Michael.Blackburn.Poet.

To celebrate our 200th issue Ambit invites you to enter our 200 WORDS COMPETITION!
Judged by Ambit writers Naomi Foyle and David Gaffney.

Send us poems or prose of 200 words* for a chance to win!

1st prize: £500
2nd prize: £200
3rd prize: £75

What sort of writing does Ambit like? Buy a copy to find out. Better yet, subscribe!

Entries cost £4 for the first one, and £3 for subsequent entries.

(*no shorter than 196, no longer that 204. This includes the title!)

Closing date is 15 February 2010.

Good luck!

Download the competition form

 

Worth having a go - and worth supporting Ambit, one of the UK’s great literary mag survivors.

Everyone with more than a passing familiarity with the publishing industry knows that writing is a tough gig. For most authors, it’s almost impossible to make writing books your primary job because the income just isn’t enough to live on.

“No one writes for the money,” we are told, but there is a dream that perhaps – just perhaps – you could be a best seller and, if not make it rich, then at least make enough to be comfortable doing what you love. I think that is the dream that many author’s hope will come true. It’s not about being the next JK Rowling or Dan Brown, although no one I know would turn down that kind of income, but about not having to worry about the rent anymore.

As a freelance, I know all about worrying about the rent and I know that for me, financial pressures make it very hard to be in any way creative. I can’t write when I’m worried about money. I’m sure that I’m not alone in that.

So I was saddened to read Declan Burke’s post, saying that he is giving up writing, although I totally understand his position. I’ve never read anything by Declan, but was pointed at his post by friend and author Steve Mosby.

Declan has had two books published, Eightball Boogie and The Big O, both of which, as he puts it “were decently reviewed and both of which sold like cheese-graters at a leper convention”. He has two more books ready for consideration. He goes on:

[…] lately I’ve started to hear a little voice in the back of my head suggesting that it might not be the best thing for me right now were either book to be published. That’s because, barring a miracle, what will happen is this: an offer will be made that will amount, in practical terms, to no more than a couple of months’ worth of mortgage payments. Following acceptance, edits and rewrites will follow (a good thing, by the way, because I like both stories and their characters, and I wouldn’t mind at all getting back into the stories, especially if doing so is going to improve them). Then the pre-publication promotion will begin, which is very time-consuming; then the publication promotion; and then the post-publication promotion. Most of this will be conducted via the web, given that I am (a) not wealthy enough nor remunerated enough to do it in person; (b) married with a small child, of whom I don’t see enough of as it is; (c) a freelance journalist who works a minimum of 70 hours per week at the job, and can’t afford to take time off, let alone spend good mortgage money on hauling my ass around the world at a time when house repossessions are starting to climb at an alarming rate back home.

There’s no doubt that being a freelance journalist is tough at the moment. Budgets for freelance writers are being slashed, if they even survive. Being a freelance journalist and an author is a double whammy of hard work. I sympathise with Declan and the choice he’s had to make.

I was then pointed via Zoe Margolis on Twitter to a couple of articles by author Lynn Viehl about her royalties statements for her book Twilight Fall. Again, I haven’t read Viehl’s books, but Twilight Fall has been in the top twenty of the the New York Times mass market bestseller list, which is usually perceived as quite an achievement.

Lynn has written two posts that give an insight into her earnings, the first in April this year which looks at her first royalties statement for Twlight Fall, and a another earlier this month that looks at her second statement. Now, I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of the numbers, because the details aren’t important. What’s important is this bit from the second post:

So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8% of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40% of my advance [which was $50,000]. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

To my mind, Lynn’s take home pay, as it were, is surprisingly low compared to my expectations of what a best seller would get.

I had a bit of a to-and-fro on Twitter about this, and Jared Earle made this point:

@Suw Most importantly, she writes more than 4 books a year. I’d guess she’s on over $200k a year. Poverty line my arse.

