Basically, it is no coincidence that the expression “book chain” is so widespread: those who participate in it live like chained people. Also these galley slaves of the literary life largely deserve that their statute be revised in the light of the current debates on the arduousness with work.
The publishers? They always complained. Since always, not an interview in which they do not deplore their difficulties. Right now, the rising cost of paper. Recurringly, the decline in the sale of books. From time to time, poor practices by authors, translators, agents etc. In short, even when things are going well, things are not going so well. What makes their life difficult.
The literary director? He has to put up with the reception of increasingly badly written manuscripts, the pride of writers who turn jaundiced when a comma is taken out of them, etc. Painful too, right?
The commercial director of the publishing house? Every day, he has to greet with a smile the indignant phone calls from authors who do not understand that their new book is not piled up in the bookstore in the Berry village where their mother-in-law nevertheless lives, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of points of sale throughout France. And when he thinks he has convinced him of the technical impossibility of his request, the sales manager must once again explain to him that it is useless to ask every day for the sales figures for his book because these are releases in awaiting the balance sheet when the booksellers’ returns will be deducted. Really painful, isn’t it?
And the press officer? He must constantly endure a lawsuit for lack of jurisdiction for not having succeeded in having the author invited to The Great Bookstore nor got a great interview about his work in the next Telerama. More than painful.
And the independent bookseller then? Apart from the fact that his growing activity as a handler is breaking his back, that the online sales sites are prejudicial to him, that there are always readers who are looking for a book seen on television but whose title, subject and name of the author, the increase in commercial leases is the final blow to the profession.
And the members of the juries? They have to take the trouble to read an incalculable number of novels that their authors have not always taken the trouble to write.
On the arduous work of a writer
It will be said that all this is questionable in view of the arduous work of boilermakers, tunnel boring machines and deep-sea scuba divers. But the writer himself, have they ever thought about it at the Ministry of Hardship? He is also prone to accidents at work. The anguish of the blank page can make him transhume from neurosis to psychosis. Each time he is summoned to pass the yeskende at a book fair and leaving with a suitcase full of manuscripts “just to get your opinion”, when he hadn’t asked for anything, he should be able to activate his C2P or professional prevention account in order to obtain compensation . The threshold of tolerance has been crossed in an environment where, in the name of the passion we have for literature, the very notion of overtime is a figment of the imagination. And ditto retirement age.
When they hear about the aggressive physical environment, night work, work rhythms or noise, a smile appears on their lips. Never forget that before being an intellectually exhausting exercise, writing is a physical activity: sitting all day cross-legged, arms outstretched towards the keyboard, back in compote hesitating between spinal osteoarthritis and discopathy degenerative…
When he investigates before writing, the writer often has to pay for himself over the course of his encounters. Also, it is no exaggeration to say that he shares certain working conditions in hyperbaric conditions: dressing/undressing, repetitive showers, compression/decompression… And then what, who will dare to tell him that he is unaware of suffering at work while Hanif Kureishi, passing through Rome to think about his next novel, had a fall that left him paralyzed; and that Salman Rushdie, stabbed by an Islamist while meeting his readers in New York State, lost 20 kilos, the right eye, part of his lip and the sensitivity of his left hand, the one that wrote! And you still doubt their hardship?