[garygibsonsf]

At the moment I can afford to live from writing, but only because I've temporarily relocated to the Far East from the United Kingdom. The cost of living in the UK, if you're a writer, is usurious.

As people have said, writers rarely if ever make a full-time living from writing books. I would certainly agree they are not well rewarded for what they do economically, but them's the breaks and the nature of the market.

As someone already pointed out, a writer doesn't initially get paid in royalties for each copy of a book published from the day it comes out. They get paid an advance based on the publisher's hopes of how many books will sell. Even if the publisher's expectations aren't met, they get to keep the money; however, if their books consistently don't sell enough copies, they are either dropped or receive even lower advances.

But even when you do get an advance, it doesn't come all at once. I can think of an example in a fellow writer of my acquaintance who sold a fantasy trilogy several years ago and got paid thirty thousand quid, in all. Sounds good, right?

It took him close on five years to finish that trilogy. And they only pay you a fraction of the money at first. The rest comes in distinct chunks; you get a couple of grand when you sell an outline of a book; then, when you finish a manuscript, and the publisher decides it's what they want, you get another couple of grand; when the book appears in the shops, you get the rest of the money for that single book. And the process of selling a book, writing it and seeing it on the shelves can take between a year and a half and two years. Spread it over five years and it doesnt' seem so much.

That's why the Independent article says many writers only make four grand a year; that's even if the book they're writing was sold for three or four times that.

But then you also have to factor in agent's fees, which usually fall between ten and fifteen per cent of the money received for each book sold. And then of course you're paying taxes, and you have to declare yourself as self-employed, even though that means you get charged a higher initial rate. And if you're in the UK, council tax as well, even though you're scraping the barrel in terms of earnings. It can get tough, it's true.

It's partly a holdover from the Eighties when many publishers were handed over to shareholders and accountants and the profit margin became completely dominant (a good example of this is what happened when Marvel Comics was taken over by an investment group in the late Eighties and quickly run into the ground for a fast profit, almost annihilating the collector's market at the time); prior to that, you could imagine a publisher was in business because, on some level, they liked books. But when profit became God, quality became unimportant in relation to sales. As a result, there's a distinct pressure on a lot of new writers to write stuff that can be commercially successful and sell quickly, as opposed to selling steadily but over a number of years, which used to be the way of things. It's also part of the reason why so many book charts are dominated by ghostwritten stuff (like the Independent says), about footballers and models. And also why so many of my favourite authors are either obscure, or haven't been published in years, or both.

I find it occasionally amusing that some few people out there do still believe that if you've written a book, you're somehow 'rich and famous', or at least just 'rich'. Oh, the irony. But some people do get by or even do very well without too much sacrifice of intent or quality, and they're the lucky ones.

It should be said that on the other side of the coin, some countries do offer economic concessions for writers as well as people involved in some capacity in the arts. In Ireland, you don't pay taxes if you're a writer. That's why Robert Anton Wilson and Anne McCaffrey took up residence there, amongst others. I think there's something similar in Holland, and maybe a few other European countries. The cost of living in Taiwan is spectacularly low. it's also another reason a lot of writers still head for Prague - lots of culture, lots of writers, cheap (ie affordable) living.

In Scotland (England too? I'm not sure), you can get arts council grants to help you survive as a writer - I know of one chap who got a grant of twenty grand to complete his second book (it helped of course that he wasn't a science fiction writer, which is frequently not 'literary' enough to get the money from such grants). A grant like that I could do with.