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25 July 2014

Most writers’ pay doesn’t amount to a hill of budget baked beans – or even a decent-sized pot of jam

Nick Lezard's Down and Out column.

By Nicholas Lezard

Great news: professional writers’ average pay has now reached levels that the award-winning children’s book author Mal Peet has called “abject”. That is, £11,000 per annum or so – and if you’re using the median average for all writers, it’s £4,000.

One would hope that this would clear the field a bit and remove some of the competition but, no, people persist in wanting to write. And one would have thought that the existence of below-the-line space online would have satisfied the primitive urges of those who like to think they can write but can’t, in the way that the walls of pub toilets used to be the preferred medium of expression for angry drunks with axes to grind – but, no, there are people out there who still think that “being a writer” is something to aspire to and to use as a description of what they do.

I’m in the fortunate position of earning more than that – touch wood – but I have no illusions as to the way things are going. Recently a friend of mine posted on a social media site a picture of the pot of jam she had received as her fee for taking part in the Telegraph’s Ways with Words festival. She placed it next to a wine glass for scale and either the glass was one of those oversize comedy presents your in-laws give you for Christmas, or – and as she is a woman of probity and good habits, I suspect this is more likely – it was a tiny pot of jam. Artisan jam, to be sure, but tiny jam. I said that if it had been a pot of honey, she could have used the old Frank Muir gag “I see you keep a bee” but even that small pleasure had been denied her.

I must say that I am glad that the organisers of literary festivals seem to have put me on some kind of blacklist. I remember going to Hay – some time before its current supremo, about whom I have yet to hear a kind word, took over – and thinking, first, this place is almost impossible to reach on public transport; and second, what a lovely town this must be when all these bell-ends have gone away.

I had, you must understand, just seen Jeffrey Archer in a huge tent addressing about 2,000 adoring ladies (and doing so, I must say, with consummate professionalism) and so was in something of a bad mood; but ever since then, I have entertained no illusions whatsoever about either Hay qua festival or any of those that would aspire to be something like it. “Woodstock of the mind”, my foot, I thought, when I heard it described thus by the Famous Author Bill Clinton, around the same time that the Famous Author Pervez Musharraf was being invited to speak there. And it was also about this time that people started having the bright idea of paying celebrities huge amounts and paying writers in jam, or cowpat, or kind words, or nothing.

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These gloomy thoughts aren’t relieved in any way by the latest look at my bank balance. A run of good fortune has been replaced by a dry spell; the parable of the seven years of famine alternating with the seven years of plenty is the one that always springs to mind, except with the word “weeks” replacing “years” and the word “plenty” being replaced with: “Doing just about OK – you know, being able to go to a restaurant once or twice a week, nothing fancy, and certainly not anything in the line of being able to afford a holiday.” Right now, it’s back to baked beans on toast and making sure that these are the beans with the price already printed on the tin and so not subject to the usual outrageous mark-up at the corner shop.

Meanwhile, I have to think of something to do to get out of this mess. I suppose that as the only thing I can do that anyone would want to pay me for is write, I had better start doing more of it.

The other day, I picked up my first book (which got only one review and none of you bastards bought), flicked through it and thought: “That’s not at all bad.” Believe me, I know when something I’ve written is below par. And how much did it earn me? After the advance, babkas.

Then again, the publisher who rashly commissioned that book is taking me to lunch in about half an hour. Maybe he has some good news. Maybe he doesn’t. (He is, however, good company, perhaps because he is serene in the knowledge that he is on the right side of the publisher/writer fence.) These days, the only restaurants that leave tiny pots of jam on the table belong to hotels. All the rest of the jam has been given away to writers. 

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