Writing four books a year is a big ask even for a pulp fiction writer and having looked at Lynn’s listing on Amazon, it would seem that she does one or two books a year, not “more than four”. I don’t know any authors who could or would want to write four books a year, and several who take one or two years to finish a single book. Volume isn’t a viable option for increasing auctorial income.

There was also dispute in Lynn’s comments about how much her publisher will have made from Twilight Fall. Lynn estimated $250k but a commenter said it would be more like $3k. In my opinion, it’s irrelevant. Whilst there are many arguments to be had about the disparity between what a publisher makes and what the author makes, this isn’t what I’m focusing on.

What I’m looking at is the fact that the New York Times bestseller list tends to be perceived as a mark of success. If that success nets the author just $25k, then the system is horribly broken. I wouldn’t expect a NYT best selling author to be rich, but I would have expected them to be doing a little better than that.

Of course, the system is horribly broken and has been for ages, if not ever. More people want to write books than can possibly be published, most books that are published don’t recoup their advances and most advances are horribly small. One friend of mine was offered an advance of $1500 for a book that was going to take him six months to research and write. Another British friend got £8,000 for his book. A third got £30,000 for, I think, two book deal. They are a long way off JK Rowling.

Writing has always been hard to break into, but you’d think that all this lovely modern technology we have, which can be brought to bear on marketing and promotion and such, would help to even things out a bit. That the internet would level the playing field. Any author can be found on Amazon now, their book instantly found and bought. Yet for many authors, writing has to be a hobby. Their talent has no bearing on this. It’s just how the industry is. Writing is for rich people and retirees.

Do we value the written word so poorly? Do we despise authors so much that we want them to live in poverty? Do we look at our culture and feel that it would be better off without books?

Of course not. The monetary value of something often bears no relationship to its societal value, as Kevin pointed out the other day:

[T]he social value of an activity is often not directly related to the compensation for that activity. If our societies operated like that, teachers would make as much as bankers because shaping the next generation’s minds would be as important as funding the next generation of businesses.

We do value our authors, it’s just that the only time we get to express that value is through the purchase of a book and at all points in the chain there is pressure to drive prices down. That, for readers, is great because it means that we can have bookshelves full of wonderful words without bankrupting ourselves. But it’s hard on authors. The RRP is discounted left, right and centre; books are sold on sale-or-return with the returns getting pulped; market pressure drives prices down.

The same thing has happened with music, but musicians have a bit of a better time than authors because there’s a rich vein to be mined in live performances, merchandise and the like. Some authors can fill out a bookstore for a signing, but many will be happy if a dozen people turn up. T-shirts might well exist for iconic book covers, but without people turning up to readings there’s little chance of flogging T-shirts as an impulse buy.

For a wannabe writer, it all looks rather bleak. Except I think there’s hope, and I don’t know how much but I do see a scrap of blue sky.

People like to make a difference. We like to make people smile, like to think we’ve done something good, even for a stranger. We like to have a positive effect on the world, on people’s lives. Why else would people give money to help a stranger’s kitten get the operation he needs to survive?

You only have to look at Kickstarter for evidence that people really do value creativity. But what’s important with Kickstarter, I believe, is that you’re not just buying something, you’re supporting a process. Without your support, the project just won’t happen. Kickstarter is enabling, empowering and a sea change, especially when linked to print-on-demand (and maybe even freelance book editors).

Maybe Declan could consider a Kickstarter-like project to help him self-publish one of the novels he has written but which isn’t placed with a publisher yet. He clearly has a fan-base who will pre-order it and take the uncertainty out of deciding on a PoD print run. He also has a blog presence that he can use to promote it. And it might even net him more than going the traditional publishing route.

I really can see such a route being valuable for authors whose careers are stalling, especially as for many the stall is nothing to do with their talent and much more to do with how marketing budgets are apportioned. I hope that we’ll see more authors experimenting with new ways of doing things, because the current system is clearly b0rked and we need, collectively, to figure out what come next.

