IGI features
Pushmi-Pullyu: Children’s Book Publishing in Ireland
May, 30, 2003
This article is condensed from a talk given by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick at a CBI/Alternative Entertainments seminar held in Tallaght Library in February 2003. Marie-Louise has worked as an illustrator and writer of children’s books with international and Irish publishers since 1988 and her acolades include, two Bisto Book of the Year Awards, a Reading Association of Ireland Award, an IBBY and a Smithsonian Notable Book listing. The following article appeared in issue 5 of Inis -the magazine of Children’s Books Ireland and is re-published here in its entirety by kind permission of Marie-Louise and CBI.
‘I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books, except money - to save me from the temptation to write only for money.’ - George Elliot
We often hear the last fifteen years or so referred to as a ‘golden age’ of Irish children’s literature, and certainly, over that period, the consumer has got an excellent choice of mostly well-written and well-produced Irish children’s books at a decent price. The bookseller has shifted many units and made a decent profit. The publisher has invested time and money and made a decent profit too, we hope. And the writer or illustrator, the creator of the raw material that produces all this general decency? Has it worked for the writer, is there brass in pocket? Well, I think we can assume that people are referring to the quality of the literature when they use the term ‘golden’, rather than to the doubloons weighing down the purses of the writers and illustrators who have produced it.
Let me say at the outset that Irish publishers are a special breed. They are adventurers and risk-takers. From tiny offices and with a small number of staff, they produce books on a vast array of subjects - history, biography, poetry, natural history, novels, current affairs, information books, coffee-table books and, in the last fifteen years, all this wonderful children’s literature. Publishers of a similar size in the UK would never produce anything like this variety. They would specialise, not just in children’s books, for example, but in a particular area of children’s books. Here, editors and publishers are jacks-of-all-books, and in the main they do it all well and produce lots of new titles a year , perhaps too many , and all this for a population, even taking the whole island into account, of only five million. This is a tiny market, no matter how good we are at buying books. On top of that, we are an English-speaking country (in the main), which means that our market is flooded with UK and US products, making Ireland an incredibly difficult place for publishers to turn a profit.
They do seem to be making a living at it, all the same, even if it is a modest one. (I refer here to the mainstream publishers; of course there are also small specialist publishers , Irish-language publishers, for example, or poetry publishers who are not really in business in the usual sense.) As a rule, publishers stay in business; they pay their bills; they pay their staff; presumably they also pay themselves. So the publisher makes a living; editors get their salaries; sales people and publicity people get paid; the booksellers get paid; everyone, it seems, gets paid a living wage from this business - except the people on whom it all depends.
Irish writers and illustrators are professionals in every sense of the word, except in the most basic sense: they don’t make a living from their work. Uniquely among the workers in this industry, they have to supplement their earnings from their books with jobs, residencies, piecework, whatever they can turn their hand to ‘to support [their] writing habit’, as Siobhán Parkinson puts it.
Irish authors are not unrealistic. They do understand that it is not possible to make a living by writing children’s books for the Irish market alone. But it is time for everyone to start being realistic, and to take the author’s situation into account, along with all the other factors. A publisher invests money, expertise, staff time into a book, and they feel they have a right to make a profit on that input - and they have. But the publisher’s input is quantifiable. Nobody ever seems to quantify the author’s input, though, so let’s try doing that now.
Let’s not think of a writer providing a story. Let’s think of a writer providing the materials for a product which the publisher is going to produce, to sell to the bookshops, which in turn sell it on to the consumer. Time is money, and an experienced author working on a novel for six months to a year: that must be worth €20,000 to €40,000 at least. That’s what anyone in Ireland today with a high level of skill would expect to be paid for their time. So the author is providing €20,000 to €40,000 worth of material - but for a return of (in total, not profit) €1000 to €10,000, over perhaps five years. Those figures are not unreasonable: they are more than a lot of (‘successful’) authors earn from their books. In other words, authors are providing their work to the publishing industry and the book trade 50-90% free of charge. Looking at it purely economically, how practical is it to expect this state of affairs to continue?
Authors don’t expect publishers to wave a magic wand and quadruple their income for them, but surely it is reasonable that authors who are getting almost no financial reward should at least expect the level of service they get from their publishers to be the best in Europe! Some Irish publishers do provide good editorial support, good cover design, good marketing and PR, but many do not. Some publishers seem to think that books will jump off the warehouse shelves and find their own way to the bookshop; indeed, some seem to be bypassing the bookshops completely and going straight to book clubs, thus ensuring that the author earns next to nothing. (Because book clubs claim such enormous discounts, contracts tend to specify extremely low royalties on book club sales.)
