Pulped fiction

This is a rather disheartening article, from the Independent this weekend:

The average author earns about £16,000, a third less than the national average wage, it is revealed. So what? They're doing what they love. But hidden behind that figure released by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a grimmer truth: when you take away the superstars who are earning shedloads, the actual figure for the rest is closer to £4,000.

That's less than it was last time anyone looked, seven years ago, and far less than the distant days when the Net Book Agreement kept prices high. Forget living on baked beans in a garrett; this is barely enough to buy stale bread and a tarpaulin for shelter.

And it is only for the lucky ones: fewer authors are being signed up unless they're famous, advances are shrinking, and those who sell only moderately well are dropped, ending careers early.

It's the sort of thing that makes hearing about the £million advances paid to the likes of Wayne Rooney (for an "autobiography" he is unlikely to ever read, let alone write, a single word of!) even harder to stomach.

[Incidentally, an university comtemporary of mine, Lucie Cave, ghost-wrote Jade Goody's "autobiography". I'm guessing that she did it for the cash, and fair play to her, but I've often wondered if she was ever tempted to slip a few veiled references to the Bakhtinian carnival or the odd bit of feminist theory in there, subliminally cloaked within a gripping pasage about being falsely accused of having a verucca whilst in the BB house. In fairness she may have done, I haven't actually read it....]

But, back to my original point, it doesn't take a Mensa candidiate to make the connection between dwindling author incoming and the internet/supermarket phenomenon of selling books at less than half their cover price. Apparently even the niche bargain bookstores are struggling. The current trend for "cheaper, cheaper, cheapest" worries me, and not just in relation to book selling. We've become a society that sees it as our basic right to acquire as much as possible as cheaply as possible, and yet the obvious conclusion is that when prices are cut back to the bone then someone, somewhere, is losing out. I'm thinking specifically of the likes of Primark and the other cut-price fashion outlets ~ I shudder to think what the foreign manufacturers/employees are being paid, so that we can exercise our god-given right to buy a t-shirt for £2.00.......

Monday morning rant over. And on a lighter note, this just in from the "You couldn't make it up (and if you did you couldn't use it in a work of fiction as no-one would believe you)" corner: Man cleared of murder by Curb Your Enthusiasm wins damages.