Writing as a career choice

Would I recommend writing as a career choice? Certain forms, yes. Journalism, for one. It will pay your rent, I guess. And more, if you are good at it. Copywriting shouldn't allow you starve to death either. But poetry and fiction? I don't think so. Basically there is little money in writing fiction and practically none in poetry. But how do you tell that to a parent who thinks that his daughter is the next JK Rowling?

There are two issues here. The first one is whether one can make money from creative writing. I wrote in a 'news' entry some time ago quoting a story from The Independent called Pulped Fiction: "... According to the report the average author in the UK earns about GBP16,000 (a little over RM108,000) a year, a third less than the national average wage. Enough if one was living in Malaysia, I guess. But if the superstars are removed from the sums, the actual figure comes closer to GBP4000 (RM 27,000) a year, hardly enough to live in KL. In Britain this is reckoned to be insufficient for stale bread for breakfast and a tarpaulin for shelter." You can read it here.

The other issue is parents. When does an (outwardly) perfectly normal, peaceful-looking individual become a parent from hell? In a government school, I have heard that it happens when his son gets punished for bullying another pupil and then proceeds to beat up the teacher who reprimands him, whereupon he (the parent from hell) proceeds to the school, assaults the teacher himself, shouts at the headmaster who tries to intervene, and then threatens to sue the school, the Ministry and the Government. In a private (or international) school, on the other hand, I have been told that the parent from hell will demand to know why his daughter, who has never scored less than 98 marks in her exam paper, got only 97 this time, one mark less than her clearly inferior classmate, a daughter of a rival to boot, and will then proceed to berate the said teacher and the principle because he has paid a lot of money for his daughter's education.

Different value systems, I guess.

(I don't recall my father ever coming to my school during my time except on the first day of year one. I don't recall ever seeing my friends' parents either. I suppose, that would be classified as the other extreme.)

As a bookseller I meet parents too, but not that many. Mostly, they inquire about reading material for their children or books for school assignments. Some ask about the Writing Programme which, I proceed to tell them, I do not recommend to those still in school because it might interfere with their school work (or even contradict what their teachers tell them). But I had a rather curious and an extremely annoying encounter recently.

I came in after lunch one day to find two people waiting for me: a nineteen-year-old and her father. I was told that they had been waiting for me for a while and had insisted on speaking to me about publishing. Now if there is one thing I don't like, it is the unannounced first visit about publishing. It puts both parties in an awkward situation, and generally ends leaving a bad taste in the mouth. I even dread telephone solicitation for similar reasons. I prefer to receive an email, whereupon I would normally request for a synopsis and about twenty pages of their writing (also by email) before deciding if a meeting would be worthwhile. I have had authors walk in here and 'offer' me their manuscripts, stuff I am not interested in, or in really badly written ones, for thousands of dollars. Some will try the heavy 'Tupperware sales-lady' approach. Some will try and turn on their nauseating charm and give me diabetes on the spot. Some will, practically, demand that I publish their books, period. They are shocked when I tell them that I don't publish certain types of books like self-help or management or some such. Often I have to lie. (I cannot tell them the only thing I really want to say: that their writing is plain bad.) I have been scolded by would be authors who cannot understand why I would not let them use the 'Silverfishbooks' imprint even if they are willing to pay for printing costs. Generally, few of these meetings end very pleasantly for everyone.

So I did freak a little at this little visitation. But nevertheless, I felt obliged to agree. (Why are people allowed to get away with taking advantage of one's hospitality?) We just want some advice from you because my daughter likes writing, the father said. So we went into the office.

He said that he wanted his daughter to be a writer, because he thought that it was a good way of making money and that his daughter had written a bunch of poems (typical schoolgirl moon-June-spoon variety, I later learned) and wanted to know if it could be published. (So much for the advice bit, I sighed inwardly.) I told him that nobody ever got rich writing poetry because it did not sell. "Yes," he said he understood. He had heard that Malaysians read little. What if we marketed it internationally, he wanted to know? I told him that the same was the case all over the world, unless his name was Seamus Heaney.

