How Not To Be A Writer - Part Four: Money Matters

 

This is a small diversion from the chronology of  previous 'How Not To' posts.  Whenever writers get together, we don't talk about what we're writing. We moan about money. 

It's worth pointing out yet again that, with a few starry exceptions, writers are at the bottom of the heap as far as payment goes. Full time professional writers earn, on average, £7000 a year. That means that vast numbers earn considerably less and payments are falling all the time. I wrote my last big project on a £500 advance. It took 2 years to research and write. 

If you look this up on Google, you'll be presented with wholly unrealistic salaries in the £35,000 plus range. Some deluded websites claim a staggering £45 - £55000. I don't know anyone who earns anything approaching this from their writing, even those you would think of as successful. Those who do, earn it from writing related work, such as teaching creative writing in universities, so that they can encourage more people to be poor. Or writing for television. (Lucrative, but also hard to get into.) Or specialised writing, such as technical writing, for large companies. Those who write for children can earn a living of sorts by doing schools visits and talks, but again, these are a diminishing resource. 

As far as large publishing companies are concerned, creative writing and publishing is a massive pyramid scheme, with the writers beavering away for peanuts at the bottom, and literally everyone else being paid more than the people without whom there would be nothing to publish or produce. 

There is no real solution to this. The big corporations will always pay their top executives handsomely and the astronomical advances will always go to celebrities, who probably haven't even written the damn books themselves.  Those organisations that are supposed to represent writers can do little about the imbalance. Small or medium sized publishers struggle constantly with rising prices of resources like paper, which means rising prices of books, and a corresponding fall in quality of the end product.

Almost everyone who writes, and most of those running small publishing companies, have to find other means of earning a living. I have colleagues who lecture, who teach in schools, who are alternative therapy practitioners, who follow quite different full time careers and write on the side. Creativity will find a way. I deal in antique textiles and toys from an Etsy store called the 200 Year Old House. 

And now, I self publish on Amazon under my own Dyrock Publishing imprint, eBooks and paperbacks, with some excellent professional design and formatting help from a company called Lumphanan Press. I make no fortunes, but there's always the faint possibility that something will take off and bring in some real income.

I'll leave you with three things to think about. 

Getting an agent doesn't automatically mean that you will get a publishing deal these days. Don't waste years of good writing time submitting endless query letters to agencies and waiting for them to respond.

Most books don't earn out their advances. The system is designed that way. It's perfectly possible for a publisher to profit from a book while the author, even from a mass market success, is paid sixpence a copy, as part of the deal. It's going to take a long long time to earn out even a modest advance at those rates. 

When people tell you that there is 'no money in the budget' to pay the creatives, what they mean is that there is, in fact, a budget. They just expect that you'll work for nothing. I still do sometimes work for nothing, but these days it's only for local organisations, small charities, good causes. Places where I can sell my own books. And seldom in winter, when I hibernate. But for big media corporations? Book chains owned by US Hedge Companies? I don't think so. Not any more.

Midnight Sun - My New Poetry Collection

 

A little while ago, I published a collection of my poetry, written over many years: Midnight Sun. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to some of my friends who didn't realise that I had once focused almost wholly on poetry. I started in my teens, carried on through my university years, and for a long time after - so the collection is arranged chronologically, although those teenage poems remain firmly at home in the 'beginners' folder where they belong. 

When I look back over my poetry, it didn't dry up completely, although at the time it seemed like it. I was busy writing drama, first for radio and then for the stage, with a small excursion into television. At the same time, I was working on fiction, long and short. I had a couple of novels published, but then there was a hiatus while I focused on drama, and when that dried up, I went back to fiction, publishing nine novels, so far. 

From time to time, though, I would feel that only a poem would do, to express what I wanted to say. I've been told that some of my novels - the Physic Garden and Bird of Passage in particular - as well as some of my plays, are 'poetic' or 'lyrical', so perhaps part of the creative energy that once went into my poems had gone into those novels. 

When I started putting this collection together, I wondered how I would feel about these poems that cover so much of my life. I left out much more than I put in. Many are love poems, but none the worse for that. Many of them have already been published over the years in a variety of small literary magazines. One or two have even won prizes. Some of them reflect the fiction I was working on at the time - poems about Robert Burns, a poem about Clarinda for example. Some of them were inspired by family history research undertaken when I was writing a book called A Proper Person to be Detained, about a murder in my family in 1881. 

I didn't even consider 'submitting' these anywhere. In fact I won't be submitting anything ever again and what a relief that is! But I did engage some expert help. A Polish friend, Michał Piasecki, (he posts as Keen Photographer on Facebook) is a talented landscape photographer and I have been using some of his beautiful images for my book covers. The excellent Duncan Lockerbie of Lumphanan Press has worked on book and cover design for me here and for other books, and he has made a wonderful job of this collection. In fact people keep complimenting me on the design of the book as much as the poems  - which I'm happy about, because one of my reasons for 'going independent' with my work was to try to maintain the quality of the physical product. To be able to work with a professional to make the book as good as it could be within the financial constraints that exist. 

If you read the book and enjoy the poems I'd be grateful for a review. Even a few lines on Amazon would be helpful. But if you can't do that, I still hope the poems speak to you in some way, that you can find something to identify with, something that strikes an emotional spark. 

A friend remarked to me yesterday that we all have secret rooms inside us, areas of our experience, places that even close friends don't know about each other. Poetry often taps into those places and experiences. It can help us to understand that our similarities are more important than our differences and that even our differences are other ways of seeing the world, other ways of experiencing our common humanity.