Over the past five years, every writer I know has been told by their agent to 'monetise the activity around their writing'. Give talks. Go to conventions. Judge prizes. Write reviews. Write articles. Go on telly. Go on radio. Go on Twitter. Build your brand. The problem with all these activities is that nobody actually wants to pay you to do them. Instead, you are given vague assertions that it will be good for sales, good for your profile, and if you do all these things, then my son, there will be jam for tea. ... Producers, organisers, editors - these people are all paid. So why aren't the authors, without whom there would be no literary festivals, talking heads on the TV and book-prize judges?

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/walters_07_13.php

It's GCSE Business Studies.
We writers are in the Primary Sector digging up the raw materials (words I mean) from the fertile soil of our imaginations, in the same way that farmers and fishermen toil (extending analogy here... bear with me)and get very little.
The Secondary Sector (publishers) turn the raw material into a product ... the book... and make a tidy sum.
The real money is in the Tertiary Sector (selling a product or service)however.
Publishing is a business. We are at the bottom of the heap. Unlike farmers, we don't get an EU subsidy to keep us going.
Farmers are told to diversify. Fishermen drown their sorrows.
Still, there's a romance in being a farmer or a fisherman. Or a writer. Isn't there?

I feel very naive, because I assumed that unless the event was part of, say, a book tour organised by an author's agent for the sole purpose of publicising his/her work, most other appearances would be paid...well, something.

In this instance, writers are being advised to advertise their produce. Good advice I would say.

unless the event was part of, say, a book tour organised by an author's agent for the sole purpose of publicising his/her work,

Well, it does depend - there's a general sense that if it's overtly promotional then the auther doesn't "need" paying.

But at 60p royalty per book, you need to sell more books than anyone ever does to pay yourself for that hour at a decent work-rate - and that's without the travelling time (Have you any idea of how long it takes to get from South East London to Hay and back? ).

And that does assume that your publisher and the festival between them will pick up the expenses, and some will, and some won't.

There's a grey area, too, in what counts as "promotional" - yes, turning up on a platform and being interviewed for the fiftieth time and reading the same reading from the same book doesn't take much prep, but for non-fic authors, specially, where a soi-disant "promotional" thing is actually a 50 minute lecture on a subject they took five years to research, why shouldn't you be paid? Anyone else would be, as that piece says.

Why should the author be expected to be the means for a commercial operation to make money, without making any themselves - whether it's a consultancy (unpaid, uncredited) on a TV programme, or a festival appearance, or the endless clamour to do blog tours on blogs which make money for their owners?

Plus, in my experience, if people have paid for a ticket - as they usually have at a lit fest - then they're MUCH less likely to buy a book, so the value of a festival appearance in book sales is drastically reduced, and it's questionable how much, if at all, it translates into sales later. What people think they're buying at a ticketed gig, isn't a book with interesting author chat as a bonus, but a performing author, and they may or may not buy the book as they might a souvenir album, afterwards.

Apart from anything else, it drastically narrows the range of authors who can live by their writing, and keep the book culture alive and diverse and vibrant, if the only authors who can afford to appear are those who've married/inherited/acquired money by some non-writing means. And, of course, if people in that fortunate position are willing to work for free, those of us who can't, or think we're worth more than that, can just be sidelined.

Edited by EmmaD at 10:13:00 on 13 July 2013


Edited by EmmaD at 10:37:00 on 13 July 2013


Astrea - just for the record - it wouldn't normally be an agent who organised a tour, it would be your publicist - usually the publishers' person.

Edited by EmmaD at 10:38:00 on 13 July 2013

it wouldn't normally be an agent who organised a tour, it would be your publicist - usually the publishers' person.

See, told you I knew nothing!

We writers are in the Primary Sector digging up the raw materials (words I mean) from the fertile soil of our imaginations, in the same way that farmers and fishermen toil (extending analogy here... bear with me)and get very little. The Secondary Sector (publishers) turn the raw material into a product ... the book... and make a tidy sum. The real money is in the Tertiary Sector (selling a product or service)however. Publishing is a business. We are at the bottom of the heap. Unlike farmers, we don't get an EU subsidy to keep us going.

Hmm. A colleague asked me what I was going to do at the weekend. When I said I'd be working, she looked confused, and even more so when I said I meant writing. Because 'it's not like work work, is it?'

Maybe there's a little of that notion behind it as well?

Maybe there's a little of that notion behind it as well?

I think there is - so many people start it as a part-time thing, it's very easy to go on feeling that it's not a proper business.

e writers are in the Primary Sector digging up the raw materials (words I mean) from the fertile soil of our imaginations, in the same way that farmers and fishermen toil (extending analogy here... bear with me)and get very little.

It's true - and if you don't like what you get paid for writing books, there is always the option of not doing it.

What that piece is arguing against is a bit different: the assumption that all the other things that we're asked to do, because we've written that book and been paid for it, we should do for free.

Borrowing your analogy, A.M., it's a bit like the farmer getting a just-about-okay price for his cabbages, but then being expected to go round the country lecturing on cabbage-growing and judging cabbage-competitions for free, and going to farmer's markets knowing they'll sell virtually nothing compared to the costs involved, and take two days there and back... And meanwhile, back at the farm, there's no one looking after the cabbages and making sure they grow well and will fetch a good price. So the risk is that while you're doing all the peripheral stuff, the work which is the foundation of it all is going to seed. Or pot. Or something.

And in principle the farmer might be able to get someone to mind the cabbages, while s/he's doing all this non-earning work-for-free somewhere else. If s/he can afford to do that. But no one can write our books except us.

Edited by EmmaD at 21:14:00 on 13 July 2013

In this instance, writers are being advised to advertise their produce.

