MY IMAGINATION by Val Tyler

Hay Festival.

I love it.

People don’t only read and talk about books, they inhale them.

Each year as I infiltrate the lively enchanted throng, my imagination takes flight and I am transported to castles on the green hills beyond. Brightly coloured fluttering flags form a welcome to the heroine in an amazing dress, shimmering in the light. She is bright and bold and knows no fear. Valiantly, she dispels evil from the land, the sun shines and…

Well, you get the picture. This flight of fancy isn’t very original and will never make the cut, but most of my musings don’t, they simply evaporate into the mists of time.

When I return to certain places, the surroundings can trigger old imaginings and Hay Festival is no different. I expect to conjure up something bright and lively with colour and happiness.

Each year as I arrive, I look down the tunnel of canvas into the vibrant world of books, their readers and writers. Fluttering flags, bright colours, and the hum of expectation and excitement consume me. My heart beats faster and I am transported to that place where only Hay Festival can take me.

This year was different. For a start, I went on my own. I’d never done that before. Seeing policemen with submachine guns is always a shock, but they’d been around last year too and I am thankful that precautions are taken to protect us.

I was arriving at a time when the children had mostly been taken home. Their parents and other adults who were coming to the 7 o’clocks hadn’t yet arrived. As my bag was searched and I looked down the tunnel of canvas, I was greeted with… well… nothing really. No buzz, only faded colours and, above all, few people.

Hay Festival was deserted.

In its defence, I must tell you there had just been a rainstorm and people had fled in their droves, leaving a festival I’d never experienced before. It was like walking through a ghost town. Few people had braved the conditions. The Festival I knew and loved had been washed away.

As I waited in the queue, I was in a dark place. Hushed tones of bedraggled people transformed in my world to folks full of fear and deception. Someone coughed. Eyes darted towards him apprehensively. A brolly dropped. We dived for cover. Dark shadows seeped from the tent behind us. Men in black uniforms with heavy guns huddled us together. In fear, we shuffled into the marquee, anxious faces, fearful eyes, trembling hands.

A woman shouted ‘Back off’, holding her hand towards us and we cringed into our seats as...

…everyone burst out laughing. Ruth Jones had just slipped into the character of Nessa from Gavin and Stacey. We applauded.

My imagination runs away with me some times.

Another Library Under Threat

I don’t suppose I’m different from anyone else, but I love my hometown, Hay-on-Wye. It’s referred to as the Book Town because we have so many bookshops. They are all second-hand bookshops, but they are great. You’d be hard pressed not to find a book on your chosen subject.

We also have a ruined castle dating back to the 13^th century, a clock tower that tolls the time quarter-hourly, art and craft galleries, stylish clothes shops, butter and cheese markets, antiques and a world-renowned literary festival.

If you’ve ever been to Hay Festival you’ll know how fantastic it is. For ten days each year our population is multiplied fifty times over and we rub shoulders with book-lovers and authors alike. The festival has its own bookshop stacked with brand new books and people sit all over the site reading. I love the smell of a new book and the crack of the spine when I open it for the first time.

You would expect a book town with so many bookshops and a literary festival to have a library, and we do. It is run by the noisiest librarian in the west! Jayne is amazing. She finds books for us, reads to our children and helps with any query, book-related or not. She has computer classes at the library, a ton of information about the town and meet-the-author events. She knows about books, old and new, and generally brightens the day of anyone who meets her. We borrow books, pretty much as many as we want and, for three weeks at a time, they are ours to hold and to value and, above all, to read.

Sadly, the Book Town’s library, like so many others, is under threat. Powys County Council is seeking to reduce the library’s costs by half, I am not sure if that is before or after the Festival’s yearly contribution of £11,000. Now, you might say we have to accept cuts and I agree, but not to a library that is only open sixteen hours a week.

We will learn our fate tomorrow, but with a budget of £163m and a reputation for being inefficient, I would have thought there might be many other ways to save £18,000 a year rather than knocking the heart out of the Book Town.

Publishing as a business - is it time to revolt?

At the beginning of this year, there was a flurry of letters, blogs and publicity about authors' fees at festivals. Philip Pullman's decision to pull out of being a Patron of Oxford Literary Festival was prompted by, and itself prompted, a widespread debate about the ways in which literary festivals reward the authors that are the primary reason for their existence, with well-known authors such as Joanne Harris and Francesca Simon joining in to condemn the fees policy and even pulling out of appearances as a result.

