Philip Pullman: authors can't make a living from books any more

Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman poses with a copy of his new novel, La Belle Sauvage Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP

Most authors can no longer make a living from writing, Philip Pullman has said, as High Street chains and online retailers such as Amazon compete to sell books at the lowest possible price.

Pullman’s latest novel, La Belle Sauvage, is out today and is expected to be one of the year’s biggest sellers. Fans have waited 17 years for the book, a prequel to His Dark Materials.

Branches of Waterstone’s opened at midnight for those too eager to wait until the morning. But Pullman said few writers today enjoy his level of success.

“There are plenty of things to be concerned about, not least the falling incomes of people who depend on writing books for their living,” said Pullman.

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
La Belle Sauvage is the first in a new trilogy, The Book of Dust Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP

“I’m extremely lucky in my writing career. I don’t decry that for a moment and I’m very grateful for it. But colleagues of mine, friends of mine who 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, before the end of the Net Book Agreement, would have been able to earn a living by writing books, and selling enough copies to libraries - they can’t do it any more.

“The rise of big booksellers, internet booksellers and so on, has been good for readers in some ways, but it hasn’t always been good for writers.”

Until the 1990s, the Net Book Agreement ensured that titles were sold at a fixed price. Its dissolution mean that online retailers, supermarkets and major chains could discount books. Authors’ royalties are a cut of the sale price, not the price printed on the back cover.

A report last year found that the average income for a writer in the UK is £12,500, well below the minimum wage.

Pullman was speaking at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, where he launched his new novel.

His Dark Materials - the trilogy of Northern Lights (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000) - sold 18 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages.

La Belle Sauvage is the start of another trilogy, called The Book of Dust. It is set 10 years earlier and revisits the heroine, Lyra, as a baby. The second book will skip forward to Lyra as a 20-year-old undergraduate.

The new book is darker than the stories that came before, and the language more adult: there is swearing, including use of the f-word.

“His Darker Materials, perhaps? I think that is true,” Pullman said. “I’ve got older too, perhaps more cynical and closer to despair and all that sort of thing. Yes, it is a darker book, I can’t deny that. But that’s the story that wanted to be told.”

Philip Pullman at home in Oxford
Philip Pullman at home in Oxford Credit: Clara Molden for The Telegraph

He disclosed that the book was years in the writing because he had suffered from ill health. He did not go into details, although the New York Times said that complications from prostate surgery had left him wracked with pain and able to sleep only in 15-minute bursts. A further operation earlier this year corrected the problem.

Speaking at the launch, he explained: “I have been ill for a number of years but I’m better now. It was a surgical operation that did the trick so: good for surgery!

“This is one of the reasons the book has taken a long time to appear, because it was quite hard to work with something like that. I have felt confined and restricted, to some extent, by my health.”

In addition to author pay, Pullman said his chief concern is schools. A former teacher, he laments the loss of school libraries (“every school should have a decent library and a trained librarian on the staff”) and of teachers reading stories to their pupils.

“Great stories have lasted for 3,000 years or more - I mean Greek myths, I mean fairytales, I mean folk tales, ghost stories - all sorts of stories. That’s what I enjoyed most when I was a teacher and that’s what I enjoyed most when I was a child at school.

“I don’t know if that’s even allowed now. You’re telling a story and it’s: ‘Stop! Ofsted’s coming! Put it away!’”

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