Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

Not to be a downer or anything, but two slightly depressing, but entirely realistic, articles about the writing life just drifted past my highly-tuned radar.

First, Tim Leffel has blistering reality-check for all aspiring traveling writers in Transitions Abroad. If you wanted to get a better idea of what kind of income you can aspire to as a fledgling writer, you could substitute the word "novelist" or "journalist" for "travel writer" in this essay.

Nobody writes to get rich. This part is particularly juicy about the economy of travel writers:

"Tom Brosnahan, who has written over 30 guidebooks for Insight, Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, and others, lays out the numbers for a guidebook writer on the site www.infoexchange.com. With his calculations, a writer getting a $30,000 fee for putting a new guidebook together would spend close to a year of his or her life on the project and end up making about $6 per hour after expenses."

Then, over at Poets & Writers, editor Kevin Larimer is exploring the elusive "x-factor," the number of miss-matched, badly-conceived, and automatically rejected submissions received by the big literary sites like American Short Fiction, or a dashed-off sci-fi tale e-mailed to American Poetry Review or Conjunctions.

Thanks to The Virginia Quarterly Review blog and the Urban Muse for pointing me towards these sad but true bits of writing intelligence.