Thread by @David_Mac13

🚨🚨THE BIG HELPFUL UK #SCREENWRITING THREAD Vol.4🚨🚨

And this time it really is big, because this thread is about one of the most important & least talked about parts of being a TV writer in the UK: Money 💵💰💵

Specifically, I'm going to look at three questions:

How do you get paid?
How *much* do you get paid?
And - equally important - how much do you have to *spend* in order to get paid? (Yup, that's right, we're gonna be talking barriers to entry)

Pretty nervous about this one tbh. In my experience, even among those working in the industry, money remains the great unspoken. It’s not even a question I see asked at Q&As much. But it is the thing I worried most about when I was starting out.

And with these threads, my aim is always to try to demystify a very mysterious industry.

Because uncertainty & a lack of transparency can not only put people off; it also, whether consciously or not, creates the conditions for exploitation to thrive. Particularly in this case.

For example last year, #PublishingPaidMe exposed huge inequalities in renumeration in the book world. Given the similar structures and cross over between the two industries, I’d be very surprised if there weren’t similar hidden disparities in TV land.

To avoid being exploited you’ve got to know your worth. But because money is so infrequently discussed, how can a new writer know what their work is worth?

And how can they know if *what it is worth* will be enough to sustain them?

(Because people gotta eat - starving artists ain’t a model we want)

Now I can’t tell you what your work is worth or if it will be enough or if anyone will in fact buy it.

But I can tell you what *my* work *was* worth, and how I managed to keep going.

And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to lay out my income & expenses over my first full year as a pro-TV writer (with figures & even a graph!).

I’m calling signing with my agent & getting my first option deal ‘going pro’ so that means starting in Sept 2018.

But before we jump in to Scrooge McDuck’s money pit (ahahahaha - I wish), context is key, especially when talking inequalities & barriers to entry, so let's put me in it:

In Sept 2018 I am a 31y/o straight white Scottish guy living in Edinburgh. I have a mortgage on a flat which I share (& which is way less than Edinburgh rent). I have no children or dependants or caring responsibilities. I live pretty cheaply.

(I would call myself a major tight-arse. Others might be kinder.)

In April 2018, after working on my writing for a long time and saving some money over a period of years, I left my office job to try and take my writing pro.

Now the observant will see, right away that’s a gap. April-Sept: No income.

I picked up a few small jobs and I had a self-published book which sold okay but between those two points I’d say I made max £1000. And I still had all my normal living expenses. So by Sept the savings were getting pretty low.

This is the point in the story where some of you will be (quite understandably) priming this Bart Simpson meme and waiting for me to say my parents gave me money to bridge the gap...

Sadly (because I love Simpsons memes) that’s not what happened. However… it leads me to a more nuanced point which ultimately has much the same effect.

My parents didn’t give me money…

…butttttt I’m 100% sure if I had asked for some and if I really fucked it and ran out of money completely, they would have been both happy and able to. (Hit the meme if you must - I can take it)

This is particularly worth noting as by the most commonly used measures of social class in TV land, I come from a working class background. Non-selective state school, father in a technical/manual occupation when I was 14.

(Those categories come from the Social Mobility Commission and are the ones use by @BAFTA and others to assess class inequality in the industry:
socialmobilityworks.org/toolkit/measur… These measures are a useful tool but important to recognise there are levels within the levels)

Okay, back to it: That potential for help is important, because it reduced the risk for me.

If I didn’t know I had that safety net, would I have taken the risks I did with (at that stage) no real idea what the renumeration could be? Maybe, maybe not. I honestly don’t know.

Final point of context - one that seems *small* but is actually BIG. I had friends in London who would let me sleep on their sofas.

Why is this BIG? Because the UK TV industry is hugely concentrated in London and London is a very expensive place to visit. So you’ll see below having a sofa to crash on actually makes a massive financial difference.

In fact, with the cost of travel and accommodation factored in the sad and *it-should-not-be-this-way* truth is it is entirely possible that a new writer not living in London could spend more getting their first option or development deal than they end up making on it.

Final, final thing to say before we get to the numbers. According to those I’ve spoken to about this, and compared with my own expectations, I had a good first year. Some would say very good. And I wouldn’t disagree. Certainly far better than I expected.

But that means I’d caution against using these figures as a barometer of what you might earn or what a typical writer earns in their first year (If such a thing as a typical writer exists anymore).

[More coming, don't go away. Twitter says I have to send this lot first]

This is only what one writer - me - earned in particular circumstances in a particular year. And this is only income & expenses directly from writing. And it’s pre-taxes. And national insurance. And student loan payments. But hopefully it is a helpful chip in the dam.

