Over the past few years some of the better known authors have been complaining about the paltry payments that most authors receive from publishers, and I had thought that with someone like Philip Pullman heading the campaign that something might actually happen. You can read the recent Guardian article about it here if you’re interested.
Evidently publishers paid no attention to authors’ complaints as things have got even worse. This is something I’ve known about for years as I do know quite a lot of authors and there are very few nowadays who can afford to be a full time author, it’s best viewed as a hobby for your spare time.
One of the problems is that publishers know how thrilled writers are to be actually published in the beginning and so they take advantage of them. Publishing is obviously a large and lucrative industry, but it must be just about the only one that treats their ‘golden eggs’ as if they are the last thing that has to be thought of. I find it particularly shocking that the person designing the book covers is usually paid just as much or more than the author gets, and we all know how bad the covers often are. The people at the top in publishing just seem to be incredibly greedy, I’m sure we’ve all noticed that even editors and proof-readers seem to be rarities now, so there must be hardly anyone actually on publishers’ payrolls.
Still the price of books just continues to rise, that’s just one of the reasons why I love secondhand bookshops as the books are so much more affordable, but apart from that you never know what treasures you might find, whereas an ordinary bookshop’s stock is usually very predictable.
I know that Persephone books have lots of fans, and I’m fond of them myself but I really don’t know how they can justify charging £14 for what is after all just a paperback in a shade of grey. Quite classy looking maybe – but overpriced.
Elsewhere in the Guardian I was pleased to see that a new book by Helen Dunmore has just been published. It’s a collection of short stories called Girl, Balancing. I still have a lot of Helen Dunmore’s books to catch up with, in fact I had only just ‘discovered’ her when it was announced that she was terminally ill. I’ll probably support a local library though and borrow it.
Having just read this post through I realise that I sound like a grumpy old curmudgeon – not that I’m worried about that!
Exploitation is something to get ‘grumpy’ about!
Margaret,
It certainly is. Authors will be getting paid about fourpence an hour – if they are lucky!
I’m not defending publishers, but I wonder if part of the problem is that there are just so many more writers — writers getting published, I mean — than there used to be. Of course, sometimes I wonder if this is just how it appears to me, that there are more — it could be that we just remember the “better” ones from fifty or a hundred years ago, and have forgotten the rest.
Jeanne,
I’m not sure that there are more writers being published by publishers, so many people self-publish nowadays. Looking around secondhand bookshops as I often do, there were certainly loads of authors who haven’t stood the test of time and are long forgotten. I read somewhere that Agatha Christie began writing because she needed money to pay a gas bill, now the gas would be cut off long before you even heard back from a publisher.