Still hard out there for a Midlist Author

Notice how all the authors complaining in this article are chicks?

With Wednesday being Dalloway Day – marking the mid-June setting of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – a report from the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) has revealed that only 5% of writers earn the income Woolf once argued a writer needs to work. This was £500 a year in her day, now equivalent to just over £30,000. But some 184,000 books are published every year in the UK and the vast majority of the authors behind them fall into what is called the “midlist” – books that get little to no marketing budget but publishers deem good enough to put out, in the hope that some of them might hit the charts. Most of them won’t.

Oh that's obscure. Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who the fuck is Virginia Woolf?*

This is about lifestyle. These dames imagined themselves living in apartments in the trendy section of London with built in book cases stacked with the great works, Virginia Wolf, whoever she was, Eudora Welty**, and oh, god, we don't even want to write her name....Jane Austen.*** They'd have lunch at fancy restaurants with their editors as they discussed the new novel and judged the (female) competition. They'd have affairs with great male authors and stab one another in back over the latest young beau author.

Instead Kerry Hudson, Louise Candlish and the like get up early in the morning and write before heading off to their work-a-day job.

Reality sucks, don't it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to take youngest daughter to school.

*Had to check the spelling.
**Had to read her in college.
***Didn't read her senior year