How To Patronise Writers Properly
Monday, January 5, 2009 at 12:55AM 
Homer's brain. Which is slightly bigger than mine. (This picture's pirated so thoroughly that I couldn't track down a credit. Anyone know who did it? One of Groening's peeps, I assume. Kudos to you, unknown worker ant, labouring anonymously for our pleasure in a cruel and hostile digiverse.)
I think a lot about the future of the book. So imagine! my! delight! when I stumbled on The Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank who do nothing but think about the future of the book. While lying in the bath, eating chocolate, and sipping a latte macchiato through a straw. I hope.
Their blog, if:book, ponders a bunch of good stuff.
OK, I didn't really stumble on it. I got a Google Alert saying they'd mentioned my New York Times piece, and I clicked through. But once there, I stayed for ages, wandering around the site. I hugely enjoyed a tremendously thought-provoking interview with Helen De Witt (author of The Last Samurai, and Your Name Here). It couldn't have provoked my thoughts more if it'd poked them with a stick.
Best thing is to just quote a big chunk of it. Here she is on the idiotic and inefficient way the publishing industry, as currently set up, makes money for authors. (Do I agree with her? If I agreed with her any more, I'd be her):
"Well, the way it works is, you try to sell a very large number of physical objects, collecting a dollar or two off each one for the author – from people you never contact again.
I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.
This is deeply baffling. One of the problems for a fundraiser is that it's hard to raise undedicated funds. Good fundraising copy often focuses on an individual; you excite the donor's sympathy for Precious, who walks 10km twice a day to go to school, and then the donors all want to buy books, school uniform and a bicycle for Precious. If you're not careful with the wording you could find yourself under a legal obligation to send half the take from the appeal to Precious. And you hauled in all this money and goodwill for someone donors had never heard of before, with a single page of copy. It takes five minutes to read, and you're sweating blood to draft something that will get people to spend the five minutes. Whereas.
When people read a book they typically spend a minimum of a couple of hours on it. Sometimes they read it at a single sitting; sometimes they live with it for weeks. Sometimes they forget it – but sometimes it stays in the mind for years, sometimes it saves the reader from suicide, sometimes it changes the reader's life. So it has the power to make a much stronger connection with the reader than a little read-and-toss mailshot – but the strength of this connection does not translate into extra time for the writer to write.
Writers spend a lot of time getting in each other's way. There are a few places that offer residencies – normally, disruptively, places that have a lot of other writers and artists also in residence. But there are plenty of readers like my Wall Street lawyer, people with second and third homes they never have time to visit – and even the most highpowered agents never think of encouraging those readers to give the freedom of silence to writers they admire. Agents go after big advances – which means a writer does a roadshow to buy silence somewhere down the line. It's done this way because this is the way it's done. It doesn't have to be done this way; if it were done a different way, writers would write better books in less time.
So, to revert to the role of the Internet in all this: the Internet has the power to reduce the amount of time writers have to trade for legitimacy. It has the power to change readers' relationship to writers. If a book (or a blog, or a web comic) changed your life, why not buy its author a bicycle? Or a goat? Or a bottle of wine? Why not offer its author six off-season months in your summer cottage on the Cape?
Those look to me to be likelier ways forward than for writers to pay the rent by selling PDFs online."
That's Helen De Witt. Much more of that interview here. Send her a bicycle, a red rose, and champagne this instant.
Oh wait. There's no mechanism in place to do that. Bummer.
I've been saying this for years. We need a global patron/artist connecting tool, and the internet can do that. Look what rich people waste money on, in its absence. Hedge funds they don't understand. Overpriced condos in the hurricane corridor. Or they give it to Bernie Madoff, and he spends half on gold taps for his dog's bathroom, and gives the rest to the rich sucker he met last month, pretending it's December's "investment profits".
Far better that some of the rich give some of their spare cash to the writers they really believe in, to write. And if the writer does come up with something that's remembered long after they're both dead, what greater glory than being remembered as the patron of a great piece of art? Harriet Shaw Weaver will be remembered long after her rich contemporaries are forgotten.
