The curse of celebrity authors
In regard to Catherine Bennett’s article, the huge advances paid to celebrity “authors” drains the pool of money that publishers have to pay other, full-time authors (“There is a moral in Jamie Oliver’s story of stereotypical folk, just not one he intended”, Comment). I made a reasonable living writing more than 100 books for children, but couldn’t do it now because the money offered to middle-ranking authors has shrunk as the advances paid to celebrities have risen. When I retired I was being offered the same advances as at the start of my career 35 years earlier.
Richard Platt
Hastings, Kent
A publisher, might, at some point, hope you’ll earn out your advance, no? And if, 50 books in, you show no signs of that then advances are unlikely to, erm, advance.
But just for a little context. Freelance rates – producing an article, a column, that sort of thing – have not changed in the 25 years I’ve been doing this sort of thing. Not changed in nominal terms that is. In real terms they’re down, what, 50%?
I would imagine the fact the Peter Jackson purchased the film rights to his “Mortal Engines” (before turning it into one of the biggest box office flops of all times) would have contributed greatly to Reeves’s “reasonable living” even if it did nothing for the unfortunate studio.
However, if it had succeeded I suspect he would have made the most of his new-found status as a celebrity writer by cashing in rather than merely strutting his stuff “Pullman-style” in the guardian.
Pulling the ladder up and all that.
Incidentally, another letter in that article refers to Will Hutton’s words of wisdom about Inheritance Tax. Takimag made quite a shrewd observation today:-
Will Hutton OBE (Obscene Batsh*t Englishman) wrote an op-ed proclaiming that the inheritance tax must be increased, because “nobody should ever profit from the good fortune of those they’re related to by birth and chance.”
Well, thanks, Will. No better argument has ever been advanced against “reparations”
Actually on re-reading that I think the bit about the “good fortune” of one’s ancestors might need re-wording. Unless of course he was making a comparison to the fate of those unfortunate captives selected to participate in religious ceremonies by the rulers of Dahomey.
In 1995 a GSM radio planner could demand £750 per day plus expenses. By 2005 that was down to £400 per day and by 2015 if they were lucky they nigh get £250 per day.
A combination of automation, lots of supply and low demand saw that and other tech jobs lose their value.
Those are also nominal rates.
I earned about 2/3rds of what I did in 2000 when adjusted for inflation. My career has been in telecoms service providers on the network/infrastructure side. Partly it’s the declining market, partly more people with relevant skills but mostly the total lack of growth/productivity in the UK economy over that period.
“But just for a little context. Freelance rates – producing an article, a column, that sort of thing – have not changed in the 25 years I’ve been doing this sort of thing. Not changed in nominal terms that is. In real terms they’re down, what, 50%?”
Bit like farming then. Apart from all farmings inputs (and there’s a lot of them) have gone up significantly over the same time period. Whereas the cost of a laptop has nosedived and a pen and notepad costs a few pence.
The problem with the creative arts is not only that you’re competing with more and more of the old stuff every day, but that the tools to make and distribute the stuff mean a lot more people can do it.
Like writing games in the 1980s was really hard. Most of that stuff was written in assembler, with programmers having to pull all sorts of clever tricks to squeeze games into 16K or 32K. A lot of modern games are built on tools like Unity3D with nice high level languages like C#. They do all the sorts of things like collision detection for you. There are something like 9,000 games added to Steam every year. But you can also go on there and have fun playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein from 2001 or Portal from 2007.
And we have an establishment that is obsessed with the economic value of the arts, so there’s lots of kids studying music production, even though we just do not need it.
No doubt many of the large advances are because the publisher thinks the book will actually earn out. As in, many copies of the book will be sold.
Of course, in the case of politicians’ autobiographies, there’s a good chance that some of those copies are bought by the campaign. Or they’re “bought” via a fiddle, and they’re actually a contribution. Or even a bribe.
See Hunter Biden and his oil company job. Or his paintings (though that seems to have dried up once it was publicized).
Yes I know Hunter isn’t the politician. But he’s family, and he’s almost certainly the family bagman.
As for shrinking advances? Well, there’s a lot more would-be authors out there. And e-books and self-publishing have basically eaten the larger publishers’ business. So there’s a smaller percentage of books that actually earn out that advance against royalties, even with publishers’ accounting fiddles.
The midlist used to be published as mass market paperbacks. Those hardly exist any more; at most they will come out years after the trade paperback if it’s still selling. You’ll only sell those in e-book format, in which case you’d better be on Amazon. And if you’re on Amazon you’ll probably do better arranging a lot of the stuff yourself.
>the huge advances paid to celebrity “authors” drains the pool of money that publishers have to pay other, full-time authors
Where does this person think that pool is filled from? From the profits made off of selling those celebrity authors’ books. The money *left over from that* is used to pay the ‘full time authors’ that no one wants to read.
If it weren’t for the books by celebrity authors, the full-time authors would be in even worse condition.
Celebrity name on the cover sells books, name of unknown wannabe does not, it’s a simple as that.
Unless you think the infants are choosing their own books based on the content, of course.