Golden goose, totally foxed

Photo, wikimedia commons

Amazon has just patented a system for re-selling used e-books. That's right, used e-books. Not that there is any difference between a used and a new e-book, of course. It's not the same electrons, slightly foxed. It's just the same 'new' e-book sold for less. So if you're the buyer, why buy the 'original', 'new' copy? The secondhand copy hasn't been slobbered over by someone's dog, it doesn't have coffee stains - it doesn't even have an old-book smell.

But unless Amazon passes a share to publishers and authors on re-sale, it will kill the golden goose. Amazon can effectively sell the same book again and again after only paying for it once. No money to the publisher or author. (They haven't announced any model yet; it is possible they will write in a resale royalty. It is possible porcine mammals will take to the skies.)

You could say, that's the same with other products. Houses, for instance. The people who built my house were dead long before I bought it. They got nothing from its resale. But a house is sold in a market with a different structure. The house-builders were paid for all their work when they did it. The way authors are paid is, in many cases, dependent on sales. We are paid if the book sells and not if it doesn't, paid copy by copy as a royalty. So if the people we have entrusted with selling it give it away, change the deal retrospectively, or cheat, we starve.

A lot of people don't really understand this. They say, "the book has been sold, you've been paid, shut up." But I haven't been paid; I've been given a small advance payment against the income from the book. Do you really think I would write a book for £750 (one of last year's advances)? Do you know how long it takes to write a book? The advance of £750 is only acceptable if I think the book will earn out the advance and pay for my time eventually. (It won't do that if the book is available without the publisher getting any money for it.) It's always a gamble - and it's a very long-term way of being paid. I chose the job, I signed the contract, so that's fine, I'm not grumbling about the existing model - but don't change the rules half-way through the game. 

This time, the perennial argument that we can always self-e-publish if we don't like the way publishing is heading doesn't wash. With this move, Amazon screws self-publishers as well as commercial publishing houses. So unless the model includes payments to the publishers, the golden goose - the writer/publisher behind books - will starve. Of course, it screws real publishers, too (which is why there is some chance of them putting up a fight). But Amazon wants to be a publisher. Would it be very cynical to suggest that perhaps Amazon wants to be *the* publisher?

My advice to publishers is to drop Amazon unless there is a payment on resale. There are other e-book platforms. A one-night stand with Amazon isn't worth a lifetime of regret - you learned that with the net book agreement. And my advice to authors? Add a new clause to contracts to say that if publishers receive a payment for re-sold e-books you want a share of it. Or that the rights you are signing away don't include digital re-sale rights. The publishers will then have to negotiate with Amazon or only sell on other platforms.

And to readers? I will ask that they please get pirate copies of my books rather than give profit to Amazon if none of the money is going to the original publisher/author.

Oh - and to people who say that they have bought an e-book and if they'd bought a paper book they could sell it second-hand? I say it's not really comparable, because it's *not* like a secondhand book - it's in pristine condition. Perhaps I'd be more amenable to the idea if Amazon ran all the returned e-books through an e-foxing program that ripped out random pages, blurred some of the characters and drew doodles across some of the text.

Being a writer is a cushy life - discuss

I've made a living from writing of one sort or another since 1988. The last time I had a 'proper' full-time job with a paid salary (indeed, the only time if you don't count holiday jobs at university) was January to March 1988. Even then it wasn't a *real* proper job as I was an academic.

Now, being an academic is hard work, which is why I decided not to do it any more [joke] but it's not 'proper' in terms of having to work 9-5:30 in the same place doing as you're told all the time, all year. OK, they employ you to teach medieval English and French literature (in my case), and if you don't cover Chaucer and Malory and Langland and Chretien de Troyes and the Chanson de Roland, there will be trouble. But whether you see Nicola at 10 am or 6pm is up to you and Nicola. Whether you mark Sahib's dissertation at 2pm or 2am - no one cares as long as you do it before the deadline.

Luckily, that job was temporary. And when it ended, I didn't apply for another academic job - or any job, in fact. I'd tried having a job and I didn't much like it. So I set about selling my time in chunks for specific tasks - whether the task was teaching Renaissance poetry or writing about operating systems or training grumpy printers in digital typesetting.

I have a few friends with 'proper' jobs. Some of them have a low opinion of my so-called job. They think I have a warped view of the world and a cushy life because I don't have to get out of bed and drive or cycle anywhere at 7:30 every day (at least, not since the days when I had to get my kids to school). And because I can take holiday at a moment's notice (ho ho - not if there's a deadline looming). Never the mind the fact that I usually start work at 6 am while they are still asleep and take far fewer holidays than they do...

