That Best-Time Gospel Hour
I'm just back
from a writers meeting where the speaker, a literary PR-maven, was overflowing
with enthusiasm: “This is the best time for writers!” she said again and again
and again.
I thought she’d
inadvertently left out the comma: “This is the best time for writers, unless
you intend to make a living from it.” But if she had a subordinate clause in
mind, she never voiced it.
Question time was
short, so I never got to ask this:
My wife says I'm
not only an optimist; I'm an insane optimist. Yet, when I listen to you — and
so many other speakers like you — I feel like the biggest pessimist in
California. Are you not aware that in this “best time for writers,” writers are
unable to make a living through their work, unable to feed their families? Can
you be unaware of the recent British study (“Authors’
incomes collapse to ‘abject’ levels”) that showed English working writers
are making a poverty-level 11,000 pounds a year? In case you somehow missed it,
here's a quote:
"… the number of authors able to make a living from their
writing has plummeted dramatically over the last eight years, and that the
average professional author is now making well below the salary required to
achieve the minimum acceptable living standard in the UK.
I never got to
warm to my subject and add this:
We've recently
been traveling with European travel journalists, and those from every country
tell the same story — more work expected for even less money. Much less
money. I'm in touch with many North American writers (that's most of you,
Lifeguards), and they say the same.
Last week I spoke
with a highly successful freelance journalist who’d lost her job as a magazine
editor. “How's it going?” I asked. Her reply said it all — “Lot of work, shit
pay.” A highly successful American book author told me, “My last contract was
for one third of my previous ones.” A highly successful ski writer left a
presentation by another best-times-through-social-media speaker shaking his
head in disgust. “You noticed,” he said, “that she never once explained how we
could make money from all this.” So when you say we’re living in the “best time
for writers,” why don't you tell the rest of the story?
Here's why I
think she and all her clones preaching this Best-Time Gospel don't.
Though they'd
call themselves service providers, they're really enablers. They're
there to convince authors and would-be authors that if they'll just hitch their
miserably paid, broken-down wagons to the enabler’s star, they'll be rich and
famous and wildly successful. As this one also kept saying, “It’s simple. Not
easy but simple. Simple!”
I don't think so.
Those stats don't lie. And if you're thinking they apply to those who write for
“heritage” publishers but not e-publishers or “pay-your-way hybrids,” in Great
Britain, these Digital Age writers are making even less than those sorry fools
who stuck with tired old Guttenberg. I'm confident that it’s the same
throughout North America, as well.
The ones who are
bringing home the piñon-smoked, private-reserved, artisan bacon
are the enablers. Like vanity publishers of yore — and, oh yes, of today — they
feed off false hope, make empty promises, take on writer clients who will never
in their lives make back with their self-published book or ebook half of what
they handed over to the enablers… who never revealed that waiting for the
writers at the end of the stairway to stardom was not feast but famine.
How do you spot
Digital Age enablers? Here's a start:
They'll be speaking at your next writer’s
meeting or conference.
They'll lace their talk with the same key
phrases: brand, platform, presence, and social media
brand/platform/presence.
They'll never, except by implication, tell
you how you're going to actually make money in all the wondrous worlds they
weave.
They’ll preach from the Best-Time Gospel
Hymnal.
And you'll leave either writing them a
check or silently seething.
I'm silently
seething, a.k.a.
— jules
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