Writefully yours

Like restaurant waiters who get tips, pen-pushers should get baksheesh from readers

Somerset Maugham floated the idea that, just as servers in restaurants are traditionally given as a token of appreciation of an enjoyable repast a gratuity called a tip – which according to urban lore is an acronym for

‘To insure privilege’ – above and beyond the bill presented by the establishment, authors ought to receive a bonus from readers who have found the writer’s literary food for thought agreeable and to their satisfaction.

Maugham, whose prolific output had gained him critical acclaim as well as a more than comfortable source of income, lamented that authors, while hoping for the moon, had to make do with sixpence, to paraphrase a title of one of the famed novelist’s works, by way of sales-based royalties received.

Maugham reasoned that with the spread of lending libraries in Britain, a single sold copy of a book might well be read and appreciated by dozens of readers but would fetch the writer a fraction of royalties that would have accrued with wider sales, if each of the readers had bought a copy for themselves.

To pinch two more of Maugham’s book titles, life was not all cakes and ale for several famous writers, including Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville, who faced the razor’s edge of penury in their declining years.

Owing to a loophole in copyright laws at the time, British author Jerome K Jerome’s immortal comedic classic, Three Men in a Boat, Not to Mention the Dog, by most accounts one of the funniest books ever written in the English language, didn’t earn him a single penny though its sales in US were over a million copies, bought by readers who displayed a voracious appetite for it, causing the publisher to comment that “I often think the public must eat them.”

Today, with AI threatening to hijack the job of writers and put them out to pasture in human bondage, to use another Maughamism, perhaps like World Wildlife Fund, another WWF, the World Writers Fund, should be established to protect this endangered species.

Who’d fund such a fund? Readers, of course, who for the benefit of their favourite pen-pushers would do the write thing by them.

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