Paying Up
We are often asked (often with a hint of disbelief or confusion) why we don’t charge members to attend our Real Writers Circle meetings. We explain that by keeping our get-togethers free, we are holding firm to our commitment to open the community to the widest range of voices possible. We’ve done it for the first six months of meetings and plan to continue to offer a free event far into the future.
People usually nod at that response, pause, and then they say, You should at least charge for the wine/the room/a nominal fee!
Let me explain why we shake our heads.
As writers, we are spoilt for choice with paid-for courses, workshops, webinars and retreats and festivals, which serve all facets of our writing needs, from honing our craft, to pitching our novels, to demystifying the Amazon algorithm. The range of knowledge and depth of expertise available to us is astonishing. And brilliant. I’ve benefitted hugely from many of these products and services and will continue to pay to do so. But still, we aren’t going to commercialise ours.
Instead, we’re looking for external funding to support our evenings in which we connect, dig into specific aspects of writing, and listen to fresh work. In addition to simplifying the choice to attend by reducing the financial burden on writers to zero, we believe that writers deserve a little TLC.
Every novel, screenplay, poetry volume, graphic novel, short story collection, non-fiction book, or memoir that sits on our shelves represent many hours, maybe years, of work. Apart from the talent a writer is sharing with us, any of the texts above represent huge amounts of devoted time and energy, enormous commitment, difficult choices, sacrifices, a lot of failure and rejection, and significant direct and indirect financial costs.
When we buy a book, we are often not only buying the work that went into that story, but the fruits of the hard grind and lessons learned from perhaps several books before that one, books the author never got published, work totally unrecognised and unpaid for.
In the cover price (typically the cost of three cappuccinos for a paperback novel and extraordinarily good value), we’re paying for the writer’s commitment to keep going in the face of quite poor odds their work will ever be widely read. Disappointment happens all the time. For published authors, the financial return is typically tiny if non-existent – sales are unlikely to pay the author a living wage let alone meet the labour and other costs of writing a book. Yet, as readers, we continue to ask writers to take the risk of expending resources putting words on the page so that we have choice.
As readers, we love that so many books exist, that we can access a range of voices and experiences. We love to live in a vibrant literary culture full of ideas, chat and opinions about books, a world of stories and imagination. We love to be soothed and excited, informed and enriched, transported, and brought home. As English speakers, we pride ourselves on our literary canon. For that legacy to grow, writers of all backgrounds, incomes, and ambitions, need to write. And writing is hard. We encourage the broader community to invest in writers, including Real Writers Circle members, when they are published, but even more so when they aren’t.
As RWC steps into the maze of grant applications and funding documents, we will explain our case again: Our events are free so they are accessible to as many writers who want to come as possible. Writers thrive in an inspiring, fun, no-charge evening in the company of other writers as we individually navigate the ups and downs of a writing life for all our collective benefit.