Writer Karen Jennings has been living in São Paolo for six years. She hasn’t loved it, but she hasn’t been able to return to SA with her Brazilian husband because she just doesn’t have the money.
This suggests that Jennings must be a world away, financially, from such best-selling authors as John Grisham or Wilbur Smith who’ve made millions. And yet, Jennings was one of two South Africans, with Damon Galgut, who made the longlist for the coveted Booker Prize in July with her novel An Island.
As tends to happen with this life-changing accolade, interest sparked, additional copies have been printed and it is being translated into other languages. But the fanfare has yet to manifest into rands in her bank account. As is the case for many writers and artists.
Jennings, born in Cape Town, tells the FM that it’s been a tough journey. She wrote the novel — about a lighthouse keeper’s encounter with a refugee who washes up on the shores of his island — in 2017 but couldn’t find a publisher, let alone people to review it, until last year. In the end, she settled for a first print run of just 500 copies.
This wasn’t her first book either. Her first novel, Finding Soutbek, published in 2012, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature. Over the years, she’s made a marginal amount in royalties, but not enough to live on.
Jennings says she gave herself until the age of 40 to become a published author (she turned 39 this month). If she didn’t achieve that, she’d find "a real job — whatever that might be".
Many aspiring authors, particularly in SA, will identify with her struggle. Jennings says there were times in SA when, without two cents to rub together, she’d go to her sister’s house to get food. "Money isn’t the be-all and end-all, but it is about the freedom," she says.
The Booker boost might not fix that, but it might alter the trajectory.
"Things have improved, but not to the extent that I’m stable," she says. "I haven’t actually received any money yet, but the book has been selling so I will get decent royalties and I’ve sold translation rights all around the world."
Even then, most writers typically don’t end up earning more than 15% of the price of a book. The rest is divided up among the agents and publishers.
Not that money was ever Jennings’s motivation. "I write because it’s in my blood, it’s what I need to be doing. I’ve never written for money or aims of winning prizes. It has been at great personal loss," she says.
It means she doesn’t have what many of her peers have — the house, the car, the beach holiday.
But, she says, "it’s what I chose for myself".
Thankfully, being propelled into the limelight means she now has the cash to book a flight back to SA. "I’ve been very unhappy here in Brazil and I’ve been struggling … but now we can afford to move back home. That is the best part," she says.
The art of the side hustle
For Jennings, like many authors, writing was a side hustle. But being in a Portuguese-speaking country limited her options. Nonetheless, she was able to rustle up some work, editing for SA publishers, writing academic articles for a friend in Denmark and proofreading academic work in Brazil to check the English. But, she says, it was "nothing very big or lucrative".
Her husband, Juliano Paccez, is a microbiologist with a particular interest in cancer and was a professor at a university in São Paulo. But the Brazilian government slashed university funding, and his contract ended. "When we return to SA, he will be working with cancer again," Jennings says.
Aspiring writers will be pleased to learn that Jennings will lecture in creative writing at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) summer school in January.
She’s comfortable in that world: she taught history for several months and lectured at UCT. And she has a string of degrees — including an honours in the classics, a master’s in creative writing and a PhD in English literature.
"For me it’s never going to be about being wealthy," she says. "I think it would be good to be comfortable enough so my mother doesn’t have to worry about me, or it takes some of the strain off my husband. While he’s been very supportive and allowed me to pursue this dream of mine, I don’t think it’s very fair he should bear the financial burden."
Jennings has two publishers — Holland House Books in the UK and Karavan Press, a small independent SA publisher. She says she only went to a UK publisher because for years she couldn’t find a local firm willing to take her on.
"I’m South African. My books really are about SA and this book [An Island] is more about Africa in general," she says.
In hindsight, it seems ludicrous that Jennings faced so much rejection. In an interview with The Guardian, she said she had been told her work was too short, too experimental, too African, not African enough.
Ultimately, though, it probably had more to do with economics. "The only real response that I have been able to pin down was that it would not make any money," she says. "Because I’m a literary writer, because I’m not famous, it’s too risky. Because no-one buys or reads literary fiction. Also, I don’t write uplifting stories. And so it’s not the kind of thing that people want to take on holiday with them."
Galgut’s stroke of luck
With his novel The Promise, Galgut — one of SA’s most respected and awarded authors — has, remarkably, made it onto the Booker shortlist this year for the third time.
It was his first Booker Prize shortlisting — for The Good Doctor in 2003 — that changed the game for him financially, allowing him to write full-time.
"It helps to have a stroke of luck that brings you to some sort of prominence," he tells the FM. "You just sell more copies and earn more, but you can’t count on that as something inevitable."
Galgut says very few writers are able to survive on writing. Most of the authors he knows have a day job — "and that includes really brilliant writers".
