Much of Lang's journalism, especially in his regular ‘At the Sign of the Ship’ column in Longman's Magazine, is concerned with the business of writing. He is conscious of the differentiation made between ‘hack’ writers in the trade for an income and the grander authors of ‘Literature’ and is uncertain about where he identifies himself. His pieces on these topics show his familiarity with the business of writing and the problems facing both aspiring and successful writers. There were several issues that concerned professional writers of the time, such as copyright, on which he comments in the piece selected here, first published in Longman's Magazine 7:41 (March 1886), pp. 551–3.

He writes also on the subject of authors’ pay and the iniquities of the market in two further ‘Sign of the Ship’ columns extracted here (Longman's Magazine 8:46 (August 1886), pp. 455–8 and Longman's Magazine 22:129 (July 1893), pp. 273–80), as well as frequently elsewhere, for example: Longman's Magazine 23:134 (December 1893), pp. 210–18; ‘What is a Hack?’, Illustrated London News 108:2963 (1 February 1896), p. 134; ‘Literature as a Trade’, St. James's Gazette (22 October 1890), p. 5 and ‘A Literary Mystery’, The Pilot (20 April 1901), pp. 498–9. Despite his consciousness of the problems of literature as a trade he was not sympathetic to the aims of those like Walter Besant who attempted to form a kind of trade union for writers, the Society of Authors, to take collective action to redress those problems. When Besant attended the Congress of Authors in Chicago in 1893, Lang writes scathingly of the event and Besant's efforts in, for example, the ‘Sign of the Ship’ column for December (see above) and ‘Chicagomania’, Illustrated London News 102:2820 (6 May 1893), p. 546.

The long essay How To Fail In Literature was first delivered as a lecture at the South Kensington Museum on 28 November 1889, held in order to raise funds for a working men's college. It was published in the following year (London: Field & Tuer, The Leadenhall Press, 1890). It is revealing of Lang's attitude to his own success as well as of the difficult world of ‘Grub Street’ in the late Victorian period.