In 2022, the Freelance Solidarity Project, the digital media wing of the National Writers Union, formed a book critics working group. This caucus of literary critics spent a year and a half collecting data on pay rates in their corner of the cultural criticism world. The results were staggering: The median hourly rate for surveyed freelance book critics was $16.67—mere cents over minimum wage in many states. Reacting to their grim findings, the book critics working group embarked on a social media campaign to expose the poor compensation and working conditions in their industry, centering around the proposition that $1 a word should become a standard minimum for payment. Four critics and members of the working group—Daniel Felsenthal, Maris Kreizman, Kristen Martin, and moderator Ilana Masad—met over Zoom in July to discuss their trajectories as freelancers, the difficulties that book critics face today, and how we might improve such realities.
Ilana Masad
Let’s start by discussing how book criticism is a labor issue. How did each of you get radicalized into joining FSP-NWU and this group?
Kristen Martin
The longer I’ve been writing book criticism—and I’ve been doing it pretty consistently since around 2016—the more I’ve seen that rates have either stayed the same or gone down. I’ve also realized that it’s not even a matter of breaking into bigger and better publications and getting paid more because there isn’t necessarily a meaningful difference in pay at some of these marquee-name publications. Especially in the past couple of years, as I’ve transitioned to more full-time freelance work, I’ve realized this is not sustainable and that there has to be something that I can do about it, beyond just asking for more money that I may or may not get in $50 increments from editors. That was what got me to join FSP in 2022, and when I heard about the existence of the book critics group, I joined it right away.
Maris Kreizman
I believe I joined NWU in 2018 because Out Magazine owed me $800. NWU approached Out and threatened them a bit. They got me my money. And I thought, hey, this collective action thing works.
Daniel Felsenthal
I joined FSP in 2022 because I was seeing how all of these publications, some of which I had worked for, were establishing unions. This was really exciting and energizing. But, as freelancers, we were not represented by these staff unions. And there’s a perception that freelancers are not allowed in bargaining units, and unions do uphold this division. Still, there’s a historical precedent for nonstaffers being in unions. At The Village Voice, starting in the late 1970s, there were “bargaining unit freelancers.” If you wrote twelve pieces in a six-month span, you would be in the union for the next six months, and you would get their insurance benefits, protections, and planned raises for freelancers—a really great historical precedent that’s been lost. Because I couldn’t join the bargaining unit of publications where I was freelancing regularly, I joined a freelance union.
Masad
I got radicalized on this subject through a totally different issue that was occurring with the National Book Critics Circle. There was a group of us trying to get the NBCC to adopt a set of principles regarding, among other things, racial justice. We were also having conversations about labor, wishing that the NBCC would do something more concrete than give awards. It’s an important institution in the sense that it has an impact on authors, on discourse, on culture. It’s the only group that I know of that is solely for book critics. But it doesn’t invest anything in the labor issues that affect so many book critics—so many of us are freelancers—and its board is entirely volunteer despite doing a huge amount of work every year. The number of people who are in NBCC and once held staff positions for many years is very telling, because many of those staff positions don’t exist anymore. And so when our fellow FSP member Lily Meyer reached out about joining this group, I was like, “Ah, here is exactly what I’ve been looking for!”