Business Matters by Catherine Czerkawska

A whole heap of radio plays ...I'm lurking in there somewhere!

Before I begin: if you’re somebody who gets pleasure from writing stories or poems purely for enjoyment or fulfilment or as a way of exploring human nature but doesn’t have any great need to communicate or disseminate the work or only to a select group of friends, then this is probably not the post (or rant) for you. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for fun. Lots of people do it, just as lots of people paint and draw or play sports for love and without any thought of turning professional, even though many of them are arguably more talented than some full time professionals. I remember back in my teens writing only because I loved what I was doing, although even then, there was lurking at the back of my mind the desire to make a career out of it. Along with that was the hope that somebody, somewhere, might pay me to write. And in fact quite soon, the BBC did pay me to write a whole heap of radio plays, so the idea that doing something I loved could bring in a reasonably good income came to me quite early on.

This may have been my misfortune.

What I didn’t realise back then – and what it has taken me some forty years to come to terms with – has been the need to know as much as possible about the business side of writing. Because once you enter a commercial world, a world where people are commissioning you and paying you (or not paying you), where deadlines must be met and taxes and National Insurance must be paid, a world where marketing matters, and where the waters in which you are swimming are infested with sharks who can scent their prey a long way off – you need at least a modicum of business knowledge in parallel with the need to learn your craft.

Back when I started out: Edinburgh in the 70s - full of hope and naivety.

Back when I first started out, the idea of a university creative writing course was only a gleam in the eyes of certain academics and administrators who could see that it might be a very good way of getting bums on seats. My first university was Edinburgh and Norman MacCaig was our Writer in Residence. I was saddened to note, a few years ago, reading an advertisement for a lecturer in Creative Writing there, that one of our finest poets would not now qualify to be employed to teach the subject. Instead, the job might go to a postgraduate with a clutch of finely honed short stories and maybe a single literary novel. A PhD would be desirable. Soon it will be essential. MacCaig might not have cared much about the business side of writing, but he certainly had forgotten more than most of us knew about the writing side of writing. And he never pretended that any of it was going to be easy.

But now that such endlessly proliferating courses are being touted as vocational, with a potential career path and jobs at the end of them, I am alarmed that only a few of them seem to offer any kind of serious business advice. The last time I wrote about this, a colleague suggested that such knowledge would be better acquired from government or local enterprise companies. Well, they can be useful. But I find something worrying about the way in which it is now possible to move smoothly from school to undergraduate to postgraduate fellowship to lectureship without any notion that a writing career outside the walls of academe might involve some knowledge of the business side of writing.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to speak to a group of postgraduate Masters students at a Russell Group university, alongside officials from the Society of Authors. We were there to talk about the practicalities of a career in writing and between us we had plenty of experience of just what can go wrong. It was a bit like trying to speak to a group of people caught in the headlights of the oncoming truck that was the reality of the career they had chosen and already paid a small fortune to study. 

Get yourself a money plant and hope for the best.

Did they know anything about self employment and taxation? About being a sole trader? About expenses and allowances, about book-keeping and whether or not they might need an accountant? (And we’re not talking about tax evasion here – just a few more legitimate quid in the coffers.) Did they have a scoobie about copyright and intellectual property? Did they know what they might be signing away to a publisher or agent? Did they know that if an agent asked them for a three month option while they made up their minds, they might be shafting themselves where another, better agenting deal was concerned? Did they know much about traditional publishing, self publishing, vanity publishing and the differences between them. Did they know about the dreaded non compete clause? About VAT? About cash flow? About business plans and expenses and funding and business loans and how to work out whether a residency or a fellowship might be worth undertaking? Did they have the foggiest notion about costing out their time when undertaking a freelance project? Or about not giving up their time for nothing when everyone else is being paid. Did they know about allowing for the cost of running an office, even when that office is the kitchen table. Did they know that time spent away from your desk isn’t ‘free time’ when you’re self employed, but lost time? 

None of the above. And it was clear from the dearth of questions – almost none were forthcoming – that they had not even thought about any of this, too caught up in the joy of writing. Which would have been fine if that’s all they wanted to do. But they had paid for the course in the devout hope of it leading to a career. Yet they knew nothing about being self employed and seemed to think that none of the business side of writing applied to them. Somebody else would take care of all that. They were the creatives and creatives don’t worry their heads about such things.

Well, I’ve made that mistake too. And I can tell you one thing. From a perspective of age and experience and a certain amount of poverty, I don't think I was ever astute enough. With hindsight, I would still have done the Mediaeval Studies course that was my first degree. But I would then have gone on to do some kind of business course, something that taught me a bit more about small business management and marketing. Something that taught me how to be tougher. Right from the start, I made sure I knew something about being self employed, but it was never quite enough. My excuse is that back then running a writing career as a business was less viable, but not impossible. Some clued-in people managed it better than I did. Good for them.

If you want to work for love or for charity, go for it. We all do it sometimes and often it's justified. But do it from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance. We need to know enough to know when we are being exploited, when freebies - so often undertaken at the behest of people who are on comfortable salaries - are eating into good writing time. We need to stop underselling ourselves. To stop believing in the fiction that working at an event for several days unpaid will be 'good promotion'. (Funny how they never seem to say that to the electricians or the people erecting the marquees.)  In short, to stop undervaluing ourselves and our work. 

Business matters, and it’s high time we realised it and organised ourselves and our working lives accordingly. Meanwhile, here's a little something to stiffen your spine. If you think I'm fond of a good rant, listen to this. Although not if you object to swearing. You have been warned!