Cornelia Funke is one of the world's highest-selling authors, a multiple award-winner for her children's books, from Mirrorworld to Inkspell and Dragon Rider. She was in fine, combative mood at a session on publishing at the Jaipur Literature Festival, explaining why she'd started her own imprint, Breathing Books, to publish her own work.
Funke's books have sold millions of copies, but even so, she struggles with a core issue for authors - the difficulty of retaining creative control. She started Breathing Books after her US publishers asked for drastic changes to a new book. Funke found this highly problematic because the work had already been edited by her editors in Germany. She was sharply critical of the way the present system works, reminding authors that they are the ones who are creators, and that even the best editors, distributors and publishers should not usurp creative control.
Who has creative control? It's a question of power: does the enormous clout of the US and the US publishing industries mean that local editors in Europe and Asia are sidelined as a consequence? Another question about power: if an author with as much superstar muscle and bestselling clout as Funke has is under pressure to re-edit an already edited manuscript, what chance do less well-known authors have of standing up to this sort of pressure?
Earlier this month, Philip Pullman, President of the Society of Authors in the UK, author of the hugely popular Golden Compass trilogy, criticised "certain large interests" in publishing: "[Their] attitude to creators' rights is roughly that of the steamroller to the ant… [These] great interests have enormous financial and political power, but no creative power whatsoever." He and the Society are spearheading a campaign for better wages for authors. Many point out that writers receive just 12 per cent of the earnings on their creations.
The standard figure for author's royalties has been set at roughly 12 per cent through the Western world; only vanity presses and self-publishing concerns offer higher royalties, but they seldom provide the editing and distribution services of mainstream publishers. The 10-12 per cent figure has remained in place since the 18th century, which makes it an unquestioned and in practice, unquestionable, norm. Any discussion of changes in royalty figures is usually met with incredulity from publishers, and not taken seriously because this figure has been set in stone across the centuries.
Even the Society of Authors doesn't suggest drastic changes in the present royalty system. The changes they want can be summarised in the CREATOR contract, and many of its provisions are already in force in European countries. They demand clarity - contracts should be easy to understand; fair remuneration; exploitation, also known as the use-it-or-lose-it clause, which suggests that rights not exploited by the publisher should automatically revert to the author; clear accounting; reasonable, renewable terms; full ownership over their work for authors, illustrators and translators; and that all contracts should be subjected to a test of reasonableness.
Funke's demand for creative control and Pullman's insistence on the radical notion of paying authors a fair wage come from the same place: a belief that writers, as creators, are indispensable to the publishing industry, and that they should be treated with the respect due to creators. Both writers have pointed out that some publishers and editors do exceptional work; their quarrel is with inequitable industry norms.
But part of the problem is that while writers and creators are indispensable, they are ubiquitous. The only downside to living in the first century of truly democratic authorship - where anyone can aspire to writing a book - is that there is no shortage of creators. This is not a bad thing, except that when writers, even bestselling ones, are easily replaceable by other "brands", it becomes that much harder for authors as a community to fight for their collective rights.
The real battle, and this will play out over the next decade, is for authors to be seen as creators, with the dignity that implies, and not as content providers. A creator has rights and is respected; a content provider is dangerously disposable.
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