How To Patronise Writers Properly

Homer's brain. Which is slightly bigger than mine. (This picture's pirated so thoroughly that I couldn't track down a credit. Anyone know who did it? One of Groening's peeps, I assume. Kudos to you, unknown worker ant, labouring anonymously for our pleasure in a cruel and hostile digiverse.)

I think a lot about the future of the book. So imagine! my! delight! when I stumbled on The Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank who do nothing but think about the future of the book.  While lying in the bath, eating chocolate, and sipping a latte macchiato through a straw. I hope.

Their blog,  if:book, ponders a bunch of good stuff.

OK, I didn't really stumble on it. I got a Google Alert saying they'd mentioned my New York Times piece, and I clicked through. But once there, I stayed for ages, wandering around the site. I hugely enjoyed a tremendously thought-provoking interview with Helen De Witt (author of The Last Samurai, and Your Name Here). It couldn't have provoked my thoughts more if it'd poked them with a stick.

Best thing is to just quote a big chunk of it. Here she is on the idiotic and inefficient way the publishing industry, as currently set up, makes money for authors. (Do I agree with her? If I agreed with her any more, I'd be her):

"Well, the way it works is, you try to sell a very large number of physical objects, collecting a dollar or two off each one for the author – from people you never contact again.

I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.

This is deeply baffling. One of the problems for a fundraiser is that it's hard to raise undedicated funds. Good fundraising copy often focuses on an individual; you excite the donor's sympathy for Precious, who walks 10km twice a day to go to school, and then the donors all want to buy books, school uniform and a bicycle for Precious. If you're not careful with the wording you could find yourself under a legal obligation to send half the take from the appeal to Precious. And you hauled in all this money and goodwill for someone donors had never heard of before, with a single page of copy. It takes five minutes to read, and you're sweating blood to draft something that will get people to spend the five minutes. Whereas.

When people read a book they typically spend a minimum of a couple of hours on it. Sometimes they read it at a single sitting; sometimes they live with it for weeks. Sometimes they forget it – but sometimes it stays in the mind for years, sometimes it saves the reader from suicide, sometimes it changes the reader's life. So it has the power to make a much stronger connection with the reader than a little read-and-toss mailshot – but the strength of this connection does not translate into extra time for the writer to write.

Writers spend a lot of time getting in each other's way. There are a few places that offer residencies – normally, disruptively, places that have a lot of other writers and artists also in residence. But there are plenty of readers like my Wall Street lawyer, people with second and third homes they never have time to visit – and even the most highpowered agents never think of encouraging those readers to give the freedom of silence to writers they admire. Agents go after big advances – which means a writer does a roadshow to buy silence somewhere down the line. It's done this way because this is the way it's done. It doesn't have to be done this way; if it were done a different way, writers would write better books in less time.

So, to revert to the role of the Internet in all this: the Internet has the power to reduce the amount of time writers have to trade for legitimacy. It has the power to change readers' relationship to writers. If a book (or a blog, or a web comic) changed your life, why not buy its author a bicycle? Or a goat? Or a bottle of wine? Why not offer its author six off-season months in your summer cottage on the Cape?

Those look to me to be likelier ways forward than for writers to pay the rent by selling PDFs online."

That's Helen De Witt. Much more of that interview here. Send her a bicycle, a red rose, and champagne this instant.

Oh wait. There's no mechanism in place to do that. Bummer.

I've been saying this for years. We need a global patron/artist connecting tool, and the internet can do that. Look what rich people waste money on, in its absence. Hedge funds they don't understand. Overpriced condos in the hurricane corridor. Or they give it to Bernie Madoff, and he spends half on gold taps for his dog's bathroom, and gives the rest to the rich sucker he met last month, pretending it's December's "investment profits".

Far better that some of the rich give some of their spare cash to the writers they really believe in, to write. And if the writer does come up with something that's remembered long after they're both dead, what greater glory than being remembered as the patron of a great piece of art? Harriet Shaw Weaver will be remembered long after her rich contemporaries are forgotten.

So, if anyone wants to pay my rent while I finish Jude: Level 2, mail me.