Debate Transcript (on the proposition, Everyone Should Write a Book, for the Negative). Salon Time Change (one hour Later)

Hallo, a few of you lovely Patreonites asked for the transcript of the other night’s debate (given that it wasn’t recorded. I have stuck it below, in all its stream-of-consciousness-airport-disaster-glory)

Also, salon tomorrow is moved to an hour later! Which makes it 7am Wednesday for US East Coast types, 9pm Wednesday for me, and midday Wednesday U.K. time. The same link will work. I’ll send through the reminder and passcode to relevant levels tomorrow. Sorry for the shift!

Debate

Hallo, I’m Alice Fraser and I don’t care what you people think of me.

That said, I love my dad and I’ve spent a lot of time explaining to him why I haven’t written a book which means I’m so ready for this debate, you wouldn’t believe.

Firstly, I like being paid for the work I do, second I don’t have a big enough social media following to be interesting to publishers, thirdly I was once approached to write a book based on my show Savage, which deals with the death of my mother and the publisher said yeah, there’s a huge market for Grief Memoir and I decided there wasn’t enough money in the world to make me try to write something for the booming grief memoir market.

Which is handy because they weren’t offering me money.

Finally, the search for prestige is a bottomless pit and I’m your daughter, you have to love me whether I write a book or not. The last bit may not be generally applicable.

I understand that in debating, the first speaker is there to be the officious functionary and do the logistical stuff, so I’ll get that out of the way first.

Friends, enemies, neutral parties who will store our more dubious treasures without asking for provenance. Welcome to the negative.

I acknowledge that not caring what the audience thinks of me isn’t the best position to be in when beginning a debate that has an audience vote, but I have a six month old baby and am due to start leaking milk in 5 to 7 minutes, so you’re not my priority.

But milk or no milk, we as a team will prove to you not only that everyone should NOT write a book, but that most people shouldn’t write books, most books shouldn’t have been written, and in fact that the invention first of writing and then the printing press followed by everything up to and including this event was probably a massive mistake.

We would also like to note for the publishers in the audience that nothing we say during the course of this debate should be deemed as an adverse inclination to prejudice our chances as individuals of getting a book deal.

Also I’m given to understand that as this is a comedy debate, there will be a certain amount of sledging. I would like to alert everyone that I will not take this in good part, I’m very emotionally fragile following the birth of my first child and if you’re mean, I will cry. Yea will cry aggressively and upload it to tik tok and you will be cancelled. Fair warning.

Now, to the meat of the matter.

Writing books is a thankless underpaid undervalued task that is nonetheless put on a weird respectability pedestal in order to justify our failure as a society to attribute proper value to the work. Much like parenting in a number of ways but your book isn’t going to look after you on your deathbed. Also like parenting, nobody should do it unless they really want to and think they can do a decent job of it.

According to an article published in 2019 in the conversation, aka the most reliably self indulgent wank media outlet for academics who want to bemoan the reading age of the Sydney morning herald (but probably fairly accurate as far as australian publications go), Australian authors earn on average $12,900 a year from writing work, and that’s the mean. The median is a deeply depressing $2,800. That’s more than I’m being paid for this gig but that’s because I’m not being paid for this gig.

“Wah wah”, you say, “poor authors, they’re getting paid in other stuff like divine inspiration and the respect of their peers and Twitter followers and the satisfaction of the creative process and the joy of seeing their book on a shelf in an airport bookshop if they’ve really made it”

But it’s not just the authors, who we can all agree are the least important part of the publishing process, (and the sooner we can replace them with more sensible less neurotic AI content generating wordsmith robots the better, am I right). It’s not just the authors! Almost else in the process is also desperately underpaid.

In independent publishing, 10% of the book sale goes to the author, perhaps another 10% to the printer, and up to 70% for distribution. What’s left has to pay the publisher, editor, marketers, admin staff, book cover artists and paper sommeliers.

And all of this passion and anguish and effort in the name of the customer, the client, the consumer.

And are they happy? Are they fuck.

The book buying process seems to have been amazonned into algorithmic precision to the point where nobody’s reading books anymore, they’re just accepting the genre appropriate to their demographic

[Being recommended things to like based on things you already like section from

CHRONOS. Joke about Olives redacted as a spoiler for those yet to see CHRONOS]

Don’t get me wrong, we here on the negative team are all fans of books and not just fans of using books as fans, though in a pinch if you’re very hot a floppy paperback is your best friend. We love books, we just want better for books than to have them written by any old wanker with time to burn and a need for self aggrandising self expression that 24 hour access to constant microblogging on social media sites just won’t sate.

There are books making it all the way to publication now that would be better off as PowerPoint presentations, or pamphlets, or just a set of bullet points in the back of an iphone notes app that never see the light of day.

Bring back some sort of thunderdome style selection process, a quest where you have to prove your heart is pure or at the very least vaguely interesting before you’re allowed near writing a book.

Online influencers are writing books now, if by writing you mean having their names on the covers of books, Jake and Logan Paul, YouTubers and brothers whose entire lives revolve around being the worst person you could possibly imagine both have books, and anything they’ve ever done, I can’t recommend to anyone. They’re like Jackass without the compassion or acting skills. But because the book industry is under such stress now, anyone with enough followers is a marketable quantity and who cares if they’re completely incoherent self indulgent emotionally inverted degenerates with a million strong following for their misogyny and pimple popping YouTube channel, they’re what this industry needs!

Even God, who we can all agree was the original influencer wrote an extremely popular book and like fifty shades of grey, opened a Pandora’s box of unforeseen consequences that he probably regretted, it caused a lot of trouble and I think he’d agree with me overall it was probably a mistake. Who do you think you are? You think you’re better than god? You think you’re more creative than the author who created krill?

Our opposition will have to prove, in proving the proposition that everyone should write a book, that that YOU should write a book, which if you’re honest with yourself you’ll admit is at best a flattering lie and at worst one of those mean sarcastic insults that you always realise too late is just there to make you humiliate yourself.

In order to succeed tonight you would have to all leave your tables tonight fired with the immediate desire to publish your masterwork within the year. Bear that in mind, as you cast your votes tonight. Do you want to write a book?

They will fail. You don’t want to write a book. Even if you think you want to write a book you don’t want to write a book. You just want to have written a book.

Producing a book doesn’t make you a worthwhile person, the idea that your value is tied to your productivity is a pernicious lie told to us by capitalism. Writing a book doesn’t make you a better person, a better partner, a better friend, a better parent. In fact, the process of writing a book is likely to make you worse at all those things.

Live the life you have people! The pursuit of personal glory at the cost of our commitments to one another as humans is the reason I’m not at home with my beautiful baby, and am instead standing in front of you people literally leaking milk right now.