The Guardian has published another article today about declining author wages (true), this time blaming FFB for this trend (not true). Festivals and authors have both become poorer poorer for the same two reasons: austerity and wealth hoarding by the publishing industry. > - ThreadSky

yararf.bsky.social • 47 days ago

The Guardian has published another article today about declining author wages (true), this time blaming FFB for this trend (not true).

Festivals and authors have both become poorer poorer for the same two reasons: austerity and wealth hoarding by the publishing industry.

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Comments

yararf.bsky.social•47 days ago

Cuts to local government budgets devastated festival grants as well as social services like housing benefit, making it harder to write & driving festivals into the arms of funders they didn’t want to scruntinise

(Eg BG Prizes’s 2nd sponsor is run by a dude currently under sanction by Ukraine)

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yararf.bsky.social•47 days ago

Meanwhile the publishing industry makes record breaking revenues, paying the lions share of advances to a tiny minority of (often celebrity) authors, while cutting average writer by half in real terms.

yararf.bsky.social•47 days ago

Scale here really matters. Total BG sponsorship was worth £1m across 9 festivals. Richard Osman’s last advance was £10m - enough to fund all 9 for a decade.

Whatever you think of BG, the reason writers are poor isn’t FFB.

How do we fix it? >

yararf.bsky.social•47 days ago

The same as in other industries. If train companies handed train drivers a pay cut of 50%, what would they do? When screenwriters were given exploitative streaming contracts, how did they win?

They worked together to build worker power thru strong unions and, eventually, went on strike.

Lastly >

yararf.bsky.social•47 days ago

Re the “the market decides” argument of author earnings.

We don’t live in a perfect free market of books, where every book is given an equal chance of success via equal distribution, marketing and so on.

A book w a £2m adv and one w a £2k adavance do not have an equal shot at readers.

poetclare.bsky.social•47 days ago

It’s just an appallingly written piece, an absolute word-salad, no idea how the guy got to write it for the Guardian when so many good writers could have brought much more knowledge and analysis

yararf.bsky.social•47 days ago

It’s been terrible how little interest in facts there’s been from media, even on the left. And how quickly authors have been to believe untrue things about their fellow authors! Lots of work to do and a long road ahead 💚💚💚💚