"Oh. So what type of book sells?"

"If you really want to know, romances," I said. "Real bodice-splitting romances. With lots of sex. But we don't publish those."

"Why not? If they sell, why don't you publish them?"

"We are not interested in that kind of stuff, that's all. They are mostly badly written, in any case. Anyway, there are other publishers who do that."

He kept badgering me for a while more on that. I was sure he had no idea what he was talking about. Did he really want his daughter to write that kind of stuff?

"But I want her to write something that will sell," he finally said.

"Look if you are thinking about your daughter taking up writing for money, I think you should forget about it right now. If your daughter wants to write, she should write. Not for the money but because she wants to. And, if she does happen to make money, good for her. Anyway, a survey shows that authors of most bestsellers are in their fifties. She is still young."

Then he said, "Unless you are deaf, dumb and blind, everyone knows how much money JK Rowling makes."

Oh God! Not another one!

"How many JK Rowlings, are there?"

"One." He looked puzzled.

"What is the population of the world?"

"I don't know ... several billions."

"So, the chances of your daughter becoming another JK Rowling is one in several billions. Now, if you go downstairs and buy a lottery, the chances of you winning the first prize is one in three million. Wouldn't that be much better? Anyway your daughter has not even started writing."

He wouldn't let go for a while. Then he relented. "What advice will you give her if she wants to write?"

"Read," I said.

"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "But what does she have to do if she wants to write?"

"She could attend a writing course," I said, "but I wouldn't advise it for her now. Not yet. She has to start reading first. She has to start reading widely. All the classics, all the modern masters." I looked at the girl, who had been quiet all this while. A pleasant teenager, well on the way to adulthood, polite, a bit shy, but obviously intelligent -- she seemed to understand what I was trying to say. "What are you reading now?" I asked. From the way she hesitated I realised that she clearly was not.

"What was the last book you read?" She mentioned an author which sounded like one of those that teenagers read. I smiled at her and told her that, if she wanted to be a writer, she had to read very widely, preferably before she decided what she wanted to write about. I mentioned a few names, some she had heard and some she hadn't.

The father was decidedly unhappy with my diversion and harangued me a little more before I told him finally that there was little money in writing and that writers on average, probably, earned less than bricklayers. His daughter should write, by all means, if that is what she wanted to do, but forget about making lots of money.

That was the end of my meeting with the parent from hell. They left after a while, but not before someone heard the father muttering under his breath, "She can't spend all her time reading now and start writing only after she is fifty."

Selling books

I wrote a story in this column a month ago called Independent bookshops fight back (you can still read it below if you want). Then recently I came across a story provocatively called Do bookstores know how to sell books? by Priyanko Sarkar in the Times of India online.

Do we indeed?

The story starts: "It's a familiar sight. At the entrance of every celebrated bookstore in the city, you are assaulted by international bestsellers or new Indian arrivals, many of them mediocre works. If you ask for something else, you'll hear, Sorry, we're out of stock ..."

That sounds familiar. For small independent bookstores, the main constraint is money and space. How we wish we had infinite resources to stock every book we want. But, unfortunately, no brick-and-mortar bookshop in the world is big enough to stock every book that is available, even if they had all the money in the world. The closest one gets to a truly mega bookstore is Amazon.com, but even they don’t have on their list several hundred titles we have in our tiny little store. (We have about three to four thousand titles in stock at anytime.)

"All bookstores are retailers and they have to be profitable. Real-estate prices are touching the roof."

Same here. The bookstore must be profitable enough to pay the rents and the staff salaries, at least. For the past three decades the story has been familiar -- large chains eating up independents for breakfast at an alarming rate. But now there are signs that things might be changing. We have been reading of trouble Borders UK has been having, and now a recent report from Publishing News, new CEO Phillip Downer talks about them consolidating before further expansion and a re-look at their business model. Another report in the Guardian Bookblog says "sales are tumbling at Waterstones ..." further talking of how the chain, now, has "a new focus on novels, cookery and children's books at the expense of the humanities ..." (All of which is good news for independents). And there are rumblings at WH Smith (a 3% decline in growth this year). And on the other side of the coin, the number of independents both in the UK and US increased in 2007.

