A recent survey suggested that the life of a writer was the dream of 10% of Britons, more than any other profession. Glamorous occasions like the Nibbies certainly make the idea of penning a bestseller a very alluring prospect and, as any literary agent, will tell you, there’s no shortage of hopefuls out there.
But with over 100,000 new books published every year in the UK – considerably more than in the United States – many authors will see their book in the shops, if they can be persuaded to stock it at all, for only a few months before it is returned unsold. The occasional headlines reporting advances of five-, six- or even seven-figure sums are very much the exception and the average yearly income of a writer is actually less than £4000.
So the other popular image of the writer as the driven artist scratching away in a lonely garret in the small hours, writing by candlelight because there’s no money for the leccy meter, is probably a more realistic vision of what life might be like for an aspiring author.
One of the authors up for Best Read at this year’s Nibbies, Beatrice Colin, recently gave an interview to The Daily Record in which she illustrates this harsh reality rather well. Writing The Luminous Life of Lily Aphrodite, which so many people have now discovered thanks to Richard & Judy’s Book Club, her life was as unglamorous as that of a certain popular children’s writer who wrote her first book in an Edinburgh café:
“I didn’t have a study, I had a table at the top of a landing. It was freezing, so I sat with four or five jumpers on. It was quite dark as there was no window.”
She concludes with the perhaps the best advice of which any budding author should take heed, not least because there’s a chance that your writing will never end up in someone else’s hands between the covers of a finished book: “Write for yourself. “
You can read the whole interview, as well as the thoughts of two other published writers, Carole Matthews and Shari Low, here.
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