It is striking that, while the administrators, the catering staff, the ticket collectors, the marquee companies, the stewards, the plumbers, the booksellers and the technical support, who all contribute to making the festival run, are paid wages, the authors (and, at children's festivals, the illustrators), those who are at the very heart of what the festival is about, are often paid with a free lunch or a few bottles of wine - and even when they are actually paid money, it's generally a nominal sum. Unless they happen to also be a Big Draw or a Celebrity Author. It has been argued (for example, by Claire Armistead, here) that those authors who aren't a Big Draw or a Celebrity should simply be grateful for the exposure - they aren't who the audience have come to see. They gain publicity and profile from their association with the festival and that's their reward. But I think this misses the point. Audiences come to festivals not just for the Celebrity Author but to discover new writers, new voices, to hear something inspiring that they weren't expecting - to browse among a curated set of the latest talent. The new authors  are worth every bit as much to the life of a festival as the older, established ones - and I'd like to bet that the people that come back again and again do so because of the new writing they've been exposed to more than the familiar stuff that they always knew about.


But I don't want to rehash the arguments over festival fees. What seems to me more interesting is the question of who really benefits from festivals? And the answer is, by some considerable margin, not individual authors but the publishing industry. Which begs the question, why are publishers not paying for their authors/illustrators to attend festivals? Are we aiming our ire at the wrong target?

It's clear that many small and even large festivals wouldn't survive if they had to pay all their authors fair fees. But it could be argued that the industry they are really benefiting is getting a pretty cushy deal: free (or at the least very very cheap) promotion for hundreds of their books and authors, as well as a massive coming together of industry insiders in a congenial location where deals can be done and networks strengthened with booksellers, journalists, bloggers, authors - the kind of event that if it was an industry conference (which it almost is) would cost them thousands of pounds per delegate.

And the publishing industry is not short of a bob or two (profits of the biggest companies are in the millions, and margins are as high as 10%, compared with the general retail trade at 3-4% and bookshops at around 1% or lower (see here for figures).

So really, what the debate over author fees raised for me was not how mean the festivals are, but the wider question of how a whole industry can justify running a profit on the basis that every single contributor to the basic commodity it sells - the editors, the publicists, the computer support, the receptionists, the printers, the CEOs, the cleaners, the van drivers - is paid an appropriate wage, but the writers and illustrators are paid amounts that mean that, on average, they are working for less than the minimum wage.

When I go to schools, I am sometimes asked how much money I make as an author. I generally reply with another question - how much money do they think I get for each of my books that sells? Guesses generally range from about £5 per book to £1 or £2 per book. They are all utterly flabbergasted when I tell them that it's often less than 10 pence.

I can't think of another mass commodity industry that works like this, apart from the music industry. In all other areas, the core people involved in producing the commodity at the heart of any industry, whether it's a newspaper or a dishwasher,  are always waged. And music is slightly different, because its arguably performance that is at the heart of most music rather than recordings - and when a musician is performing, they are generally paid an appropriate wage.

I don't know what the answer is - but I do wonder if we need to get more angry about this. I wonder if we need to be agitating more forcefully. I wonder if the Society of Authors ought to be lobbying publishers and saying, look, you may think there is an inexhaustible supply of would-be writers who want to be published so much that they will accept any kind of deal, but unless you start offering proper returns for the business of writing, returns that however they are organised (royalties or retainers) deliver proper decent hourly rates of pay, we, your published authors, mid-list and celebrity alike, are going to start refusing to write for you.

So, Philip Pullman and Joanne Harris, and all the other well-known authors who have been putting pressure on festivals. How about it?



Cecilia Busby writes humorous fantasy adventures for ages 7-12 as C.J. Busby. Her latest book, The Amber Crown, was published last year by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)

Who Would You Be? by Keren David

It’s unusual to be completely thrown by a question from the audience, but a teenager in the audience at my most recent event managed to do just that.

The event was the Hay Festival, my fellow panellists were Sally Nicholls and Anne Cassidy and the question was this: ‘If you could be any other writer, who would you be?’

‘Homer,’ said Sally, for his wonderful stories and use of language.  ‘J K Rowling,’ said Anne, ‘just think of the money.’

I mumbled something about Shakespeare, but it wasn’t really true, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering which writer I should have picked. Anne Tyler, whose novel ‘The Accidental Tourist’ is written so beautifully that I have line-envy on every page? Antonia Forest, because then I’d know more about the Marlows, possibly my favourite family in children’s fiction? Hilary McKay for creating the Casson family, who run the Marlows a close second? Lauren Child, because I’d love to have her visual imagination? Jodie Picoult or Joanna Trollope, because I feel I could do what they do, but then I wouldn’t have to do it and I’d have all their royalties.

No. The answer, I realised was simple. I write because I like to create my own stories. I don’t want to write other people’s books or plays, even if they are more lucrative than mine, win more awards, are better written. I don’t want to be another writer, is what I should have said. I just want to work on being an even better version of me.

How about you? Is there an author you’d like to be?