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France’s famed writers now earn less than minimum wage

It is nothing short of an existential crisis, as crippling as the ones that had Left Bank intellectuals like Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre staring gloomily into their coffee.

Published: 21 March 2016 15:36 CET
France's famed writers now earn less than minimum wage
More than 100,000 writers took part in the survey. Photo: Bertrand Guay/ AFP

French writers have never felt more badly paid, undervalued or under pressure, with a new survey showing more than half of established authors earn less than the minimum wage.

Many are so depressed by the state of the book industry that they are considering giving up altogether, according to a new report.

“Authors have a high social status but almost empty bank accounts,” said Marie Sellier, president of the SDGL, one of the five writers' and publishing groups behind the vast study.

Like their counterparts in the US and the UK, French writers have seen their incomes plummet since the 1990s, the report found.

More than a third of even the highest-earning authors had to have another job to make ends meet, mostly as teachers, it said.

Established writers with years of relative success behind them struggled to make a living, with their median annual earnings of €17,600 ($19,800), less than three-quarters of national average.

The most staggering statistic of all in the report, which was backed by the ministry of culture, is that six out of 10 published writers make less than €1,500 a year ($1,700).

Grim reading

Despite French publishing growing for the first time for five years, authors remained deeply downbeat about their prospects.

The survey of more than 100,000 fiction and non-fiction writers as well as poets, illustrators and translators found they were they “generally worried, disenchanted and discouraged.

“Many were asking themselves whether they should diversify into other work or stop altogether,” it concluded.

Although exact comparisons are difficult to make, French writers appear to be still doing better than their British or American equivalents.

Established British authors tend not to make even half the industrial wage, with latest data showing them averaging 11,000 pounds (14,000 euros) a year.

Nor has the boom in self-publishing and e-books made much difference to writers' often miserable earnings, according to the Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society.

An online US survey last year by Digital Book World made even grimmer reading, finding a third of published authors earned less than $500 a year from their writing.

Philip Pullman, president of the British Society of Authors, placed much of the blame at the feet of Internet giant Amazon and publishers when the last round of British statistics were published last year.

“While Amazon makes earnings of indescribable magnitude by selling our books for a fraction of their value, and then pays as little tax as it possibly can, the authors whose work subsidises this gargantuan barbarity are facing threats from several directions,” said the author of the acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy.

“In the past ten years, while publishers' earnings have remained steady, the incomes of those on whom they entirely depend have diminished, on average, by 29 percent.”

BOOKS

How I ditched London and became a writer in Berlin

Former Berlin resident Sarah Kisielowski tells of how a move to the German capital provided the inspiration she needed to write her first novel.

Published: 11 October 2016 12:00 CEST
How I ditched London and became a writer in Berlin
File photo: DPA.

“I’m going to become a writer,” I told my boss in London. I’m moving to Berlin to write a book.

A month later at my farewell party, he gave me a bunch of flowers, along with a pat on the back for being 20-something and following my dreams. Ten years later, my dream has come true, and looking back, moving to Berlin had everything to do with it.

A lot of people come to Berlin in search of creative input, hungry for the history and artistic freedom that the city has to offer. They hang out in cafes and bars and explore the romantic urbanism that makes Berlin so addictive: the tree-filled neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, the industrial wastelands, and canal-side haunts.

All these people from different countries and backgrounds come together, bound by the city as it perpetually writes its story on the lives of its residents.

“Berlin was different when I moved here,” many people say, and yes, in 2006 when I turned up with a backpack and a job as an English teacher, the city was different: the Communist Palast der Republik still stood on Museum Island, more people seemed to speak German, and there were a lot more outdoor parties. But I was different back then too and to me, everything in Berlin was new.

I picked up my first bike for €10 off an elderly lady in my Altbau and, by the end of my first week living in Kreuzberg, I was cycling around the streets of my Kiez like a pro, and falling in love with the city.

There was so much to write about: the smells and sounds of the streets, Kofte from the Turkish market and fresh rolls from the bakeries. Characters popped out of every kiosk, they slept on the stones of war memorials. Stolpersteine before many houses marked the homes of former Jewish residents, and the dates they were terrorized by the Nazis.

Street names like Grimmstrasse were an ode to the fairy tales of the German storytellers the Brothers Grimm, who lived in the city for two decades. And U-Bahn station names like Frankfurter Tor marked an old route out of the city towards the provinces of the East.

With so much for my imagination, I spent my first year simply living and experiencing my new environment. I connected with most of the people I met through a shared love of music and literature. Their book recommendations still remind me of the places where we first discussed them over a Milchkaffee and cigarettes, warming up from the cold. Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler is a café on Kottbusserdamm. Talk Talk by T. C. Boyle is a tram ride half-way-down Petersbergerstrasse. And then my favourite: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut: a bitter night walking along Eberswalderstrasse.

Photo: David Benham/Private.

Being half-German myself, there were some things about the city that seemed familiar from my childhood trips to see my grandparents: pumpkin seed bread and poppy seeds – favourites of my mother; then there was the chocolate bars we’d been sent as children; and the sound of the language itself.

But so many things were different from home: the apartments in Berlin were enormous and full of the smell of coal. When winter came the canals froze in Kreuzberg, and I felt for the first time that I really knew what winter was.

Lost in a dark and snowy world, I began to write vignettes of the characters and places I came across: the abandoned factories and buildings, inside which I would sit for hours, scribbling away on scraps of paper.

I read Döblin and Isherwood, and went to flea markets to buy a fur coat. I watched films by German directors like Wenders and Herzog, and spent afternoons on the S-Bahn observing life. A homeless man sat on the stairs at Treptower Park, begging each day for breakfast. The sound of a violinist filled the vaulted ceiling of a station as the horsehair of his bow glided across the strings.

The people and cold of the city breathed humanity into my everyday life in a way I’d never seen before.

And I too had to survive, in a flat with no real heating. I didn’t make a lot of money from my teaching job, but it was reliable, and enough to pay the rent. Looking back, I hardly had anything, but in other ways I had so much. I was rich in only a way that living in Berlin can teach you. On my days off I explored the city, then went home and wrote all night. And gradually I became a Berliner with a common sense of belonging running through my blood.

Four years later, I returned to London and began to write. I wrote eight hours a day for three months. The story started from a photograph, a vision, and ended in a book. It took four more years of research and return trips to Berlin to finish my debut novel. But now that it’s done it, it feels like only last week that I first cycled down Wrangelstrasse with the leaves of the linden trees crunching under my wheels.

Fulfilling a dream takes hard work and perseverance. The people of Berlin gave me the inspiration to do that. Of course, every city has its stories, but none more so for me than Berlin, where every doorstep holds a secret, every face is lined by the past.

The Last Tenant by Sarah Kisielowski tells the story of Daniel, a young man who travels to Berlin in search of family. But when his grandfather disappears, Daniel must dig through remnants of the past to find out the truth about his family's history. Find out more at http://www.fragmentpress.co.uk.

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