Authors Electric

  There was another burst of indignant publicity this month about how little authors are paid. The figure of £7,000 a year has been put forward as our median annual earnings, following a survey by ALCS, a brilliant organisation that collects money on behalf of writers.   I fear that the figure, however, while useful for giving the story a media-friendly hook, doesn’t really mean much. In the age of self-publishing, I would posit that a large percentage of the books earn their authors nothing. Just like the vast majority of paintings and the vast majority of music.   That is not a reflection on self-publishing, which I genuinely believe to be a giant leap forward for civilisation, because I would suggest that a similarly large percentage of traditionally published books have also earned their authors virtually nothing, despite having taken many hours, months or even years to write. I have certainly had first-hand experience of writing books that earn nothing, as well a...

  General levels of literacy have been with us in the West for a few centuries. But only the leisured classes, or those whose professions demanded it, spent much of their time writing and reading. For most working people, life was just too short and too busy to be whiling away the hours reading books, let alone writing them.  Children left school early in order to go to work in the fields and factories, or as servants, or even down the mines and up chimneys. Literacy was not always encouraged by their masters and employers, who believed it would only put ideas into their heads, and lead to disruption - or possibly even lewd behaviour. As recently as 1960, when Penguin was charged with publishing an obscene book after they brought out an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, the prosecuting counsel is on record as asking the jury, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?” It was not that long ago that scribes were a...