Not really. They are being asked, mainly, to market themselves (as a writer), which isn't the same thing as advertising. If it was about advertising their produce (i.e. relentlessly plugging their current novel), then it would make some sense, because there would be a spike in sales to match the pitching. But if they're being asked simply to make appearances in ways which only tangentially relate to their latest offering, that's a different thing.

I've just read that article. Hay Festival doesn't pay! Hay Festival - that's the biggest one of the lot, isn't it? I'm shocked. I was particularly shocked by this bit:

As I drove home, I did some maths. Those eight hundred people had each paid £7, earning Hay a tidy £5,600. Compared to Hay's turnover of £4 million and gross profit of £1 million, that's not a huge sum, but it is certainly greater than a homeopathic ratio. Hay had probably made around £1,400 from me and I had got, er, six bottles of wine. I googled the wine to see what it cost and found it for as little as £8 per bottle. So 48 quid all in, and I bet Hay paid a lot less for it than that.

- so what's going on here? They charge an admission price and then they charge extra if you want to go to the events within the festival, is that it? (I don't know these things; I have never been to a literary festival) . A big festival charges admission to a talk/event given by a writer, and the writer gets ... cheap wine? It's disgusting. It's a racket. I think authors need to go on strike and refuse to do these events - if they're making money for an organisation, they should be getting paid.

Do publishing contracts imply an obligation on the part of the author to "perform" at events like this free of charge? If so, then refusing to take part might not be an option. Even if it isn't a contractual requirement, it's easy to see how refusing might have a detrimental effect on a writer's future aspirations. In any case, if writers are anything like freelance software developers, organising concerted action is likely to be as easy as herding cats.

Do publishing contracts imply an obligation on the part of the author to "perform" at events like this free of charge?

There will be a contractual obligation to be reasonably available for promotional work in and around the publication date - but of course that's the bare minimum of what you're willing to do if you have any sense.

The Society of Authors Guide for Festival Organisers is here:

http://www.societyofauthors.org/sites/default/files/Guidance%20for%20Festival%20Organisers_0.pdf

and says very clearly that authors should be paid if the audience is paying.

It also says that festivals shouldn't discriminate among different classes of authors - which sits badly with the fact that a certain large festival which pays in bottles of wine nonetheless reportedly paid Clinton £10,000...

And yes, it's next to impossible to organise group action among any group of freelances. The only reason it works with the US TV scriptwriters is because they're a closed shop, which is more-or-less unique.

Edited by EmmaD at 22:21:00 on 14 July 2013

I wasn't thinking of actual group action - I can see that would be v. difficult to organise. By 'strike' I just meant that authors should say No to this sort of thing.

Not really. They are being asked, mainly, to market themselves.

There is more than one way to skin a cat when advertising - that's why having a 'platform' is so important (allegedly).

If there is no tangible benefit to attending these events - don't go the them!

If there is no tangible benefit to attending these events - don't go the them!

The difficulty is that there are unquestionably benefits - it's just that they're a) difficult to quantify and b) hard to justify doing in terms of writerly hours, but c) hard to justify NOT doing in terms of exposure and building-an-audience.

It's notoriously difficult to quantify the benefits of publicity, and this is a classic example. It's not just about whether you will or won't sell how many books on the day. It's about being visible - the programme and the website being read by people who don't actually go, this year - the publicity the festival gets while it's on - maybe even you get directly, if you've got an angle - the blog you can write about doing it - the other authors' tweets from the green room that you get mentioned in - the other blogs that mention you later. Just the fact that you've Done Hay, as it were.

All of these things go towards generating the sense that you're one of the authors people are reading. At what point that translates into a book actually being sold, and read, and setting that reader up to read your next book, is next-to-impossible to quantify.

The other thing is that, unless you're one of the writers who truly, truly wants to curl up and die when sitting on a platform, to have some readers in the room with you is just about the only time you get a direct sense of your writing being heard. The rest of the time, even an email from a thrilled reader is, in a way, at one remove (which doesn't mean it isn't lovely to get those.) It can be one of the things that makes writing worth it, which sustains us through the long dark winters at the PC...

But I don't think it's a given that because there are benefits to us, in doing events, we shouldn't be paid for doing them when there is direct money-making going on for all the other parties to it. My publisher and I share the money-making involved in publishing a book, why should I not have a share in the money-making involved in putting on an event at which I perform?

Because, make no mistake, events are a performance, not an advertisment. It's like expecting a band not to be paid for a gig, because they might sell some albums.

Edited by EmmaD at 09:35:00 on 15 July 2013

They are being asked, mainly, to market themselves (as a writer), which isn't the same thing as advertising

It is and it isn't. There are lots of different advertising models. Some of them work in the obvious way and are designed to create a quick response and which will be judged on that response. An example of this would be advertising whose purpose is to tell everyone about the start of a sale. The success or failure of this kind of advertising will normally be judged on how many people they get through the doors or clicking onto the site during the sale period.

Other advertising however, does not expect to create such an instantaneous effect. The objective here might be to build brand awareness or to create a particular image. This type of advertising will normally be judged over a longer period of time based on tracking studies or whether the sales hold up when the brand is not on promotion, etc.

This is probably partly why organisations believe they can get away without paying writers: they know that some writers will have a specific book to sell, while others will want to build awareness of their name and the type of stuff they write in the hope that next time a reader is browsing in a bookshop and spots one of their books they are more likely to pick it up and hopefully, take it to the till.

I can see why writers want to be paid and if their draw is such that the media owner really wants them, they probably will be paid. However, if the balance is the other way - the writer needs the exposure more than the festival or whatever needs them - they have to make a decision based on the drain on their time versus the potential benefit to their brand (and writers are a brand. This doesn't mean they are not also artists, but ultimately they have a product to sell, which means that brand awareness is very valuable).