Writing pays badly. Does it matter? Moira Butterfield

Money 

I’ve been a full-time children’s writer for many years now. I first chose it as my path when my kids were small and I needed to be available as the parent at the nursery door, the school gate and the doctor’s etcetera. Once the children could look after themselves I took on lots more work and did a lot more ‘creative practise’ to learn my trade. Like a professional sportsperson or a musician I feel it necessary to put in a great deal of time and effort to do what I do well and to keep my standards high. 

 

Yet I am part of an increasingly rare full-time group. From 2022 figures published by the ALCS we know that overall author earnings are in steep decline, and now just 19% of writers are full-time. The average earnings of a fulltime author dropped by 60% in 16 years and is now £7000, under the minimum wage. This report was published in a year when UK publishing houses posted record overall profits. The report makes sorry reading (for more, there's a link to the survey at the bottom of this blog). 

 

I look at the prospects for young people starting out now and, given the cost of living and the cost of a place to live, I think that the idea of being a full-time author is pretty much going extinct. Starting out, I could never make that choice now. It seems you can only afford to spend time writing if you have another main job, a pension from a previous career or a high-earning partner who will support you.  

 

Meanwhile publishers say they want a more diverse writing world, with people from all sectors of life…Well there’s a massive elephant that’s filling the whole of the room here and it’s carrying a sign in its trunk – WRITING DOESN’T PAY ENOUGH FOR THAT TO HAPPEN. The money is not being shared round enough for anybody who is not well-off to consider it a main career option. 

The elephant that lives in big profitable publishing companies. 

In addition to writing, publishers now expect us to pay for our own book launches and book publicity efforts. For those who aren’t well-off it doesn’t seem possible. School visits might provide a main income for some but most people with young kids or another job simply couldn’t travel round the country, let alone wait for months for appearance payments.  

 

Recently we have had large conglomerate publishers sending round well-meaning diversity surveys to fill in, but no amount of bureaucratic box-ticking is going to help with this. 

Publishers need to acknowledge the elephant that stops so many people coming through their doors. It’s money. 

 

Share the profits out more fairly with creatives or writing becomes an exclusive hobby-world for the elite. 

 

Moira Butterfield has written many internationally-sold books for children and has been a full-time writer for over two decades. Her latest publications are The Secret Life of Oceans (Bloomsbury), Look What I Found On the Farm (Nosy Crow) and Does a Monkey Get Grumpy? (Bloomsbury) 

 

Moira Butterfield

moira@moiraworld.co.uk

www.moirabutterfield.co.uk

twitter @moiraworld 

instagram @moirabutterfieldauthor

 

The link to the author earnings survey referenced above: 

 

https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/why-writers-are-at-a-loss-for-words

 

 

 

 

 

Writing stories fast and to order. How to avoid doing it badly.

Moira Butterfield 
www.moirabutterfield.com
@moiraworld

After last week’s detailed description of a one-off picture book’s journey to press, I thought I would write about another much faster type of picture book story-writing. I mean writing to fit a detailed brief for a book that is paper-engineered and could be described as toy-related. Some blog-readers may get the opportunity to do this, and it requires a different way of thinking.

Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago I got an urgent email. Such projects are almost always on a short schedule and if you don’t like working fast, never take them on. Be aware that such projects are fee-based and do not carry royalties, so do not consider the work if this is an issue for you.

The project was to write stories for two carousel books. These are books with a story joined to a section that folds around to create a kind of dollshouse scene (I’ll attach a picture showing a carousel book. It’s not mine but it shows the concept).

The books I was commissioned to write already had subjects – a princess castle and a tropical fairy garden. The paper-engineered carousel part of the project was already being designed, and the story part of the book was already laid out in sections, with a rough word count. There were four spreads, and there could be no more or less.

Added to this, each story had to have six characters that could be made into pressout play figures, along with scope for smaller characters and objects that could be added to the carousel scene.

Where to start?

There is a basic vital principle I always bear in mind. This kind of book is going to be played with. The child who gets it is going to use it to create imaginary stories of their own. It’s my job to help them – to prompt them into doing exactly that.

I sit in a quiet room and clear my head of everything. Then I concentrate and start to ‘see’ characters in my head and I watch them interacting and doing whatever it is they seem to want to do. This sounds quite mad, but I am effectively mentally ‘playing’ as a child would do.

A narrative emerges. It must have movement, action and speech. It must be a scenario a child will want to play.

I would approach a text the same way in something as tightly-controlled as a sound book. This type of book has to have a certain number of sounds, which are varied enough to make playing fun. The stories must work hard. They must give lots of opportunity to push the sound buttons, and I would really feel I’d done my job properly if I created characters that a child could take and use in their own imaginary stories, using the sounds in their own way. For this to happen the characters must be quite simple but have something fun about them – a name, a repeated speech phrase or a particular feature perhaps.

Ok, this type of work is not poetry or high art. But that doesn’t mean sentences should not be well-constructed, that there should be good story pace. The story must be well-formed and work if read out loud. It must always work well out loud, which means paying close attention to the rhythm of the sentences (necessarily assuming common speech patterns).

A lot of this type of work is now being done in-house by editors, and all too often it’s being done badly because it’s not just a question of ‘putting down words’ to fill a space. It’s about visualizing the child using the book before you put a single word down on paper. Then it’s about reading out loud to get the sentences right.

Just because such a text might never be up for a literary prize, and just because it takes days not years, it does not mean it should not be the best possible use of words.

Writers are loaded! by Abie Longstaff

One of the most frustrating things about being a published author is that, for some reason, everyone is under the illusion I make lots of money:

My friends think the drinks are on me.

My ex-husband's lawyers claim I must be sitting on a secret fortune.

And schools just can't understand why I should charge for doing book readings or running writing workshops.

Where does this myth come from? JK Rowling? Media quotes of 'six figure advances'? The reality of an author's life is very, very different. Most authors I know have day jobs or spouses to supplement their income. I work three and a half days a week to allow me to write and if I tried to live on my writing income alone I would starve.

The truth is that this year I technically made a tax loss. How? Well, when a book sells for £5.99 we authors don't get £5.99. No siree. We probably get around 20 pence. Yep. 20 whole pence. And when my book is read on Cbeebies I get the princely sum of…wait for it…£9.82. To offset these riches I have a lot of expenses: I work at home so there is my electricity and heating, my stationary, my stamps, my travel and my laptop. Even if a book sells relatively well all of these factors can easily combine to result in a tax loss.

On top of being modestly paid, writing is a notoriously fragile industry. One year a publisher may love your quirky style, another year you may find your voice 'doesn't fit' with their list. And we have all heard the horror stories of having a book lined up, agreed and ready to go, only to have it pulled at the last minute. Or the book that was due out in 2011 but was pushed back to 2015 to fit in with other publications.

So no, we don't do this job for the money or the glamour. 

Personally speaking, I write because I love it. I write because something in me makes me desperate to do it. And I write because children like my books.

So when I get a cheque for my public lending right, instead of focusing on the low income, I try to delight in just how many children borrowed my book from their local library and snuggled up with their mum or dad to read it.