Jane Smith's cracking post about the 'Brit Writers Awards' yesterday certainly opened up an interesting can of worms. I <a href="http://howpublishingreallyworks.com/?p=3682" target="_blank">suggest you trawl the comments here and enlighten yourself</a>. They're full of lots of pithy responses, and a couple of nasties from people who think she stepped out of line by raising a few questions about how this curious award is organised.

I always find it enlightening when a few people try to bludgeon a blogger into silence simply for expressing an opinion they happen not to share. I don't get the impression Jane is the sort to be cowed by that. And nor should she be. She didn't cast any aspersions about the BWA. Just asked some very worthwhile questions.

<!--more-->If you think this is just a little local tiff in the British writing community, think again. It's more than that. As I tried to say yesterday it's an illustration of the way 'writing advice' is becoming big business. At least for the people who are selling it. BWA, as far as I can gather<a href="http://www.claire-king.com/2010/12/03/too-good-to-be-true/comment-page-1/#comment-535" target="_blank"> from a bizarre message from one of its executives here,</a> sees itself as much as a training organisation as a literary prize, not that I've seen this made clear elsewhere.

Fair enough. But let's not mince words here. What we're talking about is charging wannabe writers for their dreams, taking money off them in the belief -- their belief -- they will one day get it back through being published.

Is this even remotely realistic? Let's <a href="http://howpublishingreallyworks.com/?p=1533" target="_blank">look at a few statistics</a>. Only about a fifth of the people who are published commercially in the UK work at writing full time. Their average earnings are lower than electricians and between 2000 and 2005 actually fell. No one has any up-to-date figures but I'd guess they've fallen even further. After all retail book prices now are actually lower than they were ten years ago, and royalties today are charged on selling price, not RRP, so authors take a big hit on those discounts in Waterstones and Amazon.

In self-publishing things look even worse. Yes, there are some highly-publicised exceptions of people doing well with self-pubbed books. But <a href="http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/" target="_blank">most are dismal failures, selling fewer than 200 copies, principally to the author</a> and their family.

How much are you expected to fork out to 'train' for this brave new economic world? BWA is currently offering this...
<blockquote>We are looking to work with 15 unpublished authors over the next 12 months on an intensive one-to-one basis, who we <strong>guarantee</strong> will be published with a top publisher before Christmas 2011 …[All this]  <strong><em>for a one off fee of £1,795. This is fully guaranteed and fully refundable if you are not published within 12 months.</em></strong></blockquote>
Bargain, eh? You fork out £1795, get one-to-one training and end up with a guaranteed published book at the end of it. The problem is this. No publisher I know will guarantee to publish an unwritten book from an unknown author who's never published a thing before. It takes a while for established writers to get that kind of trust usually. So what's going on here? BWA is very vague. It says these books will be...
<blockquote>...published by a traditional publisher, but not necessarily via the traditional route and that’s where the difference lies.</blockquote>
OK. And we also get this exceedingly vague statement.
<blockquote>...we’re creating a new model here which we believe will revolutionise the way people get published in the future. What everyone knows for sure is that the current system is not working – as a result, the publishing industry is overly complicated, elitist and inaccessible and even the ‘top’ publishing houses are having to resort to publishing trashy celebrity novels to make ends meat (sic), rather than find those gems THAT WE KNOW EXIST OUT THERE.

We know that the ‘one-stop-shop’ model that we’re developing here is difficult to come to terms with for an industry that is so set in its ways and we will have to be forgiven if we don’t answer all questions as we do not want to give it all away at this early stage – but over the next few months, we are going to unveil lots of new ideas as part of this programme.</blockquote>
It may just be me but I hate talk about 'new models' and 'one-stop-shops'. The world is changing as publishing goes digital. But the essential model -- writers write, agents agent, publishers publish, retailers sell -- is not going to alter greatly over the coming years. Yes the names doing those jobs may change, but the basic roles won't. Nor should they. I don't want to be a writer-agent-publisher-marketeer thank you very much. I don't have the skills and I'm too busy doing what I love, namely inventing stories.

I also wonder what the big-name publishers who have given words of support to BWA think of being pilloried in this way for 'trashy' publishing to make ends meet. To me it's extraordinarily unprofessional for anyone in publishing to badmouth popular books in public simply because they're popular. These books may not be my kind of thing but I'm glad they're there because the money they bring in helps keep publishers afloat. And as to 'elitist'... er, how does that stack up with being trashy? Search me. This just sounds like a come-on to people who've had multiple rejections and feel, justifiably, miffed even though rejection is an integral part of writing, something you should be able to live with and learn from, not mutter about darkly.

So what do you get for your £1,795, which is as much if not more than many first-time authors could expect as an advance for a first-time book from a mainstream publisher? I honestly have no idea, but it sounds like an expensive punt, and it's not the only one available to you.

Look at some of the other advice people that BWA work with and you could see your bank balance going down too. The 'Writers Advice Centre', for example, which has provided courses for BWA, <a href="http://www.writersadvice.co.uk/fees/fees-services" target="_blank">will charge you £75 for reading a thousand words</a>, £350 for evaluating a 60K book, £1,500 for mentoring, and even talk to you over the phone on a premium rate line at £1.20 a minute.

I'm not saying these services are no good. I've no experience of them and some of the people who have used them clearly appreciate what they've done. But get real. Your chances of earning back this kind of money from writing are slender in the extreme, especially if you're pinning your hopes on a 'new model of publishing' (which I can pretty much guarantee will be one without sizeable advances and upfront payments of any other kind).

And there is a bigger -- much bigger -- point to be made here. Writers shouldn't feel the need to pay for this kind of advice or frankly require it. If you want to know how books work read some. That’s what most professionals did. If you can’t get the hang of things that way, I very much doubt anyone will be able to instil it in you, however much you pay them.

There, I suspect, is the nub of the problem. Big conventions apart -- which I think are excellent events for would-be writers to attend -- I haven't done any teaching -- which I always did for free -- for a year or more now, and I don't intend to resume any time soon. Time is one reason, but another big one is that I was getting depressed by the calibre and motivation of some of the people who were turning up to classes.

I remember asking one why he wanted to be a writer. He answered, miserably, 'Because my job is shit.'

There you have it in a nutshell. The 'be-a-writer' training boom seems to me to be a by-product of a miserable economy and a mistaken belief on the part of those suffering from it that writing is somehow a miracle cure for their ills. Give up the office, sit at home, tap out a few words at leisure and earn a tidy living.

Chances are it won't happen, and the only people making money out of this are the ones selling that impossible dream.