Clearly not for the money. The survey I carried out with members of the Society of Authors' Childrens Writers and Illustrators, reported in this issue, make that plain. Lots of published writers had made less than £5,000 from their work in the last financial year - a far cry from Michelle Paver's two million pounds for the Wolf Brother trilogy.
Must be the fame then? I don't think so. Recently I turned up to a signing at Waterstone's Piccadilly (yes, let's name and shame) where no-one could find the books, shown on the computer as having been delivered. The person who had organised the event made no appearance; she was řin a meeting with a rep.Ó
Such bruising encounters with reality, experienced surely by all of us in the business, put you firmly in your place at the bottom of the heap. But a good review or, even better, enthusiastic e-mail from a reader, has the opposite effect.
Someone has read our work, understood it, appreciated it, even loved it. We speak to each other across and through the medium of print, mind to mind, with no intermediary and the satisfaction is immense. That and the joy of creation itself is presumably why we do it.
And maybe what the current publishing culture takes advantage of. A smart book at £12.99, signed first UK edition, might be sold to an American collector for as much as £100. The author will get almost certainly less than £1.30, depending on the seller's discount from the publisher. And you don't even get the sting removed by an effusive e-mail from the American collector. They don't read the books ¨ just like to look at them.
~ Mary Hoffman