What is the cost of change?

Whether mobilising for change in legislation or behaviour, it is pretty clear that in today’s society money is oxygen. Companies can’t make changes unless they can justify them to shareholders and the bottom line. Politicians rely on support from stakeholders with agendas, and they won’t even talk about interventions that sound too expensive because of how it can be represented to voters as ‘spending’ taxpayer money. And we the public? The best way to make corporations change is to vote with our feet, if we don’t buy it they can’t peddle it, right?

Money controls nearly every choice we make, and by controlling where the money is going, it is possible to control choices, change behaviour. The people who have it can make decisions and influence others - the people who don’t, can’t. Time is money, money is power, follow the money - it makes the world go round. 

And this is what the recent campaign led by the campaign group Fossil Free Books (FFB) was attempting to exploit when it ‘urged the eleven literary festivals sponsored by Baillie Gifford to pressure the asset manager to divest from fossil fuels’. FFB is a collective made up of workers in the book industry, and they correctly identified themselves as significant contributors to the festivals’ existence. They wanted to use that influence to create change, asking Baillie Gifford to alter its business practices, cut off the organisations feeding fossil fuels, and later, those implicated in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

FFB identified the sponsor as having ‘nearly £10 billion invested in companies with direct or indirect links to Israel's defence, tech and cybersecurity industries’, companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia and Meta. As a result, despite numerous comment pieces explaining the potential harm it could do to the already brutally underfunded arts industry, a number of festivals severed their connection with the investment company. Ultimately the company themselves made the decision to end all sponsorship to literary festivals.

The arts are worse off and the flow of money going to corporate entities remains the same. Why didn’t it work? Partially it was because the people with money in this case are not the firm per se, but the investors they work for, and as Baillie Gifford argued that, ‘our clients set the parameters and determine what to exclude or divest’, meaning diversification is not entirely within their control.

Mostly, however, it was because the situation was back-to-front. Rather than coming from the source of the money, the festivals were being asked to send pressure upstream. Instead of forcing Baillie Gifford to change their investment choices, the campaign forced the organisers of literary festivals to choose whether to stand by their spiritual sponsors - their authors, speakers and supporters - or by the financial sponsors who enable their work to take place at all. Taking the money was characterised as an endorsement of every organisation that the firm invested in. As is so often the case, the choice was between capitulation and extinction. All or nothing, and compromise is hypocrisy.

Nearly every iteration of the debate as it has been reported raised the question of whether or not any of the now 800 signatories to FFB’s campaign will be pulling their work from Amazon because of these same ‘direct and indirect links’. Other articles emphasise how FFB demands distance from Meta while asking us to follow them on Instagram, or that much of their organising happens on an Alphabet-owned Gmail account.

A spokesperson for the collective responded to these insinuations of their own hypocrisy by identifying their campaign as ‘strategic’ rather than about ‘moral purity’. And just because a solution isn’t complete doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value, or that it shouldn’t be attempted. Sometimes you fight the battle you stand a chance of winning - and if they don’t try to fight then they are accused of not being fully committed to the cause. Nonetheless, when so many festivals that work hard to promote literature and discussion are left without a major sponsor, it is very hard to see this as a win.

A bit of reading reveals the origin of FFB was as a response to another suggestion of hypocrisy, not aimed at the book industry, but at environmentalist Greta Thunberg, who had been slated to address the Edinburgh book festival in 2023. In July that year, journalism platform The Ferret published an article pointing out that the ‘lead sponsor’ of the festival was the investment firm Baillie Gifford, who ‘has billions invested in firms that profit from fossil fuels’. This apparent ‘gotcha’ was picked up by some in the industry who found the connection problematic, and FFB was formed. 

Thunberg is often subject to this type of whataboutism that pitches her message of environmental responsibility against the realities of existing in the world and then calls an end to the argument. And it is easy enough to avoid the accusation of hypocrisy when people expect you to be grasping and profit-driven in the first place. In the past few weeks Baillie Gifford has largely been characterised as one of the good guys. Categorising their investments in fossil fuel industries as ‘up to £5bn’ is not inaccurate, but that represents 2% of their portfolio, well below the sector average of 11%. Their website describes an approach that believes that ‘companies that act sustainably and treat society fairly have better growth prospects’. Even the Ferret article itself pointed out the company’s own climate report promises that ‘by 2025, all Baillie Gifford clients will have the option to invest in a portfolio which is aligned with the world reaching net zero climate emissions by 2050’, albeit emphasising that in December 2022 only 20% of their assets were managed this way.

No one writing about this has seemed shocked to learn that Baillie Gifford invests in the fossil fuel industry, and much of the coverage of the conversation has in fact focussed on the fact that it is only 2% - 1% if you ignore investment in supermarkets that sell fuel. Greta Thunberg, however, cancelled her attendance at the festival in Edinburgh.

We all live inextricably entangled and often reluctantly engaged with the distasteful facts of the world we inhabit. We have all had to decide where our moral line lies based on the necessities of living in a capitalist society. We’re deep in a cost of living crisis that restricts our moral choices based on what we can afford, deciding the importance of a cause against the need to pay the bills this month. If I were being really cynical I might point out that making sure the poor stay poor is another way that people who control money are able to keep hold of the power it provides.

The problem of morality seems to be forced upon artistic industries much more strictly than other industries - with the exception perhaps of the charity sector - because the assumption seems to be that the work done there should be its own reward, or that creativity shouldn’t have its purity violated by the consideration of financial rewards. But like any other industry, the production of art requires financing, in particular if that art is to be made accessible in the true meaning of the word.

There’s a big machine that makes the books we buy well-paced, easy to read, evenly spaced, and correctly spelled. That machine makes sure the books you want to read call to you from the shelves with professionally designed covers, they are recommended to you by publications you trust, grouped with other books you enjoyed by list-makers and trend-setters, when and if they have been properly distributed by the machine. And the machine, like everything else, eats money.