It is too early for independents to be celebrating just yet, of course. But methinks that the writing is on the wall. The idea of the mega bookstore is a leaf taken from the supermarket (and the hypermarket) business model. The model is simple. Buy in large quantities. Buy it cheap. Sell it at the lowest possible price and undercut the competition. (If one bought large enough quantities of a particular consumer item, one could push the price down to ridiculously low levels, which would then, in turn, allow one to sell the items at extremely low prices to the consumer. (It will also run the same consumers out of work, but that is a different matter.) When mercilessly applied (together with globalisation) what this means is that hypermarkets like Wal-mart and Tesco can (and do) source for merchandise from the lowest cost producer anywhere in the world (from Vietnam or China or wherever) and compete at the expense of other players in the market, people's jobs or even whole economies of nations. (Some would say that the sub-prime crisis in the US is simply one form of collateral damage.) This model, of course works, (if you want to call it that) with merchandise ranging from pressure cookers to pottery, and from dungarees to DVD's made available at the lowest costs.

When applied to the book industry, this is how the model will work. First of all the book has to be made a commodity. Let's forget about all that namby-pamby 'cultural goods' bullshit the Europeans like to whine about. (Though we may have our own opinions on this, let us just go along with the 'commodity' premise for argument's sake.) Buy the books at the lowest prices possible, which means you have to buy titles in truckloads. Squeeze the publisher for discounts, and kill the competition by undercutting them. But, unfortunately, there is a problem. Firstly, there is no low-cost manufacturer for books. (Yes, you could buy Harry Potter in truckloads from China at rock-bottom prices but you could, also, end up in jail for that.) If the retailer wants a particular title by an author there is, normally, only one source. And prices are pretty much controlled. A hyper-mart might be able to get a pair of jeans made by near-slave labour in Laos or Cambodia for two dollars and sell it for a hundred (I have been told by a supermarket operator that those are the type of numbers in the garment trade. I know of someone who bought an intricately hand-embroidered saree -- all six yards of it -- in India for fifty rupees, a little over one US dollar. How much do you think the embroiderer who did the bead-work was paid?) Even if the book supermarket buys large enough quantities and swings that huge discount, the story is not over. What discount is he going to offer the customer? Fifty percent appears to be the norm these days for bestsellers and new arrivals. (Not in Malaysia.) If he does not offer the discounts, others will. What about his overheads then? The rent is not about to go down, nor are the wage packets. Taking all that into consideration, and assuming that he actually manages to sell all the books he buys, there will really not be very much left. So, Borders looking for a new business model is about right. (Note to Malaysian mega bookstores still griping about the Harry Potter deal: You are in supermarket territory. They invented the rules. You are a mere Johnny-come lately. So you can't complain when the local Tesco undercuts you. After all, you do undercut others.)

What is happening is not surprising. The big boys are fighting one another to death. One can pretend to defy gravity only for so long, especially when every store looks the same, and they all sell the same products. (But unfortunately, or fortunately, they don't 'get it'.) It is time for the independents to make a comeback.

Sarkar’s report further says: "Small bookstores usually have owners who are booklovers themselves. They stock books that the impersonal managers of chains do not stock. That's why, while small bookstores in the country have distinct personalities, the big chains that reek of coffee, don't."

Interestingly there was another story I read this last fortnight in Springfair.com Marketplace entitled Queen of shops claims service is the future of retail. The story starts: "Mary Portas, star of BBC TV show Mary: Queen of Shops, suggests that in future retail "... would be led by expertise and customer experience, rather than price and product ranges."

"Portas said that independent stores can build up their services and differentiate themselves from multiple retailers by creating efficient, good-looking stores that shoppers will enjoy visiting and by providing the service of expertise."

The other point she is making is about getting customers to go to a shop at all, given the internet craze and all. Maybe shops as we know it will cease to exist. Anyway, they have been predicting the death of books since television was invented. Resilient little buggers aren't they, books?

Interesting.