Finkle says Canadian freelance industry just the right size to make agency feasible

Eye Weekly in Toronto has published a longish interview with Derek Finkle about his nascent Canadian Writers Group agency. He says the current system of compensating writers, which is paying them as they were paid 15 or more years ago doesn't make sense and that, while writing is "a valuable skill, a special skill", writers are often too timid to bring up issues of underpayment because they don't want to ruin the relationship with the editor.

Psychologically it's a lot different when you have an agency doing that on your behalf and the terms are a lot different when that agency is representing a massive chunk of the talent pool in this country.

"This idea, this agency I've dreamed up, this is something that would never work in New York or in the United States, where the industry is so massive. You could never absorb the talent pool to achieve the kind of negotiating position that you need. Here, the industry is just the right size, the talent pool is just the right size, and it's a much more feasible concept here.

The current system, he told writer Kate Carraway, discourages talented and experienced freelancers and they turn to teaching or book-writing or alternative career choices when they can't afford to freelance anymore.

"It affects the whole industry, because they're constantly reliant upon the next round of talent being turned out by Ryerson or some other school where hopefuls eternally reside. The quality totally suffers. We don't have a system that could ever create a Seymour Hersh type of character. It's not that publications here can't afford it, they choose not to afford it. When they say they don't have the money, that doesn't literally mean they don't have the money. Another way to put it is, 'We don't have it in the budget.' When they're saying it's not in the budget, what they're saying is, 'We've chosen not to spend the money on writers.'

"What happens every year is you have an editor going to a publisher, saying 'We need to make the editorial budget bigger' and this is in a meeting in which they've already discovered that they have to jack up the printing budget and the distribution budget … and they get to the editorial budget and everybody is just burned out at that point. And someone says, meekly, 'I think we need to revise the editorial budget' and there's five seconds of silence and they end the meeting. And that's what happens."

[Thanks to David Hayes at the TFEW list for tipping us to this.]

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