Live Class: The False Choice: Writing for Passion vs. Writing to Market—and the Book That Does Both 

Supposedly there are two kinds of writers: the artist who writes “what matters to her” and starves, and the hack who “writes what sells” and feels empty. It’ s not true. The best-selling books are not the ones that abandoned the writer’ s obsessions or the ones that ignored the market. They’ re the ones that smuggled something the author cared about inside a form readers couldn’ t put down. This session takes apart the passion-versus-market binary and turns it into a craft issue: how do you write a book that is unmistakably yours and genuinely attracts lots of readers?

As an editor, writer, and publishing consultant, Jonathan Baker has worked with Richard Powers, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Charles Palliser, John Lahr, and Jonathan Eig, among many other authors, and his projects have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize. He lives in Portland, Maine.