THOSE CANADIANS LEAD THE WAY AGAIN !

Making the literary life a little less precarious -
Even famed Canadian writers can end up impoverished. A new benefits program seeks to change that, James Adams writes in the second part of his three-part series on the publishing industry.

JAMES ADAMS writing in The Globe and Mail
February 13, 2009

Winning a $50,000 cheque as a Scotiabank Giller Prize laureate or scoring a half-million-dollar advance from a publisher is always cause for jubilation for a writer, not to mention praise in the media.
But such triumphs are decidedly the exception – a distortion, in fact – of the writing life in Canada. The majority of published authors never get big advances, never see their books on the bestseller lists, never visit Rideau Hall for a Governor-General's Literary Awards ceremony nor share a tête-à-tête on CBC Radio One with Shelagh Rogers.

According to Statistics Canada, a Canadian scribe on average makes only between $18,000 and $22,000 annually from his or her writing – and this includes royalties from book sales as well as income from grants, giving readings and workshops, writing, say, reviews for magazines and newspapers, and earning a yearly stipend from the Public Lending Right Commission.

It is, in short, a hard life, fraught with long, lonely hours of work, occasional feasts and many famines (in 2005, an estimated 3,000 Canadian authors – 11 per cent of the total 27,500 who identified themselves either as self-employed or salaried writers – reported no earnings from their writing), not to mention the agony of public indifference.

Read James Adams' full report here.

And for a comment on the poor UK writer read Robert McCrum's piece here.