Gedanken experiments can take us so far, but we really need to start getting real world data on how the hell we remake publishing. We need more people like Lynn to publish their royalty statements so that we can all understand what’s going on here. Yes, lots of insiders know the deal, but us outsiders don’t and we need to know so that we can make informed (insofar as is possible) choices for our future potential careers. And the more data we can gather, the better.

And as for me? I’ll be putting my lack-of-money where my mouth is very soon.

{ 3 comments }

Authorship and money have always had an uneasy relationship. Just because your book gets published doesn’t mean you’ve got it made.

My own view is that everyone in the writing and publishing business needs to accept that the old model is losing its power and that we need to rethink the whole business. That means taking a hard look at the relationship between our products, our readers and the processes by which we earn a living (if we earn anything at all).

Lincolnshire parents outraged at school ‘snooping’

Thursday, November 19, 2009, 06:30

Parents of Lincolnshire children who have just started school have been sent an 83-point Big Brother-style questionnaire probing into family life.

Lincolnshire Community Health Services has begun sending out questionnaires to parents of every child who entered reception class in September.

Along with routine health questions, parents are asked whether their child lies, has temper tantrums, steals from home or has at least one good friend.

Other questions directed at parents include “did you enjoy school?” and “how does your child engage/connect with strangers?”

Lincolnshire Community Health Services insists the pilot questionnaire is confidential and will only be viewed by school nurses.

Yet county parents are outraged by the invasion into their home life.

Full-time mum Rachel Ponder, 34, received a questionnaire for her four-year-old son Christopher Taylor who is in the reception class at Waddington Redwood Primary School.

“I was shocked at how intrusive the questionnaire was and I don’t understand what concern much of it is to them,” said Miss Ponder, of Brant Road, Lincoln.

“At that sort of age children don’t know what a best friend means and can be fickle with friendships anyway. The questions about myself were very concerning, such as do I have someone to talk to. This makes me wonder if they are concerned I might go mad and hurt my child or something.”

More on the ‘School Entry Wellbeing Report’ sent out to parents of 5-year olds in their first year at school in Lincolnshire and coming to your local authority some time in the future.

Most of the media reports omit to mention some of the more intrusive questions asked of parents, such as:

Are you in paid employment?
Is your partner in paid employment?
Did you enjoy going to school?
Have you attended any further education courses?
Do you get support and help from family members?
Does your family provide you with any financial support?

Many parents will be under the impression that it is compulsory to fill out the 4-page form. It is not.

The Echo quotes Joy Wood, team leader for children’s and families’ services at Lincolnshire Community Health Services, presumably answering on behalf of Ginny Blackoe, Head of Family & Healthy Lifestyle Services (God Almighty, that is her actual job title) saying it is ‘entirely optional’ and non-compliance will not result in a child being denied access to healthcare. Just as well.

The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

The questionnaire – or “School Entry Wellbeing Review” – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a “Health Record” on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.

The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child “often lies or cheats”: whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks.

However, the interrogation is not limited to intimate details of a child’s health. Parents responding to the survey are asked to provide details about their health and their partner’s health, whether they or their partner are in paid employment, and even to own up to whether or not their child is upset when they (the parent) returns to a room.

Completing the review is, according to a spokeswoman for Lincolnshire Community Health Services (CHS) “entirely the choice of the parent”. However, the letter accompanying the review states: “Please complete the enclosed questionaire …and return it to school in the envelope provided within the next 7 days.”

There is no indication on the letter of a parent’s right to opt out, and parents we have spoken with have expressed fears that failure to fill out this questionnaire might mean their child’s access to health services would be diminshed.

One went so far as to say that she found the entire exercise terrifying: given the way in which social services were nowadays so quick to intervene in children’s lives, she felt that merely objecting to this questionnaire might lead to her and her child being placed on some sort of risk register.

Ginny Blackoe, Head of Family and Healthy Lifestyle Services, confirmed that children would not be excluded from the School Nursing service on the basis of non-completion of the health needs assessment. She went on: “On reflection I agree that this should have been clearer in the letter accompanying the questionnaire and I will ensure that this is actioned by the Lead for School Nursing.”

