How to Get Paid

ALK to writers working for literary nonprofits and two words come up a lot: mission and community. Paychecks can be fatter in corporate America, these writers say, and professors get to take the summer off to write, but working at a literary nonprofit brings with it the satisfaction of serving the mission of helping writers and building a literary community.

“I think the only reason a person works in nonprofits is to serve the mission,” says Britt Udesen, executive and artistic director of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. “At the Loft we’re a lot of book nerds. We really, really believe in the essential nature of reading and writing. Otherwise we would all be working at banks.”

The trade-off, of course, is that they don’t pull down a banker’s salary. Udesen estimates that staffers working at literary nonprofits earn 30 percent to 40 percent less than their counterparts in similar positions at for-profit companies. “I’ve done a little bit of corporate work in my life,” she says. “I think one of the reasons that some of us stay with nonprofits is that we believe in the work that we do, and we believe that if we have to spend fifty or sixty hours a week doing something, it may as well be something that makes us feel like we’re serving our community.”

But this doesn’t mean Udesen’s