Readers Stoke Publishing Salary Debate

Earlier this week, GalleyCat and The New Yorker asked: Do publishing salaries affect literature?. The question drew passionate responses from readers on the site, inside a crowded Twitter-stream, and on other blogs.

One GalleyCat reader wrote: “I can’t afford to work for free for a week without jeopardizing my apartment, never mind full-time for the *fourth months* that many publishers and magazines have suggested I should work as an intern to get the experience I’d need before they’d give me a real job.”

Another reader disagreed: “There’s another, related trend in publishing–the trend of kids coming into the industry just out of college and expecting to be able to afford anything they want (this extends to other industries as well, of course.) I started in publishing at $25k/yr with student loans and the opposite of parental assistance, and I never felt deprived, but that’s because I found an inexpensive apartment that I shared with two roommates and was always thrifty.”

Finally, one reader replied: “I didn’t have a damn dime from ‘parental support’ or any other kind when I first started out, and yes, it made both my life and my work more miserable then it should have been … So without agreeing to the (not completely, but significantly) misinformed judgment that all of us start out with help from the trust fund, I would agree that low industry salaries (ESPECIALLY in proportion to author advances…) do negatively affect the industry as a whole.”

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