So, if anyone wants to pay my rent while I finish Jude: Level 2, mail me.
Reader Comments (12)
The only other patrons in the game at present are called universities. They don't like a certain kind of writer either.
What I want is a richer ecosystem of patrons, so that writers can find patrons who already like what they do, and are willing to cover their overhead while they keep doing it.
There is no perfect system, and that includes the market system, which has repeatedly failed to support some of the most interesting books. (And yes, the old Soviet Writers' Union was far worse, and failed far more thoroughly.)
A big bunch of individual patrons, with widely varying tastes, would be a good addition to the limited mix of options ambitious writers currently have.
And now I've got to go and finish my novel.
I find most of us would get a lot more writing done if only real life didn't keep getting in the way. It's hard to slip, brain fizzing, into a parallel universe if you've spent all day talking panicked architects through The Recession. Oh, all the wonderful phrases I could have phrased if I was only independently wealthy!
It's true, though. There are enough rich people out there spending their dosh on empty pursuits like ponzi schemes and 2nd wives. Someone really should set up a matchmaking site for prospective patrons and those who have found themselves talented but famished.
and
"Our Mission is
to provide a
Catholic education
that fosters
spiritually,
morally,
academically and
technologically prepared lifelong learners."
Imagine my disappointment.
The Sweary Woman is the... the.... she's... Jeeeez, I don't know, it's 4am in Berlin, I'm only an award winning novelist, I can't describe her. Just go read her.
And also, I couldn't help but bristle at this. I mean, c'mon!
"Our Mission is
to provide a
Catholic education
that fosters
spiritually,
morally,
academically and
technologically incorrect page
breaks."
Typical stuttering nuns.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/tags/momus/
and called Bob Stein, the ex-Maoist agitator who leads them (no gun-running billionaires here), a "delicate vulcan". A year later they paid for me to cross the Atlantic on a flying Taj Mahal
http://imomus.livejournal.com/322856.html
gave me three nights in the excellent Country Inn Hotel, and paid me to sit in an oak-paneled room at the LSE questioning whether democratization of the literary conversation is really such a good idea. They didn't even bat an eyelid when I called one of my fellow panelists an "idiot" and a "zombie" on my blog.
http://imomus.livejournal.com/323114.html
(Mainly because he was so busy blogging during our meeting that he seemed to be at least half elsewhere.)
if:Book are princes among men! I will dedicate a post-Maoist eulogy to them!
I look forward to your eulogy...
I was looking for "LSD isn't what it used to be". Amazingly enough I found it, but wasn't allowed to pay for it because i'm in the wrong country.
Then I stumbled upon this post. How appropriate that I was struggling with a mechanism to pay for another's artistic endeavour and found this.
I thought I'd try and be creative but perhaps I took your literary post a little too literally. I ensnared a goat and packed it in a goat box (with suitable breathing holes and a pile of coconuts because goats will eat anything) and tried to post it to you. Unfortunately the staff at the local post office are allergic to goats and the sneezing was all too much to bear, so I kept the goat. Well I kept your goat, actually. I never really wanted a goat. So now I have to think about how to pay for its food.
On reflection perhaps I could have tried sending you some money in an envelope. Remember those? They looked a bit like the things you get in the bottom corner of your monitor when emails arrive. But sadly I didn't. I bought you a goat.
It's hard enough dealing with the GFC as it is without an extra mouth to feed and with all this procrastination, so if you could kindly send me some goat food money I would be grateful ... as would your goat.
Many thanks.
But I do thank you for your kind thought. It's not the goat that counts (except in certain circus acts, and even there I think the goat is being given hints by the ringmaster).
Best of luck finding LSD. It should be on all the main iTunes sites, in a wide assortment of rapidly depreciating currencies... The double CD of the first two Toasted heretic albums sold out on CD Baby this week, and I've been too busy writing to send them more copies. But it'll be back in stock soon.
Meanwhile, this live version, on RTE's The View, is free, and pretty good... it's archived here, at the bottom of this list:
http://www.rte.ie/tv/theview/archive/20050913.html
And the original video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMztx7jZuI
Rock gently on, my friend, rock gently on...