Creative Midlands Events

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Twentieth-Century British Poets in Music Posted: 20 Jun 2013 09:18 AM PDT Twentieth-Century British Poets in Music This post has been generated by Page2RSS

What Writing is Worth Posted: 20 Jun 2013 03:02 AM PDT How good writing reaches the wider world is something we are very concerned with at Writing West Midlands. For all our artistic policies and finely developed tastes (if so they are) we know that what stops most creative writing getting into sight or hearing is a  confederation of economic realities. For any reader or listener to give any attention to any writing – written, performed, broadcast, digitised – requires that they give up something else. Time and money is finite. Even at a novel a week I have probably only just enough time left to read a thousand more novels. And that takes no account of having a week off to read poetry or re-reading Middlemarch, as I have promised myself I will do, or just loafing around, or more likely watching television or riding my bike. It is time rather than money that stops me consuming literature. But to return to my original point, what are the economic forces that ensure certain novels, shall we say, become one of my 'last thousand to be read' while others do not? Cost for me is not an issue, in that I can usually find £10 to buy a novel. But I know cost is an issue in helping publishers decide whether to make that novel available to me or not. While I may be content that £10 is good value, they need to be sure that enough people are of a like mind in order to be able to produce said novel at a cheap enough unit cost to make enough of a return on whatever investment they are making. My £10 is useless if it is only me. And sadly, at the moment, there isn't really a mechanism for me to up my payment so that my 'demand' for a novel coincided with the appropriate conditions being met for the novel to be 'supplied'. Or is there? Actually, I have paid 'over the odds' for books in the past, usually specialist tomes on the history of apples or the manufacturing of bicycle frames (any novelist covering these subjects are guaranteed a purchase from me) and sometimes print on demand. My point is that creative writing typically becomes available only when personal demand is replicated enough for the cost of production to match the accepted cost of purchase with whatever profit deemed necessary. Which is odd and sad. Odd because there are so many writers writing so many often wonderful books each with a particular and often unique flavour that the chances of recruiting sufficient mass demand are slim. Unique books fare worst. Books that echo previously popular books fare best, until even their charms are exhausted. And it is sad because the structure we have for transferring a text from a writer to a reader simply does not accommodate the level of individual pleasure or satisfaction that a reader may receive, but is dictated by average demand. But things are changing. Crowd-sourcing funding for books while responding to small examples of mass demand at least allows individual potential readers to decide on the value they place on the text being available. Although they may all buy only one book, if one person pledges a high value – commensurate with their enthusiasm for the book in question – they increase the chance of it being made available to them, and to less enthusiastic (or financially fortunate) readers. And the day will surely come when one reader can commission for themselves and, if they wish, themselves only a text from an author paying whatever price the two parties agree on. That would certainly set the exclusivity cat amongst the accessibility pigeons. I'm not sure where I stand on these various brave new worlds, but I do believe that everyone in the writing world should spend more time thinking about how the market for writing works or could work. I'm going to return to this in a future blog, I'm afraid, but if any students of economics would like to take up the discussion that would be fun.  By Jonathan Davidson

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