Philip Pullman has been making waves in the literary world in recent weeks and not in the way you might imagine. Pullman is a successful and recognised author, his trilogy His Dark Materials won the Carnegie medal in 1995 with the first book made into a blockbusting film (The Golden Compass) starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig to name but two, so he’s no self published wannabe author.
What could Pullman have said that has set the world of publishing talking? It turns out that Pullman believes that professional authors simply cannot survive on the income that writing provides. In an open letter he states that authors are set to become an endangered species unless “serious” changes are made by publishers.
Pullman, current president of The Society of Authors penned the missive aimed at Britain’s publishers and in it pointed to a recent survey that found that the median income of a professional author is now just £11,000, with only 11.5% of UK writers making a living solely from writing.
He also states that “authors remain the only essential part of the creation of a book and it is in everyone’s interests to ensure they can make a living”
With the ascent of the E book it was inevitable that the dynamic between publishers and authors was going to change but I doubt many authors saw just how badly the electronic revolution was going to affect their livelihood.
Also with the huge influx of self published electronic titles offered for free, it is becoming harder and harder for authors who sit on the edge of success to break through into a sustainable and reliable marketplace for their work.
We readers love our books; we have our favourite authors and we look forward to new titles from them, very rarely giving thought to the battles that have often been fought to get those sheets of paper into our hands.
After reading the article from The Guardian and the Open Letter that Pullman had written my thoughts turned to a favourite author of mine, Mr Joseph D’Lacey. Joseph has written several books crossing genres from Horror, (MEAT) into Fantasy (Black Feathers) and even collaborating with his daughter Sparkle to bring us a wonderful Children’s novel ( The Hairy Faerie). These are no self published E books, these are proper hard copy books, stocked in stores such as Waterstones and WH Smiths and MEAT has a rather wonderful endorsement from the King of Horror himself one Mr Stephen King.
Joseph D’Lacey Rocks – Stephen King
We are fortunate enough here at For Reading Addicts to have developed a good working relationship with Joseph and he has supplied us with several blogs, book prizes and anecdotes over the last few months. Of course this meant that I turned to him for his views on Pullman’s take of the current financial difficulties that even established authors are facing when trying to earn a decent living writing good books.
I never expected the response he gave.
A calling more than a career
by Joseph D’Lacey
Despite my mother telling me never to tell stories that aren’t true, I grew up to be the sort of person who gets paid – occasionally and not particularly well – to tell a bunch of absolute whoppers. I can’t help it. It’s a sort of compulsion. No matter how bleak things get in publishing, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop.
And, for me, they couldn’t get much bleaker, financially speaking, than they already are.
In sixteen years, despite every effort to earn a reasonable wage, there has only been one during which I made enough money from writing to ‘live on’. Even so, in that year – between ’08 and ’09 – I made less than the ‘socially acceptable living standard’ income mentioned in Philip Pullman’s open letter to members of the Publisher’s Association and the Independent Publisher’s Guild. At the moment there is no indication that my financial situation will change.
It has nothing to do with unreasonable contract terms, however, and everything to do with being published by small, new or independent houses. Whilst I consider myself fortunate to have been picked up by a number of brilliant and innovative publishers, none of them have had the money to pay fat advances or throw their weight around when it comes to distribution and marketing.
When a sincere editor from a modest outfit is excited about an author’s work and offers them a deal, only a narcissistic lunatic would say, “Oh – no thanks. I’m waiting for a proper publisher to come along and make me rich and famous.” Opportunities arise and you take them. Otherwise, no one gets to read your novels and that’s like a prison sentence for any keen writer.
I know several authors whose books do earn them a serviceable wage each year, because they’re with larger houses. Even so, there’s very little security in being a self-employed novelist: no sick-pay, paid leave or pension. Whether the deal is to write one, two, three novels or more, that contract, even with a powerful and established publisher who pays well, could end without renewal, leaving any author jobless. It might be only for a few weeks or months but the trouble is, no fictionista can know for certain if they’ll ever find a paid writing deal again.
Perhaps the most important point to consider about a career in writing, then, is that it makes more sense, financially, to train as a heating engineer or hairdresser and never to set quill to parchment (other than to do a doodle of yourself winning the Man Booker Prize). People will riot in the streets if they can’t get their boilers repaired or their barnets trimmed but no one’s going to notice all the writers have starved to death until the only work of fiction left to read is the Daily Mail.
Fortunately for me, as Pullman’s letter suggests is the case for most writers these days, I have another little job. However, the money from that is also piddling. It’s my wife who supports our family with the income from her job. This leaves me available to do the housework, shopping and cooking and, most importantly, it gives me the time to write and chase book deals.
It’s a gamble, though. And the longer it goes on, the bigger the stakes become. In fact, I can no longer bring myself to think about it in the clear light of day. Yet, it constantly plagues me at some subliminal level and is the source of almost all my worries. The gamble is this: we’re betting that I will make enough from writing books to pay for all the years during which I’ve earned little or nothing from it and to keep the wolf from the door well into our future.
I wonder how much money it would take to do that… Well, let’s see: if we come back to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s annual income figure for authors – suggested in Pullman’s open letter as acceptable – that’s £16,850 multiplied by sixteen years of writing. So, I would need an advance of £269,600 on my next novel just to cover the work I’ve already done. And, of course, I need to plan for illness, holidays, never getting another advance in my whole life and a little income for when I’m too ancient to type. I should probably double that figure, then, to make sure we’re covered into old age – you wouldn’t want to see me cold and hungry in my eighties, would you? So, call it an even half million to set things right both retroactively and henceforth.
Wow. Half a million pounds. I can feel the crispness of those notes. An advance like that would definitely ease the anxiety. It would also help everything to make sense on those days when I wonder why I put myself through it all. And, finally, after all the years of slogging with little or no recompense, once that tidy slice of lucre is safely in the bank, at last I’ll be able write for pleasure instead of doing it for the money…
Joseph D’Lacey 20/01/2016
Joseph is a published author, he has received praise from the pinnacle within his (then) chosen genre. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer; he’s good, in fact he is very good. Yet over the last few months I have seen his battle to get his latest novel accepted by a Publisher; to the point that last week he put out a number of Tweets giving his fans the choice of waiting for this elusive publishing deal or receiving his book for free, serialised on his own blog.
Thankfully they said no. I like them am happy to wait until a publisher sees what we readers see, a story that needs to be told and has to be read.
So here we are, full circle and back with Philip Pullman.
The author added weight to his belief that professional authors are being sold short by resigning his position as Oxford literary festival patron stating that he could not continue to promote or represent an organisation that expected authors to offer their services for free.
Perhaps having such a high profile author speaking out on behalf of all those who sit at the periphery might just make publishers and festival organisers sit up and take note.
After all, an author who has to choose between eating and writing will soon starve and stop producing the books we all love to read.
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