Mark Le Fanu is the Society of Authors' long-standing General Secretary. We asked him what exactly the Society does for writers?
Whether you’re a novelist, textbook academic, poet or translator, the Society of Authors is there to help you. For over a century the Society has been fighting for writers’ rights and currently boasts a membership of over 8,000. Mark Le Fanu is their long-standing General Secretary [check]. We asked him what exactly the Society does for writers?
What is the Society of Authors?
Technically we are a union. We’re essentially about authors’ rights, earning a living as a writer and everything that it involves. Most of our dealings are to do with author-publisher relations, which are very tricky. They are touched on by Wendy Cope in one of her poems, which goes: ‘Five happy publishers go through a door, one saw an author and then there were four.’ That’s really what it’s all about.
When was the Society founded?
The Society of Authors was formed in 1884 by a man called Walter Persante. It was about getting some sort of decent copyright law, which didn’t exist – what publishers were offering in the 19th century was a complete rip-off. As an example there was a case in 1836 about an author who beat up a publisher. The judge said, ‘This assault was carried out at very inconsiderate length, if an author is to give a beating to a publisher who has offended him, two or three blows with a horse whip ought to be enough to satisfy the author’s injured feelings.’ Persante was tying to get authors together for their own collective good.
What does the Society do?
The core of our business is giving help to members on anything to do with the business side of being a writer: getting a publisher, which publishers are better than others, getting an agent, changing agents.
We probably get about five or ten contracts everyday that members have been offered. Our first bit of advice to any author is, when the publisher says we’d like to publish your book and you’re tempted to sign, just hold on and get advice. Contracts are always negotiable and the publisher will never make their best offer first time round.
Libel comes up from time to time. If you’re writing a biography of someone who’s still living, that’s a tricky area. That’s getting a little more complicated due to a privacy law coming up in this country: how far can you reveal the private secrets of the individual you are writing about?
In the early days our work was very much about copyright, campaigning and an awful lot of litigation: suing publishers, taking individual action, backing cases. This is less prevalent today. The last major case involved the BBC, which was about copyright infringement on a television series called The Explorers. It was based on various travel writers’ books and the BBC had failed to clear the rights properly. I’m not sure whether it was mischievous or just neglect. We eventually settled it on the steps of the court and they coughed up.
What to do with heavy-handed editors is also a question that comes up. Shaw, one of the great activists of the society, once said: “I mind more about the removal of a comma than I do about the deaths of my mother and my father, of whom I was extremely fond.” There aren’t many authors who could get away with that.
On top of that we provide information to members through our journal The Author, as well as providing a series of quick guides, which are all fiercely practical.
What sort of subjects has the Society lobbied for in the past?
About 25 years ago, we set up, along with the Writers’ Guild, the Authors Licensing and Collectors Society (ALCS). It deals with collecting money for writers that cannot be dealt with individually, such as photocopying, cable transmitting of programmes in Europe – areas it would be completely impossible for the writer or the agent to calculate. It’s quite a complicated business accounting for third sold French rights and German rights and maybe newspaper rights. That’s why, from time to time, we do random royalty audits. It’s surprising how often one finds an author has been underpaid, usually by quite a lot, but not deliberately.
We campaigned for a long time for the Public Lending Right, under which authors now receive money for library borrowings. Each time a book is borrowed the author gets about 5p. It was a long and fractious campaign, which was eventually successful. Most authors don’t get a huge amount per year from it, but it helps.
We’ve also lobbied for tax concessions for writers. A lot of writers don’t pay much tax, but if you do, you can now average it between one year and the next. In the nature of things, when you’re writing a book, you may get a decent size whack one year as an advance and then the next year maybe nothing.
What recent issues has the Society been concerned with?
We were deeply involved with the takeover of Ottakar’s by HMV-Waterstone’s. So much in publishing these days depends on the central buyer at Waterstone’s and the merger will be damaging, not only to writers, but also to the public in terms of choice.
You may have heard about the digital future of publishing, which is mind-boggling, and Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature and the issues that it gives rise to. It probably is a good idea, but a lot of writers are twitchy about the extent to which texts are being digitised. Is it going to help sell more books or is it going to enable people to do research online more easily without actually having to buy it?
The emphasis on the bestseller list is becoming greater and greater. The sales of the top 50 books over the last 12 months [from when to when] have gone up 40 per cent, the next 50 are about static and below that sales have gone down. It is becoming tougher for the middling author - someone who’s written two or three books that have done quite well but haven’t really made a breakthrough.