Contracts are another problem. They should be signed at the beginning of the process, not when the book is finished. Late contracts protect the publisher from risk, but they expose the author.
Contracts should acknowledge illustrators’ rights to retain copyright and ownership of their original artwork, which they should have returned to them after use. Some Irish publishers still insist that the artwork is theirs, because they commissioned and paid for it. What do they think publishing houses in the rest of the world are doing? Borrowing it for free?
Publishers who do not visit the Bologna book fair (where foreign rights in children’s books are bought and sold) and who do not have agents in other countries should not insist on owning world rights to a book for ever. If a publisher is in no position to exploit these rights, why insist on taking them? And even if a publisher does make the effort but has not exploited these rights within a certain period, the rights should then revert to the author. Anyone can see that this is fair and reasonable, but almost no Irish publisher will agree to such a clause in a contract. Where an author is writing a series of, say, five books, and a publisher publishes the first two but then turns down the rest, this leaves an author in a very awkward position. The author can’t approach a new publisher with books three, four and five, unless the original publisher agrees to release the rights to books one and two - but again, many publishers will not do this. Why not? It’s simply unjustifiable. Contracts for series works need to take this difficulty into account.
Then there is the famous and ridiculous option clause. Almost every Irish publishing contract contains a clause that gives the publisher the right to publish the author’s next book, and often on the same terms as the current contract. This binds an author to a publisher, without placing any obligation on the publisher with regard to the author.
Some Irish publishers, I hear, do pay their authors’ royalties - in full and on time, no hysterics required on the part of the author. Lots don’t. No one should have to phone and phone and phone and cry and beg for their own money. It’s not fair and it’s not professional and ultimately it will drive authors away.
Joining the Irish Writers’ Union, which can provide advice on contracts, is one step all authors should take; but do it before you run into trouble with a contract you have already signed. Fellow authors can’t give you legal advice - neither can all but the most specialised of lawyers when it comes to publishing contracts - but you can at least benefit from their pooled experience. Getting yourself an agent who can sell your books to British and US publishers is another solution, and is probably the only way a writer has any chance of making a living from their writing. But if all the best Irish children’s writers get themselves agents, what then? Almost certainly they will desert their Irish publishers and fly off to British ones. It must be very hard for Irish publishers who have built up a working relationship with an author and put time, work and money into that relationship to have the author ‘snatched’ from them. But that happens to all small publishers, Irish and otherwise. The fact is, an author does not belong to a publisher. It is a two-way relationship, one book at a time. The publisher is in business and will make decisions based on finances and cold facts. Authors must be prepared to take their careers into their own hands and do the same. What we need are creative solutions. For example, if British publishers are sending out landing parties, as they are at the moment, to work the Irish territory, then why don’t Irish publishers face this challenge head on and propose partnership agreements with British publishers, instead of grimly hanging on to reluctant authors by means of option clauses? There is no doubt that things will change, as things do, but as long as there are good Irish writers and illustrators, wherever they are published, Irish children’s literature will continue to be well served. Meanwhile, Irish publishers will have to find Irish answers to Irish problems because if they and Irish writers cannot find a way to move forward together, then they will have to move on, apart.
Why royalties don’t make authors rich
Let’s be wildly optimistic and imagine a publisher prints 20,000 copies of a book with a cover price of €10. You might think that the author should get €20,000, working on a royalty figure of 10% - wrong! Here is an example of how the royalties might work out:
200 are given away for publicity and PR 200 x €0 = €0
800 are sold at the full cover price of €10 800 x €1 = €800
2000 are sold in various bulk deals, which
works out at 50-70c a copy for the author,
so say 60c 2000 x 60c = €1200
2000 are sold to book clubs, which means
very low royalties, say 20c a copy 2000 x 20c = €400
15,000 are for a foreign co-edition for which
authors get about 50% of the sum paid to
the publisher, which depends on the deal
they can swing. This could work out as low
as 20c a copy for the author 15,000 x 20c = €3000
total royalty €5400
But
Most contracts will have a royalty rate closer to 7% than 10% A foreign co-edition of 15,000 is extremely unusual - most Irish publishers print between 3000 and 5000 copies of a children’s book. And in any case, a children’s novel is more likely to have a cover price of €6 rather than €10
So
A more realistic expectation for a new Irish children’s author is about €400 on a book in its first year; maybe up to €1000 over the book’s lifetime. Even an experienced and prolific author published in this country is unlikely to make as much as €10,000 a year on several titles, including the sales of foreign rights.
