Read on Twitter
It is cool and completely valid for independent scholars to give much more weight to the personal costs and benefits (including economic!) of generating new scholarship than to potential contributions to their field.
It's even totally fine for that to be the dealbreaker.
It's even totally fine for that to be the dealbreaker.
If you're a scholar outside of the structures of tenure-track academia, you don't have to play by those rules. You don't owe anything to that system. That doesn't mean you can't do scholarship and maintain relationships.
This is important for people in academia to remember too.
This is important for people in academia to remember too.
I don't say this because I think people don't understand. I just know that a lot of academic ways of thinking become habit and it can help to be reminded that they're habit, not laws of nature, whether you're an independent scholar OR a tenure-track/tenured scholar.
This is why paying people was the dealbreaker for @contingent_mag. Whatever else people got out of the experience, we wanted them to be able to get paid for their work, and to center payment as a legitimate way of valuing scholarly work done by non-TT scholars.
All this being said, getting paid for something and earning money from something aren't the same. I got a lot of pushback from some corners on this piece, pointing to advances/royalties, but that's meaningless if we don't account for the costs. https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/17/mailbag-2/
Plenty of people have hinted--and even outright stated--that Contingent pays "too much," but we know that what we pay might not come close to covering the cost of the writer's time/travel/equipment. We are transparent with our pay structure, but we'd love to raise our levels.
