Today I received a message from the new CEO of my publishers to say that they will not be able to give me a date when they can pay me the money they owe me until after the end of January. That’s when they might be able to give me a date for when I’ll be paid; not when they can finally pay me. This is after months of hollow promises that have seriously disrupted my life. The money for my most recent book has been due for more than half a year, and none of the latest batch of royalties owed on my other six books with my publisher have materialised.
It feels like a running theme in the media, generally. Newspapers - and i’m talking primarily about the kind that style themselves as champions of fairness and social justice - often used to forget or neglect to pay me. That involved smaller sums of money but money that I was counting on to get by. After years of self-employed work, people like me who have somehow mistakenly been “allowed in” to this exclusive world, which is still dominated by clans and cliques and dynasties of people born into Russell Group affluence, shudder to think about the number of hours we’ve frittered away chasing money owed to us by charming, educated people who, as my grandparents would have said, have “the gift of the gab”. But it’s a bigger, older story than that: the one where businesses make money off the hard work of artists, and when things outside the artist’s influence or concern go wrong, the artist is the person penalised. It’s also a story that can often - especially if you look closely at the history of suicide in music - have truly tragic consequences.
This is why I love Substack. Yes, they take a cut, but, no, they do not forget or neglect to pay you. The power is all with the writer and the writer’s connection to their readers.
I still admire so much about my publishers - I think they are passionate people who want to support brave writing outside the mainstream - and I cannot help feeling gratitude that they have allowed me to write the books I’ve written, but I feel angry and mistreated: I have been through the wringer lately and its puts me in an extraordinarily difficult position because, ultimately, I have a new novel coming out in March - which is undoubtedly the best and most ambitious I’ve ever written - and, despite what is going on, I want as many people as possible to read it. I do not want the knowledge my readers have of this situation to stop them buying the book but I DO want my readers to have knowledge of this situation. The book will come out, those who’ve pre-ordered it will receive it, and I trust I will be paid for it, eventually. But for this level of uncertainty to happen when you’ve worked so singularly hard on a book and pinned so many hopes on it is crushing. The positive thought I hold onto every day is this: I have put in my years of training and disappointment and the result is that I am now at the peak of my creative powers. My most recent books feel like a huge, exhausting achievement. But I will draw on every reserve of inspiration and strength I have to make the next ones even better.
And I will NOT let this happen to me again.
Substack is part of a long-overdue transfer of agency from Them to Us. From now on, I will be the future of my own work.
If you are choosing to come with me while I do that, I thank you, because the more of you who do, the stronger and less compromised I become.
P.S. There’s some background to this in the link: I’d appreciate if you read it before commenting, as it might answer other questions you have.
