Publishing an increasing amount of books annually is a methodical madness for the publishing industry. Because determining what a readership might be remains an alchemical mystery, the publishing industry has settled on a model somewhat akin to a shotgun: In one year, publish as many books as you can in the hope that one or two of them will hit the bird of phenomenal readership. This model is what keeps the publishing world afloat. But it is clearly unsustainable for 90% of professional writers.
Thus this third tangential essay on Robert McCrum’s “thriller in ten chapters” has to do with the number of books being published – pushing 200,000 in the UK in 2007 – and “that age-old struggle” of books and writers “to achieve a readership.” The obvious paradox is, the more books published, the less the chance each one has of achieving an economically significant readership (statistically, less than 500, according to last week’s Thursday Soapbox on Vulpes Libris by Marygm). What this translates into is that the typical professional writer earns £4,000 a year, 33% below the national wage (according to an ALCS – The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society).
Which begs the question, should we not reconsider the concept of the “professional writer”? The “professional writer” is not a phenomenon of late capitalism. It is a phenomenon, at least in Europe, of the Reformation, and in England, the Reformation and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536-40. Before this time, there was no “professional writing class” but monks in abbey scriptoriums, poets in royal courts and scholars at the Oxbridge universities. The turning out of monks, the religious upheaval of the royal courts and the doctrinal splits in scholastic philosophy gave birth to the professional writer as monks, poets and scholars sought their survival. It was perhaps as brutal a world, probably more so, for the professional writer as it is today.
Of the writing monk, the poet and the scholar, Nehemiah & Blake is most provoked by the monk. If modern dismissal of medieval church institutions as corrupt, greedy and hypocritical is temporarily laid aside, the abbeys and monasteries can be seen for what they were in Medieval England – deeply embedded symbiotic patrons of the communities in which they existed. It needs also to be remembered that among the populace of England, the dissolution of the monasteries was very unpopular, because it put the abbey lands into the hands of private landowners who were perhaps corrupter, greedier and more hypocritical towards the people.
The writing monk or nun would have lived within his/her abbey, a community upon which the monk or nun could rely on in support of their primary vocation. The abbey in turn would have been living within a rural community, supporting it in terms of providing farm land at reasonable rent, the community supporting the abbey from the sale of its produce. As a model, it wasn’t perfect. Nothing is in this world. The key here is seeing the writer being placed firmly within the economy of these interlocking communities.
In the first instance then, the writer finds abundant support to live, something clearly lacking in the current professional model. In the second instance, the writer is producing what his or her immediate community – the abbey – requires and wants to read. A small but secure and sustainable readership is gained. In the third instance, a potentially vast readership is still available through a network of “abbeys”.
In the case of the third instance, the difference between the abbey model and today’s publishing model is that a vast readership is not the first line of attack. Many might argue that blogs fulfil the second instance of the abbey model and lead to the third. Nehemiah & Blake would agree with that. However, 90% of bloggers are not going to see economic abundance flow from their efforts. It is in achieving the first instance that Nehemiah & Blake sees the greatest challenge and opportunity for writers who believe that writing is a primary vocation: To take the abbey model and rebuild it into the fabric of contemporary society.
This would mean for writers to seek out living in community with non-writers and for each to support the other in creating a sustainable economy of living. Further, this would mean for that “abbey” community to work in such away that it can offer something symbiotic that the wider community around it can use towards its own needs. If this can be achieved, then the need for a writer to sell 100,000 books in order to survive is no longer necessary. Five hundred to a sustainable and secure readership would suffice. There will always be writers that break beyond the boundaries of immediate community. This has been happening since the days of the Venerable Bede. But we would not have Bede were it not for the abbey at Jarrow and the community that lived around it. The call then is for a change in mindset among writers.
