Fremantle Arts And Thoughts On Authorship

It's sometimes what hasn't been said and is mentioned in passing...

"The question of unpaid royalties was also being addressed. “We’ve been gradually, because of the turnaround in the last 12 months . . . clearing those. The package the Minister (has announced) will bring all of that up to date.” "

So there are, like, all these writers who have been quietly starving away for the last few years and who might now get their cheques? Well that's a good thing, certainly.

More of a worry is the $565,000 grant/loan combination figure. How many books does FP actually have? Well, I count 9 titles on their website which they're actively advertising, and there's of course no indication of how many copies have sold nor how many other titles are on sale. But even if we number their string as consisting of only ten authors, that means the maximum average royalty each can receive is $56,500 - and I gather that A) not all of that money, indeed probably just a small portion of it, will go to royalties, and B) we're not talking about royalties just over the last 12 months here, but likely two years or possibly more.

At a very rough guess, their authors will be earning not much more than $9k a year from royalties, and my gut feeling is that in fact the average author will be earning about half of that.

So really, it sucks to be an author. Maybe I should get out of blogging...