In Halit Ziya's seminal novel entitled Mai ve Siyah (“Blue and Black,” published in 1898), the protagonist Ahmet Cemil, an aspiring poet, describes the literary field in quite bleak terms. As a young poet hired by the Mirat-i Suun (Mirror of Affairs) magazine, Ahmet Cemil's daily life revolves around writing like a machine in order to meet deadlines, filling up columns with uninteresting news or other miscellanea, hunched over the worn-out desks of the old and gloomy office, smoking chains of cigarettes with the hope to appease his overworked mind, all of which, in his opinion, cause a gradual and painful death of his intellectual abilities. And all of this for a very small monetary gain. Halit Ziya himself expresses similar frustration in his personal memoirs, contrasting the disappointing realities of the publishing world with the bright pictures he had in mind before coming to Istanbul. Ironically, then, the publishing house, the very place where aspiring writers seek to realize their dreams of becoming successful men of letters also becomes the location where those dreams come to an end, unless they already have the economic means that will allow them to survive in this profession. This irony, I argue, is a major consequence of certain transformations within the literary field at this particular juncture of Ottoman literary history. During the 1890s, first, the fast growth of print capitalism allowed the fast multiplication of printing houses in the imperial capital, and second, the decreasing importance of the sultan as the patron of the arts caused the members of the field (e.g. writers, publishers, book sellers) to be mostly left to their own devices to sustain the literary market. As more and more publishing houses emerged at this particular juncture in Ottoman literary history despite Abdul Hamid II's harsh censorship policies, definitions of authorship increasingly polarized into two major 'writerly categories', insinuated by Ahmet Cemil's observations above. This paper explores the contrast between these two new categories of participation in the literary world, i.e. 'writing for much-needed income' and 'writing out of a higher existential urge' and highlights the causes and consequences of this polarization, which also came to impact authors of later generations in Turkey.