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

It's even harder when you're stupid.

Louise Candlish laments:

Candlish planned to stop after two novels received scant backing from her publisher. “Meanwhile, debuts were getting these huge budgets, posters everywhere for books I thought were no better than my own, and I thought, well, this is ridiculous,” she says.

She's getting maybe 35% from that publisher, btw, who she admits gives her 'scant backing'. All those big books that got all the publisher support, by which she means JK Rowling we suspect, were no better than hers, Candlish needs us to understand.

We don't get support from a big publisher either. The difference is we keep 70 % of my royalties. Despite not selling anywhere near Candlish's 200,000 copies, we've almost certainly made more money than she.

Or at least we're not complaining about our financial situation to The Guardian.

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.