But I think *they* have a warped view of the world and a cushy life. They are paid if they're sick! They are paid if they go on holiday! They don't have to do tedious admin, or clean their own office, or order their own toner cartridges or fix their own computers! And - craziest of all - if they screw up something, they're still paid. They're even paid to have another go at it! If there's nothing for them to do one day, they're still paid. If a client cancels the project they've been working on, that's OK because they've already been paid for the work they did. And they know how much they will get each month. What's more, it goes up, even if slowly. It never goes down. It's never zero. And if they lose their job, there's a benefits safety net. They can easily prove they don't have any work and they get their handout.

I love my job and I wouldn't change it - had I wanted to change it, I would have done so years ago. But please, non-writers, don't assume it's a cushy life just because the hours are irregular and I don't have to do as I'm told. I would hate to be a wage-monkey, but I suspect you would hate not knowing if you'll be paid for the work you've done, or knowing you won't be paid if you take a week off with flu.

PLR number crunching

It's PLR time again - that joyous time when authors find out how much money they have earned from library loans in the UK.

As usual, some of us are celebrating, some being glum, and some relieved that it's not fallen too far. Is there a pattern? My PLR is up again, but it's up every year as I release a lot of new books each year. So I thought I'd stick all the figures into Excel and do a bit of exploring. And it's quite interesting...

I've looked at a total of 113 titles. I have more books than that registered, but I've combined the paperback and hardback loans for each title. I was careful to take account of books that came out during the last year and so aren't listed the previous year. In looking at the changes per book, I ignored one book that came out close to the end of the 2010-11 PLR year and so wasn't available for borrowing for most of the year. Thereafter, these my findings:

Thirrteen books show appreciable increases in loans. Of these, five are non-fiction (38%). Two of the  non-fiction are very simple reluctant-reader titles. One is an edition of Machiavelli's Prince. One is a photographic book about London, so possibly of more interest because of the Olympics. The last is a book about healthy lifestyles. All except the Machiavelli are children's books. The average increase over last year was 210 loans, with the largest non-fiction increase being 301 for London: A photographic exploration, published by Chrysallis.

All the rest of the increases (8 titles) were in fiction, with an average increase in loans of 872. The largest increase was 2,642 (up from 5,545 to 8,187) for Where's My Sock, published by Hachette.

And the losers? All non-fiction, with children's non-fiction losing faster than adult non-fiction. The biggest loser by a very big margin was Take Me Back (Dorling Kindersley), which dropped by 794. As I only wrote about 10% of it, I don't really care - but I can't see why, unless it's because it gets stolen a lot.  (It is very nicely produced.) A stolen book can't be borrowed again. The next largest loser was Kidnaps (Franklin Watts), a book about forensic science, which dropped by 230.

Overall, my loans have gone up by 15 per book on average (corrected for more books listed in 2012 than in 2011). That doesn't look significant. But:

• Fiction loans are up an average of 534 per book (using only books that were also out last year).
• Non-fiction loans are up by 7 per book.

And finally... 72% of my loans are from fiction, which represents only 13% of the titles (listed in both years). In fact, 56% of the loans were from just four books - the series All About Henry (with the sock). Why is this strange? Because it's part of a reading scheme. That means, kids are told to read it at school. So why the hell are they borrowing it from libraries? But no matter - please keep borrowing it!

Had we but world enough and time...(2)

Recently, someone said to me that they didn't have time to listen to a 15-minute radio programme.

Isn't that sad? Not 15 minutes in the whole week (it was available on iPlayer) to listen to something interesting. Listening to the radio is not even an exclusive activity - you can do other things at the same time.

I've been noticing since how many people have been saying 'I don't have time to...' whatever. Really? Most of these people don't have children at home; they are married (so we can assume some level of sharing of domestic chores); and they don't have out-of-the-house jobs that occupy regular hours - they're writers, illustrators, freelance editors, etc. So how can they have so little time?

Of course, they don't *really* have so little time - I see them discussing TV programmes on twitter. I don't watch TV. I don't have time. That is, I choose not to watch TV because I would rather spend my time doing other things. People in the UK spend a total of 10,000 years a night watching TV. Think what we could do with all that time! If you just watch two hours a night, it's two working days a week.

Perhaps not working regular out-of-the-house hours is part of the problem. Work expands to fill the time available. Actually, whatever you do, even if it's just faffing about on Facebook, expands to fill the time available. But similarly, you can cram more in and it shrinks to fill the time available. As the single parent of a long-term ill child, earning all the money we live on from the not-very-well paid job of writing, there are a lot of demands on my time. Some things don't get done (cleaning, mostly) - but lots of things do get done. And really, it doesn't take any longer to do the cleaning if the place has got a bit dirtier in between times. It's more satisfying, too, as you can see a difference.

