REWARDS OF AUTHORSHIP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 390, 13 December 1946, Page 5

REWARDS OF AUTHORSHIP

Sir,-The article in the Listener recently in which a number of American writers placed their calling somewhere between slave labour and death raises again the question of whether writers get an adequate return for their labours. The answer is obviously no, but I don’t intend going over the whole argument here. It has all been said before. I only want to point out some aspects which apply particularly to this country. With the exception of a very few best-sellers the average sale of a book in Britain is about 1000. Therefore in New Zealand we are doing well when with a population one-thirtieth as great our average is perhaps 200. We can pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that we

are great readers. But whereas the financial return for the British author from his 1000 copies is hopelessly inadequate, especially for a scholarly work that may have taken years of research, the financial reward of the New Zealander with his 200 copies is nothing at all. With the higher cost of production even 1,000 copies, which is reaching best-seller standards here, will return him less than they would in Britain, and unfortunately we can’t scale down an author’s wants in proportion to his sales, The New Zealander needs just as much food and clothing and housing as the Englishman. Therefore the writer is giving the fruit of months of hard work for nothing, for charity; and at the same time he must work for his living, or starve-and both will lessen the quality of his work. The question arises also whether we are morally justified in criticising the quality when it arrives; whether we can question its worth when it is given as free. Only when you pay the piper can you call the tune, and we cannot expect to. see any great improvement in our writing unless we are prepared to pay for

it. This is where the pundits start,talking about subsidising uneconomic industries, not remembering that roads, for instance, are not expected to pay for themselves, or that if newspapers confined their activities to collecting and printing news alone they couldn’t exist. They have to be subsidised in huge amounts by advertising-indirectly by the consumer. A start has been made with a State Literary Fund. Why shouldn’t the fund pay the whole production expenses of a few selected books, at first, leaving the proceeds of sale for the author; which would ensure a fairly good return while leaving enough to chance and the public to keep the writer up to the mark.

DENNIS

McELDOWNEY

Christchurch.