Thank you.
My name is Doreen Pendgracs. I'm from Manitoba, and I am the national vice-president of PWAC. We really appreciate the opportunity to participate in the discussion.
I sat in on the hour that preceded us and was happy to see The Writers' Union of Canada participating, because I am also a member of that organization, as I am a hybrid author. I write books and I've been traditionally published and have self-published as well, and I do freelance writing and a number of other things.
The point that I'd really like to make is that most writers nowadays have to do a number of other things to create a significant income on which to live because, as you heard in the last hour's testimony, the average annual income of a freelance author is $9,400, and I'm sure that's below the poverty level by a considerable amount. This means most writers do have other jobs that they take on to be able to exist and pay their bills.
For me, I earn more money from speaking about the kind of writing that I do than from the actual writing, and that includes sales of books, writing freelance articles and doing other kinds of writing.
Writing has eroded very much since digitization became common. I started freelancing in 1993, and in the 1990s and even into the early 2000s, I could make a very comfortable income from my writing, but when the digital world opened up, it took the rates way down. Now we have a very large segment of the writing community who will write for free, just to get their names out there, because they're told that will give them the exposure they need in order to get published in a more fair-paying market, but that's not true, because once you get yourself in the ghetto of writing for publications and markets that pay very poorly, it's very difficult to make your way up.
As a result, most of us have had to find other ways to create incomes, because we are being driven out. The writers who were making good money and writing for a dollar a word or two dollars a word are now having to settle for 50 cents a word in many cases, because many publications have lowered their rates. Some are paying nothing at all for content and just saying that it's good exposure.
I'm a travel writer, so I enjoy the opportunity to take trips in accordance with a lot of the writing that I do, but there's a big bubble in the population—new retirees—who are doing that kind of writing for free, because they don't care if they get paid. They just want to take a trip.
As professional writers, we're finding we're combatting so many different groups that don't care if they get paid. The biggest ones, I guess, are the content mills that come out of India and Pakistan. Those people will write for nothing or for five dollars for an entire article, because that's what their markets pay.
I was very encouraged by the commentary in the last hour about the fact that some of the members of the committee here understand the importance of Access Copyright and what it has tried to do to protect the rights of writers. I sat on the Access Copyright board for six years as a member of the creative community, and I really valued what we were doing.
Now, unfortunately, Access Copyright is a mere shadow of what it used to be. The incomes have dropped so much there that they've had to get smaller offices and reduce their staff, and they're not able to provide the same kind of service to their members. Plus, as you heard in the commentary earlier, they now have three times as many members as they did before, so people are gravitating there thinking it's going to help them, but in the end, it's really not.
There are so many things that are preventing writers from making a fair living. Somebody said something in the previous hour that I wanted to rebut: the idea that the Canadian Council for the Arts has a public lending rights program that helps authors get income. Those programs do not pay royalties for non-fiction books, such as travel guides or self-help books, and unfortunately for me, my books have never qualified under those programs because they are mostly travel guides. I wrote a book on volunteerism, and they said it was a self-help book and disqualified it.
Those programs do exist, but they mainly help literary writers, and it's the same with the Canada Council grants. As a result, there is a group of us writers out there who are trying to make a living, but it's getting harder and harder.