So please, people, this year - choose how to spend your time. Don't get into the position of feeling there is never time to do things you want. Commit to doing more things and time will stretch to let you fit it in. (This doesn't apply to the very few of you who *are* single parents juggling jobs and writing and five dogs and chronic illnesses and domestic disasters. Been there-done that. Except the dogs.)

Anyway, I must go to bed now and read Crime and Punishment as I have to get up early and buy chicken food and build a fence to separate good chickens from bad chickens and bury the bint's dead fish and put the Christmas decorations in the attic and then go to the university library to work on The Story of Philosophy (deadline 22 Feb) and the picture list for MMBR (deadline Tuesday) and then go to a friend's house for dinner. I hope you have a restful day, too!

Another thing children need...

When I was a teenager, one of my best friends, Julie, lived in a rambling, slightly dishevelled house on the edge of the heath, hidden by trees. It could be a scary walk in the dark, tripping over roots and bushes and stumbling along the half mile or so of pot-holed, muddy track to the house. Julie had an older sister and parents, and a dog. Both parents have recently died, and I've been thinking about them as Christmas approaches. Christmas makes us think about families, but children need more people supporting them than just their families. They need people who supply what families don't, or can't, give.

The best, most secure moments of my teenage years were spent in a cigarette-fogged kitchen, warmed by an Aga-type stove - not in the uber-middle-class, Joanna-Trollope way, but because cutting wood from the garden and sticking it in the ancient stove was the way to keep the house warm and get the food cooked. We had long sessions of debate or emotional-outpouring fuelled by endless black coffee and an unstintingly generous supply of advice, sympathy or just listening from Anne Hughes who sat, cigarette in hand, presiding over our traumas.

She was an artist. Her fingers were often stained with paint or ink, and when they weren't, they were stained with dirt and leaf-green from the garden, and nicotine. She was slim and beautiful, with dark hair and dark eyes, and reminded me rather of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. She never, ever belittled any teen problem brought to that kitchen. She never complained about smoking, drinking, immoderate sexual behaviour or even some of the downright stupid things we did and then suffered for. There was never a suggestion that we had brought our miseries on ourselves - or at least, not until we after we were suitably recovered.

It wasn't just a place for miseries. We talked about poetry and books and art. We planned trips to the Tate, we cooked (probably horrid) meals and 'treats', and we even dabbled in witchcraft. (I remember one spell to bring a desired boy to one at midnight. Curiously, it worked. The boy was found by my dad wandering around our garden, three miles from his home, unable to say why he was there. That put us off witching.) People pierced each other's ears, dyed their hair, painted each other/themselves with henna and made various kinds of music, usually involving a number of guitars and anything else that was lying around. We wrote maudlin poems and sweet songs. The door was always open, no one was ever turned away, the biscuit tin was never empty and the coffee flowed like 2012-floodwater. Mrs Hughes frequently entertained both partners in a floundering romance, and her discretion was beyond doubt so that was fine.

My own parents preferred a clean, tidy house, not cluttered with teens who didn't belong there and hadn't been specifically invited. They didn't like music, they didn't drink or smoke or do any drugs, or tolerate any of those things. They had little in the way of aesthetic sense and very little inclination for emotional intimacy with anyone else (except the next-door neighbour). There were, in fact, quite good reasons for all this, but I didn't know them at the time, so they didn't count. In effect, Anne and Tom Hughes were the parents I would have had if I could have chosen my own. But it would have been the wrong choice. They were brilliant, and an essential part of my young life precisely because they weren't my own parents. Because they had no investment in my existential angst or silly mistakes, their kindness was freely given; it was not part of the parenting bargain and it could not be clouded later by resentment or reproof. They gave me kindness I was not 'entitled' to - and so gave me an even more valuable gift: acceptance, which every teen needs.

And, beyond that, a model of the best way to be. I haven't lived up to Anne Hughes' standard. But I have tried to be like her to my daughters' friends. I am the go-to person for pregnancy tests, for looking after those too drunk to go home, for advice about embarrassing medical issues or drug problems, or lifts to A&E, or a large glass of wine and a pile of tissues. And I think many of us who passed through her kitchen have done the same - taken a tiny bit of what she was and tried to live it. Inadequately, perhaps, but it's better than nothing. That's how she lives on. Thank you, Anne Hughes, for everything. Rest in peace.