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It’s bots all the way down at kindle unlimited
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing "literary" stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing...
As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say "You need a degree in X to get that job".
Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It's basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it's awful.
I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn't be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I'm a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.
That's interesting, is this worldwide or just in your country (America?)
I'm out of the loop, I had assumed the sausage factory was churning along ok.
As someone who's been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There's an incoming "demographic collapse" coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren't.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
I think that's her plan. She was a bit disillusioned with knock backs, until I sent her a list of 50 odd famous(?) writers that got rejected, some many times. Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, J. K. Rowling, Isaac Asimov etc. That perked her up a bit ;-)
Everyone gets rejections. Something that's hard to fully appreciate when you're starting out is how much quite good stuff gets rejected for bad fit or "we already have one of those" or just timing.