She also explained that as part of Lincolnshire’s softly-softly consensual approach to data gathering, this initial communication will be followed up with a reminder and then a third letter and a potential home visit from the School Nursing team.

El Reg put a number of specific questions both to Lincolnshire Community Health Services and to the Department of Health. We asked whether this process was lawful. We also asked whether not mentioning a parental right to opt out was a very convenient omission – and whether the process as a whole might be considered intimidatory.

Lincolnshire CHS were adamant that the process did not breach any laws on Data Protection. A spokeswoman said: “The questionnaire does not contravene the Data Protection Act.” They further added that the data would only be provided in anonymised form to third parties.

However, they were not prepared to engage in discussion of how this review fitted with DPA requirements that data be “obtained fairly” and that collection be “adequate for purpose” and “not excessive”. Nor have they responded on the specific issue around their right to collect data on third parties - partners of parents filling in the form.

I know what the answer is. Don’t you?

Stanley Ellis and Tom Mason, a farmer who lived at Addingham Moorside, near Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire, and Mason’s dog Jip

Stanley Ellis, who has died aged 83, was an authority on English dialects, a pioneer of the forensic analysis of voice recordings and a radio broadcaster whose programmes brought dialectology to life through illuminating discussions with locals about folklore and language.

He came to national prominence when he declared that a tape released by the police in June 1979, purporting to be the voice of the Yorkshire Ripper – then suspected of the murder of 10 women – was by a hoaxer, someone who hailed from Castletown, a small village on the edge of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear – many miles from the scenes of crime. The police disregarded his warning, a decision that may have put their investigation on the wrong track for more than 18 months.

Ellis was proved to have been right in 2005, when the hoaxer was identified and shown to have lived all his life within walking distance of the area Ellis had pinpointed.

Ellis had honed his ability to identify English dialects early in his career at Leeds University, as principal researcher under Harold Orton on the four-volume Survey of English Dialects (1962-71). During a decade of fieldwork on the survey, he travelled throughout England interviewing his subjects, all the while living in a caravan with his wife, Jean. The resulting work remains the paramount publication on regional speech. As well as conducting interviews, Ellis made many recordings that are now housed in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture.

Ellis, the son of a superviser in the wool industry, was born in the Lidget Green district of Bradford, West Yorkshire, and attended the city’s Grange grammar school, from where he gained a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Towards the end of the second world war, he broke off his studies there to become a navigator in the RAF. After national service in India, he read English at Leeds University, where his master’s thesis was a study of Lincolnshire dialect.

His friendly, unpompous manner allowed him to establish a good rapport with his subjects, which made him an ideal interviewer of the elderly farming folk who were the chief target of a survey that aimed to record information on styles of speech and vocabulary that reveal much about our linguistic past and were about to disappear. He began his fieldwork using a motorbike and sidecar but, when Orton was able to find the money, he got Ellis a Land Rover that towed the caravan housing his tape-recording equipment, and his wife.

As a lecturer and, subsequently, senior lecturer at Leeds University, Ellis enjoyed teaching undergraduates and was an inspiration to colleagues and students alike. Eager to bring linguistics to a wider audience, he was closely involved with the Yorkshire Dialect Society, editing many volumes of its journal, Transactions.

He began his forensic work in 1967 when he was the first person to provide expert evidence for speaker identification in an English court (at Winchester magistrates). He was subsequently recruited as a consultant to the security services.

After 35 years at the university, he took early retirement. Encouraged by his second wife, Maggie, Ellis continued his forensic work, attending law courts up and down the country advising prosecution barristers or defence counsels as an expert witness in the ever-increasing number of cases in which recordings of voices played an important part.

