If anyone in the East of England hasn’t stumbled across the
Norwich Writers’ Centre yet, I can only recommend checking them out – they
organise fantastic workshops, talks and all manner of other usefulnesses. On
Saturday 3rd October, they held a ‘Professional Development Day’ for
writers in the lovely Dragon Hall. I’m reasonably new to the business of trying
to trade as a writer, and keen to pick up practical advice on all aspects of
it, so while my family enjoyed a day out in Caistor learning about Bernard
Matthews, I sat and listened to talks on tax, applying for grants and
crowd-funding.
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| Inside the Dragon Hall, Norwich |
There were a few gems on the tax liabilities of
self-employed writers: if you’re fortunate enough to win prizes, you owe tax on
them if you or your agent submit your work, but not if someone else enters it
(I’ve been chucking this over my shoulder and thumping it on the back for a
week but the logic still eludes me); every time someone in another country
downloads your book you should be paying income tax in that country; it’s a bad
idea to pay your tax bill with a cheque from an account that you haven’t
disclosed to the taxman. And there was a brilliant talk by Melanie Gow about crowdfunding
that make me want to pull on my boots and march across Northern Spain.
The day as a whole was interesting and thorough. In
hindsight, though, as I grapple with the one issue that’s left a taste in my
mouth as lingering as a slug trail on the carpet, I realise that I often attend
workshops looking for that magic Writer’s Job Description which will tell me
how to eliminate the insecurity of a career based around writing books. This is
impossible, of course. The best approach seems to be to maintain diversity –
write books, do events, network, tour schools, dress up as a penguin and get
filmed stealing from fish counters and so on.
And, of course, using social media to create an online presence and
promote your work.
So during one of the talks, someone asked the question: ‘Do
you have to be on all these social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook etc,
in order to sell books these days?’. At which, a knot curled up tight inside my
belly. Because this is my not-at-all-secret Guilty Secret: I’m really rubbish
at social media. I know very well that I should put some effort into it, but
every bone of my body is so disinclined to tweet the progress of my
biscuit-crumb-baby-wailing-laundry-hanging-staring-into-space-filled days that
I still just… haven’t got round to it yet.
And I absolutely knew that the speaker was going to tell
this room full of people that yes, they do have to engage with these things in
order to make a living from writing: i.e. to be a ‘professional’ writer. And he
did.
This time, the knot inside me rebelled and sprung loose – that’s
your opinion, I said. Not the absolute truth. What you’re doing is repeating a
lazy modern ‘truism’, and scaring people.
Social media seems to be the new orthodoxy of the writing
profession – a vital part of the job, as I’ve been told many times. I don’t
deny that it is very useful, and I really should be trying to use it. But this
is how things happened for me.
When I was a child, I wrote endless stories. Even though
that was how I filled my spare hours and how I learnt to understand the world,
it was my own personal crusade and my love: I didn’t ever think I would do it
as a job. A job was something you went to a place and did for someone else, who
paid you to do it.Now that I’m older and realise that it might be possible to
indulge myself in writing for all (or most) of the days of my life, I’m very
keen to know exactly how I can make it into a job – my own job. And I want to
follow all the good advice of others who’ve gone there before me. But I don’t
want to try and make writing into a job that I dread. So I have buried my head
in the social media sand, dragged my feet through the social media mud, and
tried desperately to push down the guilt about not doing it.
After I disagreed at this talk, someone trotted out the
‘formula’– you engage, you get followers, they buy your book, spread the word,
it goes viral, you have a huge fan-base, more people the world over start
following you and buying your book, and so on. The implied threat being that if
you don’t go on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, you won’t get followers, you
will never sell your books, and you won’t be able to be a professional writer.
And I just realised that while I still feel guilty about not using enough social
media, I just don’t buy this line anymore.
If we allow and repeat a general orthodoxy that you must use
social media in order to become a professional writer, it essentially sends out
a message that no matter how good your book is,if you haven’t done your time on
Twitter then the book itself is useless. And I don’t think we’ve yet reached a
point where that’s true. It might be rarer these days, but it is still possible
to get a publishing contract without having an internet presence at all. There
are all those other event-based options, too - you can establish and maintain a
presence in the physical world. It might be harder, take longer and wear down
the soles of more pairs of shoes, but it’s possible.Social media is a useful
tool, but it isn’t the single, vital and unique step that must be trodden upon
in order to access the solid floor of a writing career.
Sitting in the ancient Dragon Hall, acutely conscious of the
inspiring and unforeseen longevity of some human endeavour, I felt strongly
that it is very wrong to discourage anyone from putting their all into their
art on the grounds that they will never ‘make anything of themselves’ unless
they are also prepared to share more aspects of their life than they want to.
I’d even go so far as to say it is very bad advice. The future might prove me
wrong, but if it does, I guess at least I’ll have sunk into such obscurity that
nobody will know how to get in touch with me and tell me…
