Not just singing into the wind

In reply to a comment, on the Writer's Workshop blog Toasting Napoleon, Harry Bingham talks about how the financial insecurity of being a writer can make one seem obsessed with money. Having just had a particularly acute cashflow crisis myself, I know exactly what he means. And yet there are thousands of ways of earning a living that are more secure, and usually more lucrative. Clearly we don't do it for the money in the accepted sense, nor do we have the relative security of equally low-paid but enjoyable/interesting employment, so why do we persist? If the poets and UK short story writers want to, they can look away now while we novelists try to unpick what, exactly, is the relationship between what we do and how, if at all, we make our living doing it. Because, from the beginning, it's not straightforward.

On one hand, there's the undeniable fact that the average advance for a first novel, from a major publisher, is about £8,000, gross, for a book that might have taken two or three years to write. Bear in mind that the cheques will appear (minus agent's commission, and before tax) in up to four instalments, from signing the contract to the paperback being published, over perhaps two more years.

On the other hand, there's the famous/notorious six figure advance. Never mind that such a headline figure will divide up, similarly, to anything from the minimum wage to very serious money. (Guess which is more likely?) But people still read it and think that all they need to do is live off their redundancy money for six months while they sit down and scribble. Never mind that such deals are increasingly rare. Never mind that the publicity that a mega-deal generates in the trade may later be negated by the news that the book hasn't come near earning out the advance, an event which may strangle the author's career at birth.

Even once they're established and can reasonably hope (it's never a certainty) that they'll be able to sell the next book, it's only a handful of writers in the entire country who can earn a living purely by writing exactly what they chose to write, without teaching/ghosting/journalisming or having some other source of income (spouse? lodgers? smallholding?) which still leaves time to write (well, maybe not the smallholding). Virginia Woolf's £500 a year has inflated, but the need for it hasn't gone away. Poets and short story writers (okay, you might want to come back in, now) will never pay the rent from what they earn, and, actually, most novelists won't either. And still we write.

And after we've written we (or our agents) hustle and bargain for the money that most of us would swear we don't do it for. Are we being hypocritical? I don't think so. When I was offered the deal for The Mathematics of Love and what's turned out to be A Secret Alchemy, my first thought was that - Wow! - a major publisher believed they could sell enough of my book to justify such a deal. And though I was also able to crumple up the Situations Vacant page I was studying when the phone rang, the joy of a deal - of being paid for your writing - isn't really the money in the bank, though that may lift a huge cloud from your life, and be the key to other writing-related work. Fundamentally it's what the money says, not the cash itself: that tens of thousands of people - maybe one day hundreds of thousands of people - will soon hear what you're saying. No longer are you standing on a hill-top singing into the wind. The audience is out there.

Comments

[Sue Guiney]

I'm so glad you wrote this! Recently I spoke at a school's Career Day and I started off by saying that writing isn't a career. It isn't a job. It's lifestyle. Just about every writer -- even famous ones -- have to make their money some other way. But we do this crazy thing because we have to, can't stop ourselves, and that's (hopefully) what makes it art. My publisher told me -- after I was gushing with excitement -- just to remember that if in the UK I sell 1,000 hardcover copies of my novel, I will have been a great success. That would earn me £5000 for 5 years of work. I rest our case.

[Emma Darwin]

I know. At some point writers discover the truth. You just hope it's before they've sold their granny and gambled it all away on living expenses while they write. Good for you for catching 'em young!

[Rosy Thornton]

I completely agree, Emma. It's not the money (which I know I could never live on, anyway). It's the fact that strangers get to read what you've written that makes publication so exiting. For that reason, I found I was just as excited by the number of borrowings that appeared on my PLR statement (which earned me only a few hundred pounds in total) as by the slightly bigger numbers on the sales statements that come from the publisher. Ultimately, writing is born of a desire to communicate - and finding a readership means that can happen.

[shauna]

Oh Emma, so beautifully put as always :)