In the 1980s, Radio 4 engaged him to do a series of programmes called Take a Place Like … and Talk of the Town, Talk of the Country, which sent him off again to travel around the British Isles meeting people to discuss their milieu and the words and accents that were peculiar to them. Besides these programmes, he later took part in frequent radio phone-ins, often late at night, in which he chatted with his callers not only about their speech, but answered questions about the origins of their names and local placenames. In recent years, thanks to technological advances, he was able to conduct these conversations in his pyjamas and slippers from the telephone in his study, much to his delight.

In 2004 Ellis was awarded honorary life membership of the International Association for Forensics, Phonetics and Acoustics, the first person to receive the award.

He spent his retirement in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, with his third wife, Margaret, who survives him, along with Jean, from whom he was divorced, and their three children. Maggie died suddenly from a brain tumour in 1996.

• Stanley Ellis, linguistics scholar and broadcaster, born 18 February 1926; died 31 October 2009

I remember Stan Ellis from my first year at Leeds University way back in the 70s. He introduced us to the fascinating history and varieties of the English language and it’s to him I owe my compulsive need to analyse the derivation of English place-names whenever I have a map in front of me. A simple thing but one that never fails to delight me (even if it bores the hell out of everyone else). Thank you, Stan.

In a pungent article in today’s Independent, Adrian Hamilton lambasts the empty rhetoric spouted by Western leaders at the recent Berlin Wall (demolition) celebrations. Sarkozy, Clinton, and –needless to say – Gordon Brown uttered meaningless platitudes about ‘freedom’ and the West’s role in promoting it. Brown’s “you know that while force has temporary power to dominate, it can never ultimately decide” takes the biscuit for sheer nonsense – the hastiest glance at history tells us it simply isn’t true.

Our purblind Prime Minister loftily proclaimed that “an Africa in poverty, Darfur in agony, Zimbabwe in tears, Burma in chains, individuals, even when in pain, need not suffer for ever without hope”. As Hamilton points out, all this Pollyanna-ish flim-flam churned out by his Whitehall speech writers flies in the face of reality. It wilfully denies the inescapable fact that, far from exerting themselves effectively to right these undoubted wrongs, Western leaders are tumbling over backwards not to rock the boats of petty tyrants, dictators and mini-Hitlers all over the world instead of putting pressure on them to reform.

Unfortunately, little of all this is the result of conscious hypocrisy or of deliberate lying. The reality is even worse – that our leaders sincerely believe most of the hifalutin nonsense they spout about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, whilst blithely ignoring the damage they are doing to these concepts both at home and abroad. For most of the past decade – ever since the ‘9/11’ Twin Towers atrocity – they, and much of their electorates and the media, have lived in a paranoid state of false consciousness, misconstruing much of the actual state of world affairs and chasing will-o’-the-wisps such as a shadowy ‘Al Qaeda’ alleged to have the power as well as the will to launch murderous terrorist attacks on the American and European civilian populations. So, ostensibly to prevent this, the West has launched murderous attacks upon the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rationale of which are now being increasingly questioned. Whether it is already too late to retrieve a firmer contact with reality and tackle the outstanding issues which are making the world such a dangerous place remains to be seen. But judging from the flowery phrases uttered at the Brandenburg Gate, the chances are not very bright.

In these uneasy days, I am increasingly drawn back to Matthew Arnold’s superb poem Dover Beach (1867), in which he laments the ebbing Sea of Faith, hearing “its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/retreating, to the breath/of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/and naked shingles of the world/….And we are here as on a darkling plain/swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The dwindling faith of which Arnold wrote was religious faith. Now, it is our previously taken for granted faith in democratic values, principles, and practices which is visibly shrivelling when confronted with our leaders’ self-deluded posturings and verbal acrobatics which defy a very different truth.

The reference to Matthew Arnold’s great poem is poignant and apposite. I just wish that some of my students when studying the poem last week had not been so resolutely unresponsive to it.

They’re going to have to live with the worst consequences of this failure of political faith, just as they’re going to have to endure the unpleasantness of a world in which Yeats’s famous words also apply:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.