Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Socialist Worker, No. 113, 15 March 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A novelist explodes the myth that writers are well paid
and suggests a controversial way for them to get more money
IT IS POPULARLY assumed that any author known at all is making thousands a year. As the late Dorothy Parker used to say, Wouldnibbe nice?
There are best-selling authors, to be sure, who do make thousands a year. Ian Fleming in one field was pretty rich, so was Somerset Maugham in another.
Romance fiction and crime fiction are the chief money-spinners, and, of course, sensational sex – in so far as it’s possible to be ‘sensational’ nowadays, when Lady Chatterley reads almost like a Sunday-school prize, relatively speaking ...
But that a handful of bestselling authors are doing nicely (and good luck to them in our competitive, capitalist society!) doesn’t alter the fact that professional authors, i.e. those who live entirely by writing, are a dying breed.
An anonymous survey conducted recently by the Society of Authors (anonymous in that we didn’t have to give our names) showed that something like only one in ten authors made a thousand a year.
The fact that they were well-known, old-established, and had a good following, was no criterion of large sales – for the simple reason that though were widely read they were not wideiy bought, and libraries buy the minimum copies they can get by with – despite the long waiting lists for the books of any author at all in demand.
And, of course, this library readership profiteth the author nothing. Not even the royalty on the sale of books by the publisher to the libraries, in many cases, because librarians very often buy review copies from agents who have in turn bought them cheap from reviewers – who had them for nothing.
Private libraries, such as Harrods, sell books at half price ex-libris, and this again brings the author nothing, because they are library copies, so the author is doubly cheated.
A.P. Herbert has been battling for years to get a Public Lending Right bill through parliament, to give the author a small royalty on the number of his titles stocked by public libraries.
Before A.P. Herbert there was John Brophy, who proposed a penny charge on every book borrowed – this penny, which came to be known as ‘Brophy’s Penny’, to go to the author.
The objection of many people to the PLR proposal is that it requires the already over-taxed public to ‘subsidise’ the author. The objection to ‘Brophy’s Penny’ is that it cuts across the whole idea of free public libraries ... though no one objects to paying for radio and TV licences (or do they?) or for seats at cinemas, theatres, concerts.
In our crazy capitalist society it seems that people are prepared to pay for any and everything – even to be buried! – but not for their reading matter.
My own view is that everything should be free – cinemas, theatres, public transport, housing, the lot, because money is nonsense, and production should be for use, not profit. But so long as we live within a money system, to each according to his need has to apply in terms of money – it is part of the general barbarism of the system.
And so long as authors are not deriving any material gain from the library use of their work they are, quite simply, being defrauded.
The cost of books is high because the cost of production is, and keeping authors’ royalties and advances down is part of the business of keeping down the cost of production.
Everything goes up in the book trade except payment to those without whom there would be no books, that is, the authors.
Because books cost more, fewer people buy them so the authors, whose royalties are on a percentage basis, don’t benefit by the higher prices, but, on the contrary lose, because their readers resort to borrowing from the libraries instead of buying.
Until something is done to secure authors some sort of royalties on library borrowings, the biannual royalty statements sent them by their publishers can only be accompanied by cheques which steadily diminish as the cost of books steadily rises.
At present nothing is more depressing to an author than to have someone say, cheerfully, ‘I see you’ve got a new book out. I’ve got my name down for it at the library ...’
And it is something people are always saying to authors. Not that people are to be blamed for borrowing books rather than buying them, the price of books being what they are. It’s all a vicious circle.
In the controversy which followed Michael Holroyd’s massive attack on our beloved Minister for Culture and the Arts, Miss Jennie Lee in The Times Saturday Review recently, a librarian wrote in to say that if authors couldn’t make a living at writing books let them earn their living in some other way – no one asked them to write books ... overlooking the fact that but for authors he wouldn’t be there as a librarian.
Overlooking,too,the simple basic fact that we all have to do what we’re most fitted for.
No one tells the teachers or the car workers, when they are dissatisfied with the returns for their labours, that no one asks them to teach or work in car factories, and if they’re not satisfied let them go and earn their livings in some other way.
But authors, we know,make thousands a year. Well, wouldnibbe nice if it were true? Wouldnibbe!
As things are we’d do a whole lot better being cabinet ministers or even members of parliament. Only until the next General Election they’re full up at the Westminster Gas Gas Works, unfortunately.
Main Socialist Worker Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 16 January 2021