If it quacks like a duck

sorry, LARB is a grift

Last month we were treated to what is by now a familiar spectacle, in which a high-profile editor announces a new post with an attendant call-for-pitches, and the editor’s eager followers, acting entirely in good faith, inquire about rates. Then the editor puts her tail between her legs and admits, erm, well, I won’t actually be paying the writers I commission, but nevertheless! The editor gets dragged a bit, for having the audacity to solicit unpaid labor from freelancers who, it turns out, also have bills to pay, then everyone goes back to whatever they were doing. Rinse and repeat.

The editor this go-round was Carolyn Kellogg, a former books editor at the Los Angeles Times¹, who now lends her services to the Los Angeles Review of Books². What’s curious is that I soon encountered full-throated defenses of Kellogg and LARB’s practices, best distilled in this post by Leigh Stein. Stein not only excuses LARB’s policy of non-compensation, she argues it’s Good, Actually: to be edited by such a distinguished professional, and published before such a distinguished audience, is such a surefire opportunity the lack of payment becomes immaterial. It’s a tough market, and paid opportunities are dwindling. Why not take an unpaid one?

"can you share the rate?"

See, we all write for free. Writing for exposure is a thing, but you should be wary, especially when salaried professionals — editors, publishers, other writers — tell you to do it. Supposing you level-up into paid assignments, you’ll find you’re still writing for free. What with research, outlines, citations, and edits, it takes me fifteen hours to knock out a Pitchfork review, meaning the payscale falls below minimum wage. If freelancers had cojones they’d file labor suits against every American publisher, but that never happens because (a) writers are bootlickers, and (b) publishers aren’t serious businesses, and they’d sooner close shop than pay contractors a living wage. At best, bylined editorial work is a loss-leader for your copywriting or book proposals, and chances are those won’t earn out, either.

I’m not interested in that discussion. If you find writing has intrinsic value, do it; otherwise, you should pursue a different line of work. Anyone currently engaged in writing essays, criticism, or fiction in this country does it out of pleasure, narcissism, or both. What concerns me is LARB, a publishing grift that’s fooled a lot of people who ought to know better.

LARB was established in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Given that, again, they do not pay, the site never quite caught on among independent critics and essayists. Instead, it became a sort of résumé-building platform for career academics. LARB’s masthead consists of some 300 volunteer and part-time editors — most of them, you guessed it, career academics — each authorized to assign and publish pieces according to his schedule. In this arrangement, the editors and contributing writers bolster one another’s CVs with legit-sounding work, which is then submitted for the consideration of their respective tenure committees. LARB is best understood as a back-scratching network for assistant and associate professors.

Everything that’s off about LARB — the haphazard editorial calendar, overly broad topical remit, lack of voice or politics, shoddy formatting, the fact that LARB articles never get picked up by other sites — can be attributed to this. When’s the last time you encountered a LARB article in the wild? These pieces aren’t intended for general consumption; most aren’t meant to be read at all, they’re just bullets on some professor’s inflated CV. There’s no effort to promote featured writers, and LARB’s ginormous Twitter following is blatantly fake. (There’s never been another Twitter account with over 300,000 followers and less engagement, even before Elon Musk throttled redirects. LARB’s Instagram following is a comparably modest 26,000.)

The way it works is, you either pitch an individual section editor, or send an idea to the slush pile and see if it gets picked up. Either way, there’s zero accountability. The last time I wrote for LARB in 2018, a section editor assigned me a book review and gave me a deadline of four weeks. I filed in advance of the deadline, crickets from the assigning editor. After a month’s worth of follow-ups, the editor replied that, oops, she was teaching an extra course that semester and didn’t have time to edit pieces she’d assigned. She looped in another editor, a humanities professor at Gettysburg, to see if she could take it on, and I never heard from either of them again. They didn’t have skin in the game, and I got stuck holding the bag.

I can’t really begrudge these people for such a patently unserious operation — academia is a tough gig, with its own warped incentives. Still, LARB’s function as a nonprofit ought to raise eyebrows. They hold perpetual fundraising drives, sell paid memberships, and accept grants from public arts councils and universities as well as private donors. So, where’s it all go? Surely their literary salons, award dinners, book fairs, and $3,000-a-head workshops carry significant overhead; presumably there are web-hosting costs, salaried administrators, and office space.

I don’t care where the money goes, because we’ve established it doesn’t go to the writers. (When pressed editors are deputized to extend writers a $100 “honorarium,” but they never offer it outright, and they’ll make you jump through hoops and a ghastly invoicing portal to secure it.) LARB built a brand and revenue stream on the backs of uncompensated writers, and appropriated the income for their own devices. They solicited money to fund a publishing concern, then used it to buy other stuff. LARB is an events planner-slash-credentialing body-slash-pricey writing academy masquerading as a literary magazine. That, my friends, is a grift.

I’ll anticipate counterarguments informed by Stein’s piece. The journals LARB emulates — The Paris Review, the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books — don’t pay writers much either, but at least they’re up-front about it. They assemble magazines, market subscriptions, sell ads, and some of the revenue gets disbursed to contributors. Their prestige hinges on the quality of work they publish, which influences their ability to move product. When you write for The Paris Review, your name appears alongside Hemingway and Plimpton in the contributors index. Prestige is earned; the model entails a sophisticated scouting and editorial pipeline.

Okay, well, some writers pay for MFAs, no? They fork over thousands of dollars to receive edits from published authors, to bask in the glow of decorated elders. Writing for Carolyn Kellogg is basically the same thing, right? First of all, maybe don’t pay for that MFA, you can buy all of Michael Chabon’s stupid novels in paperback for like $30 total. But also, the point of an MFA is you get to workshop a passion project, which you might someday monetize under better circumstances. Kellogg, on the other hand, is seeking a narrow band of 1,000-word book reviews to publish on a website. If she wanted to be an instructor, she’d join an MFA program.

It’s safe to say Kellogg is not editing LARB out of the goodness of her heart. She’s getting paid, or doing someone a favor, or saving face after she quit or got fired from one of the most coveted roles in western media. She’s getting something out of this arrangement, or she wouldn’t bother. Can writers pitching her say the same? No? That’s extortion. Writing for free isn’t a sin, but when other people capitalize off your pro-bono work, they’re taking advantage. Pitchfork stages an expensive music festival on the strength of the critics they publish — I wouldn’t publish there for free.

Since I’ve argued what LARB is, I’ll also posit what it’s not. It is not a collective, because writers have no ownership. Its goodwill is not borne by history or influence; in claiming the Review Of Books mantle, they’ve banked on the prestige of magazines who’ve earned it. It is not a scrappy upstart lit-mag, or a high-school newspaper where you interview Coach Ruggiero about jayvee field hockey and then list it on your college apps. Each of these examples carries clear incentives; LARB is funded and operated by people with fancy degrees and deep pockets, whose motives should be questioned accordingly.

Most people can’t turn down money, but working folks are very selective about where they donate. Rather than solicit work, LARB seeks editorial donations — contributors donate time and ideas they might otherwise commodify. It’s an exclusionary premise, available only to those who can donate to frivolous causes, but then LARB isn’t a charity so much as a poorly-run business. When revenues are insufficient to cover costs, costs get passed on to writers who are used to eating shit.

1. Disclosure: I wrote for Kellogg during her stint at the L.A. Times, had a nice editing experience, and would consider working with her again! But not for LARB, under these circumstances.

2. Disclosure: I’ve written for LARB more times than I care to remember, and will not be contributing to them again under these circumstances. Tap in!