer to read fiction. You should pass on the opportunity and drive Uber instead, maybe buy an NFT if you want to make money. But if you just want to spend a couple hours a week reading stories from strangers on the internet, we are here for you.

Thanks,

Matt Borondy
Founding Editor
Identity Theory