The Tackiness of Asking You for Money

Big, bright subscribe buttons, the genre of literary busking, the gift economy, paywalls and the tax under which we operate

The other day, I was on 10th Avenue, hesitating outside the door of a small bookstore, before barging in to try to convince the proprietor to carry my latest novel. This kind of bald-faced cold calling on a stranger is no fun, and comes with a low success rate.

But after so many years in the condition of being irritated that it’s come to this, what’s one more? I went in, tried and failed.

Here’s a button

Buttons like this are some of the appeal of Substack for writers - lots of buttons, lots of ways to ask people for their money without asking in your own words.

Asking for money is no fun. It’s a little worse when you’re a writer, writing a request for money - a subscription, or a publishing deal, a grant or a loan. If you write an eloquent plea for cash, and get none, what does this say about your writing ability?

Here’s another button, with a plea pre-written and A/B tested by Substack.

Is it fair to you?

Subscribing to No Homework is fifty or a hundred bucks. The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times are in the $150-$600 range, though they’re always running schemes to lure you in and then bang your credit card at higher rates once you’re not looking. But those papers have staffs, and deliver a whole lot more content than I do. They have salaries to pay and a whole sales division of men and women who have no shame when asking you for your money.

Shame is a factor. So is consideration.

Like you, I subscribe to everything from video streaming to a word processing program (you think you’re so slick, Microsoft, but I saw that charge). They all want something. Every time I read an article, I run into a come-on to subscribe or donate or set up a username and password. The cooler the story seems, the more heartfelt the plea for money.

The other common come-on that’s all too similar to these subscribe buttons are the regular Gofundme pleas from an august music venue or bookstore that’s about to shut its doors, and the venerable artist or intellectual who needs new teeth.

My teeth are fine, as far as I know. So where do I get off?

The gift economy

The motivation for writing, singing, painting, even chatting isn’t so simple. When you’re at a party, why do you share an anecdote? Why reveal anything about yourself at all?

It’s usually not about money. There are other impulses, which sit closer to our real sources of happiness than the cash economy.

As I get older, I see more of what happens to people. This is one surprise: More people become miserable because of the love they were unable to give than because of the love they didn’t receive.

That’s where the gift economy looms large. There’s a joy and accomplishment of giving. It’s a big part of art and writing, among other pleasures, like cooking for someone or chatting. The gift economy is the one where people give things to each other without an explicit expectation of anything in return.

The wedge between the gift economy and the cash economy seems to be that word explicit. The expectation of an exchange is there: I tell a joke and you laugh. The people you give the gift to could give you back something incredible. Or they could leave you hanging.

Given what feel like the ever-escalating demands of the cash economy on our time, energy and psyches these days, it’s more likely that you’ll be left hanging.

Grandiosity and humility

It’s a new year, with many lessons behind us and many more to come, I was thinking the other day, with a small shudder. Lessons are fine, but please, I said to myself, maybe not so many lessons about humility this year.

T.S. Eliot said wisdom of humility is endless. He may have a point, but I doubt he was eager or happy to take that point. What poet would be?

There’s a grandiosity to anyone who tries their hand at something like this - to make sense, to make art, to make some kind of splash starting from what’s most private and urgent.

The shadow side of the gift economy

Back when I was a poet, there was no money, almost ever. The arrival of even a dollar into poetry always heralded the a wave of recrimination and bad fortune.

Some small presses had fundraisers, and soon went under.

Some publications charged reading fees, and called the entire dynamic of writing and publishing into bitter question.

Some people won the big awards, and got living-wage gigs teaching poetry. But they had to watch their backs. There’s an army of jealous poets with all the time in the world, just looking for any occasion to take the professional poet down.

One Canadian made actual home-buying money by selling books of her feel-good instagram poems. There was a mass gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among people who break sentences into multiple lines. I think she went into hiding.

One woman willed her husband’s nine-figure drug fortune to a Highly Prestigious Poetry Periodical. Despite the incredible windfall, the Periodical still, rather cruelly, mails me regular pleas to pay for a subscription. I heard they bought some nice real estate in Chicago, before the coup. I think they’re still cleaning the blood out of the carpets.

At one point a hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot’s poetry pals said man, this guy is stressed out, and maybe he shouldn’t have to work at Lloyd’s Bank to scrape by. They raised some money to help him do his poetry full time. Lovely stuff, and we need more of it. Still, T.S. said thanks but I’'ll stay with this old evil paycheck. I have enough drama. People have called T.S. a lot of things, but never a fool.

Claw marks on the paywall

So how do you fit the gift economy into the regular economy? It’s not a simple equation, and the math doesn’t equal out. There are remainders. There have always been starving artists.

In our digital century, the paywall is one attempt to square the circle. And it works for some. But it usually requires that the giver be explicit in what they promise in exchange for the money.

Moving No Homework into that more transactional corral might help me squeeze an extra buck or two from this residency. But it would also suck out the joy. We’ve all had the experience of reading a periodical and even a book where it becomes clear that the writer is fulfilling an obligation, checking boxes, and nothing more. They’re doing homework, and we’re expected to read it. It’s a bummer.

I’ll try not to do that. I’ll go where the inspiration is, where honesty is difficult, where the unexplored country beckons, even if it means writing about topics you don’t much care about sometimes, like Yetis or untenable pet peeves (see “You Say Photography, I Say Catastrophe” in April) or the astral plane or my kids or money.

Other forms of payment

Nowadays, there are all kinds of hot new ways to not get paid. There’s traffic, clicks, shares, followers, unpaid subscriptions, exposure and so forth. While asking for money is no fun, asking for clicks and shares is even worse.

Clicks and shares are just too many steps away from what will feed my family or allow me to quit my day job or go on a nice vacation or not grit my teeth at the grocery store checkout or go out to a nice dinner or buy a home or not argue about the price of Christmas presents with my wife.

Other selves

One reason for literature is that it gives us access to something missing from daily life. It brings us closer to what we might really think, and to a place where thinking what we might really think doesn’t make us so damn alone.

This is the gift. It’s part of something outside the market. It’s the thing the market uses to sell us things. Every other ad for beer, an SUV or a cable TV package promises to give us back a little of who we know we are in the spontaneous moments of joy among friends and loved ones, in nature or just in the world.

Of course, the book may cost money. The ink and the paper may cost money. The Substack servers cost money. Enough food in our bellies to appreciate the words costs money. But the words are a gift. They’re given that way, and received that way.

The exchange is not explicit. It never evens out exactly. But without it, there’s not much of a world.

The real payoff