The Golden compass points to the dotted line
Philip Pullman, the bestselling author of the His Dark Materials series, is heading a new campaign with the Society of Authors demanding writers be rewarded fairly for their work.
“Without serious contract reform, the professional author will become an endangered species and publishers — as well as society at large — will be left with less and less quality content,” reads an open letter published Tuesday from the Society of Authors to U. K.’s publishers.
A third of published authors make less than $ 500 per year from their writing, according to a survey from Digital Book World. Another study carried out in the U. K. found that the median yearly income of a professional writer there is $ 16,000, well below minimum wage.
“Authors remain the only essential part of the creation of a book and it is in everyone’s interests to ensure they can make a living,” the letter continues, adding that “unfair contract terms, including reduced royalty rates, are a major part of the problem.”
The Society of Authors is asking publishers to give authors 50 per cent of ebook revenue, rather than the customary 25 per cent, along with revised contract conditions regarding indemnity, non- compete and option clauses, advising publishers not to discriminate against writers “who don’t have powerful agents.”
“From our positions as individual creators, whether of fiction or non- fiction, we authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonizing the Internet with projects whose reach is limitless and whose attitude to creators’ rights is roughly that of the steamroller to the ant,” wrote Pullman, who is currently president of the Society of Authors.
Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, responded to the Society’s demands to The Guardian, saying that they “locate the principal source of this problem not in the contractual relations between publisher and author but in deeper market factors.”
“With margins being squeezed across the whole supply chain, books are facing increasingly stiff competition from other media and entertainment sectors for consumers’ time, and there simply being more writers … the reasons for the decline in average author income are wide and varied,” he went on, adding that the organization would be happy to meet with the SoA to discuss the issues.
Pullman’s push for better treatment of professional authors is just the latest campaign in an international effort to call attention to writers and contract terms.