The bulk of his literary income stems from overseas book sales, and it helps that dollars go much further when they’re converted to rands. "So I’m in a lucky position, but it certainly wasn’t always the case and it may not always be the case in the future," he says.
It’s a precarious way to make ends meet, he admits.
Of course, there are authors who have done extremely well.
"But they tend to be people who write a particular kind of book and build up enough of a following to make themselves comfortable. The problem is younger people — students and so on — often fixate on those figures and aspire to that without knowing how unlikely it is."
Would-be writers, he says, need to come to terms with the fact that they’re choosing a craft with sketchy economic prospects, and they need to be creative about finding other ways to generate cash.
Galgut, headboy of Pretoria Boys’ High in 1981, distinguished himself early on — he was only 17 when his first novel, A Sinless Season, was published in 1982.
Early day jobs to keep the wolf from the door included teaching drama at UCT, working in an antiques shop, waitering for a catering company and posing naked for art classes — though he hasn’t done that "for quite a while".
Luck is something Galgut often mentions when discussing literary success. "Most people are not lucky and I spent a lot of time not being lucky," he says. "It was no clever project on my part."
If you don’t have a name, "you’re probably talking about at best a print run of 3,000 to 4,000 — and in SA, that’s considered a book that does really well".
If the author gets 15% of the price of a book, that works out to less than R50 per book; so if every book in a print run of 3,000 is sold, which is an optimistic scenario, the author will make less than R150,000 pre-tax. Which hardly seems just reward for the work that goes into a novel.
But, says Galgut, when a Booker accolade comes along, everything "will immediately go stratospheric". In itself, that’s the difference between a print run of 3,000 and one of 100,000, he says. Few literary prizes, not even the Nobel, have this impact, he says.
Every year 12 or 13 books are chosen for the longlist, and it’s a testament to the depth of literary talent in SA that both Jennings and Galgut made it this year.
"I guess SA’s social and moral questions are a heavy weight for its citizens. But for its writers, in an amoral sense, it does provide rich material, because we have powerful themes, we have powerful subjects and they’re real," says Galgut.
"This is not science fiction or an imagined universe — it’s where we actually live. I always feel slightly uncomfortable saying that, because you’re always talking about issues and problems that really have a human cost attached to them. But literature happens in a bubble and in a bubble these are very interesting abstractions to debate."
As the Booker Prize committee describes it, The Promise is a "powerful story of a diminished family and a troubled land", detailing how a white family crash and burn.
Like Jennings, Galgut says money was always a secondary concern. "I’m not interested in making a lot of money; I’m interested in having enough to keep going and do what I’m doing. And I’m not clever with money, I don’t know fancy ways of investing it."
Instead, he describes himself as "completely moronic" when it comes to his finances. Which doesn’t help if, like him, you publish books at intervals of several years.
"You have some money in the bank but then you have to stretch that until the next book comes out. There’s an art to it. It’s much easier if you’re a prolific writer and you’re producing something every year, but I’m not that guy. It’s been seven years since I published my last book. Times got quite lean".
Moving back in with mom
The SA Revenue Service (Sars) is "extremely unimaginative" with someone like him, says Galgut. "If you don’t get a monthly salary, maybe they should spread their income over the years it’s taken you to write the book, but instead you land up paying far more tax than seems fair given that it’s only a once-every-five-or-seven-years event."
As a result, Galgut ended up in a financial hole while writing The Promise. A tax bungle saw him having to pay Sars much more than he’d expected — at a time when he’d helped a friend finance a new restaurant.
Galgut ran out of cash but, fortuitously, a US film director bought the rights to an earlier book of his, The Quarry.
It couldn’t have happened at a better time: Galgut had been on the verge of renting out his Cape Town apartment and moving in with his mother in Pretoria. This is something "you only do in your 20s", he says.
And yet, the craft remains as enticing to him as ever. He says there’s a still a mystery attached to the process.
"It is a peculiar way to spend your time, because essentially you’re making up stories. You’re making up things that didn’t happen and then trying to persuade people with the power of your prose that this is real, and that these imaginary people really did feel these things. You get judged as a writer by how persuasively you tell the lies," he says.
Galgut has tried to work in a structured and disciplined way, but it doesn’t fit with his temperament. Instead, he’s all over the place.
"It sometimes takes me hours to work, I run my errands, I do everything to avoid it. I try at some point in the day to settle and then you have to find creative ways to strategise against your own intransigence," he says.
"I think writing is an indulgence for people who have other means of income or who are independently financed. It’s a passion, not a vocation. I’m very aware of how lucky I am."
As are the millions of people who’ve read his books — and the flood of people who’ll now find their way to Jennings’s books.
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