It is naive to imagine that art can exist somehow outside the system of the world, that something that represents and reflects society, is a direct product of the people and experience of a society, can somehow exist (and thrive) without engaging the foundation stone of that society. Compromise is inevitable if we want art and artists to continue to exist. Asking for moral purity before allowing anyone to acknowledge the problems we know the world is facing is absurd. If you can’t be entirely good, don’t try to be even a little bit good. 

One of the accusations is that Baillie Gifford has used literary festivals as ‘artwashing’ or ‘greenwashing’ - morally laundering their money through good causes. This is not unusual, the tax breaks and improved optics that charitable giving and sponsorship provides large corporations of all types is without doubt the main (being cynical, the only) reason that they give any money to ‘good causes’. It doesn’t wash them clean, and it is important not to stop asking for improvement, but it is also the only way to get any amount of that money redirected towards a less complicated good.

We can all recognise that there is a scale of morality in the real world, and that just as artists cannot live outside the system, businesses like Baillie Gifford are even more enmeshed. Not acknowledging there can be a granulation beyond black and white leaves corporations free to be as evil as they want. Because if we don't acknowledge the little, if we insist on all or nothing, then we get nothing. And we can’t complain when they stop trying, because there is no way to win this game. As the late, great conservationist Steve Irwin once said ‘I wanna save the world…I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate’.

Baillie Gifford’s website describes their decision to support literary festivals as coming from a hope ‘to expand your horizons, ignite your imagination and excite you about what’s possible’ because ‘exceptional books broaden your mind’. This last claim could be copied directly from our own mission statement. Because there is another way to change behaviours and ultimately shift the movement of money itself.

Literature can have an incredible impact on the way we see the world. The written word is one of the only forms of art that performs itself in your own mind, using your own voice. It promotes imagination and empathy in a way that is only just beginning to be understood scientifically. If you doubt its power, consider the impact of misinformation on today’s political landscape - what are these if not examples of how fiction can engage the imagination and inspire people to change the world around them?

The current shape of publishing means that money is still influencing what we read. The need to feed the machine of literary production and dissemination results in decisions being made based on what will sell. The content of the books available to us is being chosen by organisations that are sufficiently profitable. Publishers must consider the need to cover overheads and justify spending what is needed to get the work into the hands and minds of the people around the world. The science of money creeps in as they attempt to predict the profitability of a book’s appeal: they look at what has sold well in the past, what other publishers are doing, and what demographic spends the most money on books. These in turn are shaped by disposable income, traditional education backgrounds, popular opinions and daily trends and fashions.

And money is represented in many forms. The people able to make it in the industry rely heavily on having the time to write, to study, to self promote. And as we know - time is money. Success relies on connections and moving in the right circles. It is affected by how much education you were able to afford, how many unpaid internships were available to you, whether you had to pay rent or stay at home while you did them - whether you even consider the publishing industry as one open to you.

Even beyond the bigger players, smaller publishers and solo authors must find the resources to promote their work - made harder still when they haven’t had the editorial support required to make it look and read as well as it might. There is a reason that ‘self-published’ is so often referred to in dismissive and pejorative terms - it’s synonymous with amateurish, sloppy prose, weird covers and bad formatting. This reputation is a direct result of the practical realities of book production and their financial constraints.

The costs involved in getting books into the market are even more daunting without the benefit of a household name to boost interest. Marketing might be a dirty word to many but it, and its step-sister PR, are crucial to getting your words read. Even the arguably more concrete and practical realms of printing and distribution are still locked into a monopoly, increasingly prohibitive thanks to the climbing cost of materials. And if you want to bypass that? Welcome to the warm embrace of Amazon’s self publishing platform, KDP, and all the compromise that entails.

This isn’t a critique of the large publishing houses that are trying to run a business, so much as frustration at expecting the industry to be a slave to two masters - asking them to be morally responsible in a way that few other businesses are required to do, within a system that only rewards financially viable products. Understanding that this is the case also means accepting that in order to keep art relevant and accessible, there must be compromises; literary festivals aren’t free from it, and neither are we.

This is one of the reasons why Ensemble Publishing is a not-for-profit organisation. By removing the requirement of commercial viability, the concern for profits and loss and ‘what will sell’ from decision-making, we are better-placed to welcome any and every writer, supporting them to produce something readable and accessible. This way there can be more representation and diversity in which stories are told, and how many people those stories can influence.

The only way we can do that is to make sure that everyone in the process is treated fairly, and that means that at no point do we ask our creatives or our suppliers to compromise their wealth or wellbeing for the sake of the art. We need to accept that the writers (and editors, designers and illustrators) are not villains for asking that they can support themselves. 

No one is asked to work for less than their worth, no one is paid less than what is fair, no one is taken advantage of for not knowing how the industry works. There is no imperative to sell a certain number of copies, there is no contractual obligation to sign over copyrights or to pay the publisher anything for the privilege. Book sales reimburse the costs of publication both for the writer and publisher, and then if a profit is made, Ensemble takes a small commission to put back into the work we do. 

We don’t yet have the reserves to help writers who have no budget of their own. Therefore our current model still requires a level of financial input from the writer, which means there is still a financial requirement dictating who can make full use of our services. As we confront this uncomfortable compromise, we try to combat its impact by growing a team of experts with a broad range of experience so that we can be accessible to as many writers as possible while we build the proof-of-concept: that you don’t need to make artistic and literary decisions based on money, even if everything else you do is. One of the ways to do that is to produce and promote work that is engaging to a wide audience - another is to ask for funding from individuals and even corporations. Maybe we’ll ask Baillie Gifford.