Plight of the Mid-List Author: The World Owes me a Living

No it doesn't.

Four years ago, Kerry Hudson had just won a prestigious French literary prize when one late payment left her unable to make the rent on her sublet flat in Whitechapel. Could she continue as a writer? Or would she have to return to her old job in the charity sector?

Oh, my sweet summer child.

Kerry Hudson's a work-a-day gal with a cool thing about her that requires a ton of extra work and effort. 

She thought she'd be living the writer's life. Here's a great example of said, The Algonquin Round Table. Reader(s) have probably never heard of the Algonquin Round Table or it's members but we assure you, it was a thing. Today there is a commemorative painting sitting above the spot were these lit-lights gathered in the jazz age.

How do I know?

That's me at the Algonquin Round Table. 

[Oh, you're really classing it up there.-Ed]

I'm the best writer to sit there in half a century.

[If you think so.-Ed]

My great, great grandfather used to take my grandfather for lunch there every Sunday in the 1930s. Christmas dinner at the Round Table was a tradition for the Stroocks until just last year. Mark Stroock held his 50th wedding anniversary party and his 90th birthday party there. He'd slip hundreds to the staff. If my grandfather dropped something the Maitre' D would scrample to pick it up.

Look at the pic again. Do note that my drink is full.

I can sit at the Algonquin Round Table whenever I want - and Kerry Hudson can't.

Yet here I am worrying about dishes and laundry and tonight's dinner and dance recitals and mowing the lawn and getting an op-ed onto a Ruski news site and...

Get a load of this:

Despite having just won France’s Prix Femina, Hudson had to apply for a Royal Literary Fund hardship grant to help her until next payment. “Coming from a working-class background, I don’t have a credit card, I don’t have family I can borrow from – there’s no safety net,” she says.

Literary fund hardship grant....oh my god, I can't even...

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

It's Hard out there for a Mid-List Author

Via my FBF Kathy Shaidle, mid-list Limey book writers want help from Parliament:

This week, the All-Party Parliamentary Writers Group called on the UK government to take immediate action to reverse the steep decline in author incomes, a year after its inquiry found that writers’ earnings have fallen by 42% in real terms since 2005. 

As Kathy says, 'Get a job.'

In addition to writing novels we blog, we write magazine articles and the like. We have a new gig we're super pumped about. We used to be a college prof.

Our other gig is Mr. Mom duty. As we write this post we're thinking about taking middle daughter to the bus stop, doing the dishes, straightening up and getting to the gym with the other moms.

You're not JK effing Rowling honey, and you don't have a right to be Jane Austen. Get a job or marry well. We've done both.