In The Observer this weekend Robert McCrum wrote
a fascinating piece entitled “From Bestseller to Bust: is this the end of an
author’s life?”
Partly
it is fascinating because nothing much really seems to have changed. To be financially
successful as a freelancer you need to be entrepreneurial and most creative
people are not. The exceptions, from Dickens to Archer, Rowling to Blyton, are
blindingly obvious.
Most
writers, like most designers and most musicians, need someone else to take care
of business for them. Sometimes that person will be an agent, sometimes a
traditional publisher, sometimes a lawyer. It might even be Amazon or a
freelance publicist.
Finding
the right person and being able to make it worth their while to put in the
necessary hours on your behalf, has often been a matter of serendipity. If
Rupert Thomson, one of the authors that McCrum cites as falling upon hard
times, had had a business partner they would probably have advised him not to
hire himself a work space in South London, for instance – rule number one for
any freelancer must be to keep the regular outgoings down because you are never
going to have regular in-comings.
Yet
again, however, we are left at the end of the article not really knowing what
figures we are talking about. I wanted to know exactly how
much these writers have made each year of their careers. Would it be comparable
to the lifetime earnings of a nurse or a doctor? A teaching assistant or a
headmistress? These sorts of figures are particularly instructive when you have
authors who have been working for a long time, so that blips like occasional large
advances or arbitrarily cancelled projects can be ironed out. If we knew those
figures we could judge better whether the rewards or the sacrifices of a writer’s
life might be deemed worthwhile.
