What if you could quit your day job and earn a salary as a novelist? You’d write full time and get paid for it, even before you sold your novel. Does that sound good?
According to this article in The Bookseller, that’s the plan for a new, London-based publishing firm. Headed by Jonathan De Montfort, De Montfort Literature (DML), intends to pay chosen writers a salary of £2,000 per month (about $31K per year) to write novels. The company will also coach these writer/employees.
A hedge fund manager and novelist, De Monfort believes the traditional publishing model is “a mad way to do business.” By contrast, the software industry doesn’t expect its most creative employees to work on their own, unpaid, then submit their work product and receive payment only after acceptance of their product. De Monfort is betting authors will focus better and write more marketable novels if they aren’t stressing about money.
There are a couple of strings attached. First, DML would own the intellectual property and copyright to any novels you produce, and your “ideas,” too. That goes beyond what traditional publishers require. Second, according to the article, if you leave DML, you couldn’t write for another publisher for two years.
The website’s FAQ section says DML allows its writer employees 25 holidays plus bank holidays per year. Presumably, you’d be working the rest of the time, though it’s not clear how the company will monitor that. Chances are they won’t use a time clock like the one in this post’s image.
The company plans to pay salaries to ten writers as a start, and hopes to increase that number to one hundred later. They will choose their writers using a selection process featuring a prediction algorithm akin to the one De Monfort developed for predicting financial and economic events.
Although DML’s is a private venture, there are examples of government financial assistance to writers. The National Endowment for the Arts offers grants to writers, as do several states. Between 1969 and 2010, Ireland allowed its poets to work tax-free.
But DML’s model is different and, as far as I know, both pioneering and unique. This is a private publisher paying its writer employees a monthly salary up-front.
The book publishing industry is already undergoing considerable upheaval, with the explosion of independent publishers and self-publishing. The DML model may represent one more disruption to an already chaotic industry.
We’ll see if their experiment succeeds, both for the company and for its salaried authors. If it does, you can expect more publishers to try that model.
Time to stop blogging; I’ve got to clock in for my workday and earn my salary. My employer isn’t DML, it’s a rather demanding sea-deity. Remember, I’m—
Poseidon’s Scribe