With all the ado complete, here we go:

So this is income and expenses, month by month, in my first year writing TV in the UK as a pro (I took it to Sept-19 as I didn’t want to end it on a doom and gloom £0 cause, you know, hope).

Which makes for totals of:

Income: £31,485
Expenses: -£5,291
Pretax profit: £26,194

And spread out across the year it looks like this (told you there’d be a graph):

1st thing to notice: Big Gaps. I completed my first deal in Sept 18 then didn’t make anything for another 5 months. When you make your first deal - don’t spend it all. It could be all you get for a long time.

2nd thing: These are the dates I actually received the money, not the dates when someone offered to buy the options, scripts etc. The difference between these two dates can be very long. We’re talking 3+ months.

Why that is, is a point of great confusion to me, but that’s another thread. For now, remember, definitely don’t spend the money before you have it.

However, again for full context, what that means is that during some of the later gaps, I knew - barring any great disaster - that there was money coming down the track. Which brought security, albeit the inedible kind.

3rd thing: Those expenses. They basically breakdown into two categories - agent fees (normally between 10-15% & totally worth it) and travel expenses to London. Okay, okay, in May I bought a new chair for my desk, so three categories.

But what is interesting is what is missing from them. This includes: food while in London (I didn’t know at that point I could charge this as an expense); Travel within London, mainly on the Tube (probably about £10 a day); accommodation while in London (see above, sofas).

So the expenses are an underestimate. Buttt because I like to keep records I can tell you over that year I spent 19 nights in London.

And now that I’m a bit more experienced the cheapest habitable hotel I’ve found is around £70per night, so for someone without the benefit of places to stay the cost would have been an extra £1,330. Plus food and TFL travel costs.

And despite me being a Scottish writer, and travelling a very long way each time, at considerable expense, the number of companies who offered to pay travel expenses when coming for meetings was… small. Very small (I did once get train fare to Glasgow tho, so not a total bust).

Now let’s say I was a working parent trying to become a writer, & on every trip I had to pay childcare as well as lose wages/precious A/L from my day-job. Or that I couldn’t afford the £140+ return train tickets. If you're talking barriers to entry those are some quite huge ones

And so... …this is all to say, one good thing to come out of the pandemic is Remote Meetings. I really, really hope we don’t slide back on this.

I can afford the London trips now, but if you really want to find new voices, realise that in person meetings in London are a huge barrier, both in cost & accessibility (there's a whole other thread on accessibility here - lotta lotta stairs in those indie offices...).

Also, if you’ll allow me an aside, having done a lot of these, David’s Rule of First Meetings is:

The more expensive the venue for the meeting, the worse it will go.

If other new writers are anything like me, they already feel like they’re entering a place they don’t belong. Meeting in the exclusive club or the fancy hotel might work for some people but for me it hit that imposter syndrome bell hard & made me extra-nervous.

Thus those meetings were generally disasters.

4th thing: What is that really big number in the middle? Or… what do am I actually getting paid *for*.

So essentially, here in the UK as far as I have discovered the new writer has 3 ways to make money. These are:
Option Deals💵
Development💵
Script Commissions💰💰💰

Options are when a production company buys the right to pitch your script/idea for a limited time (normally between 1-2 years).

Development is a nebulous thing which can mean anything from tweaking an existing script to writing treatments or pitch documents to a whole host of other weird stuff that isn’t writing scripts.

Neither pays particularly well, certainly not enough to live on for any length of time. And crucially - unlike script fees for which the @TheWritersGuild has publicised, agreed minimums - there is very little transparency on how much you should get or what exactly it covers.

Options at least seem to have a reasonable consistency and scale. As for ‘development’ the payments there often seem as nebulous as the term itself.

[More, more coming...]

However, it's worth noting that for many (and perhaps most) new TV writers, the land of Options and Development is where you could be living for some time. Perhaps a few years. Perhaps even more.

This is also where having a good agent comes in, and unfortunately, where even if you do have a good one, exploitation can creep in.

Because there is at least one *small* figure in the graph above which turned into a *big* demand on time. Like years. All in the name of nebulous ‘Development’.

This trend of paying script writers to write things that aren’t scripts is, to my mind, not good. Outlines, treatments, bibles, whatever you call them, are fine as tools to help someone write a show. But they aren’t products themselves and shouldn’t be treated that way.

It’s one of the reasons I was really pleased to see Bisha K Ali’s recent @skytv / @NetflixUK screenwriting fellowship promising to pay the successful writers a proper script fee.

It’s closed for applicants now but more of this please! Cause writers can’t live on treatments alone. (netflixscreenwriters.co.uk)

So that leaves Script Commissions. The exact figures per writer are closely guarded secrets but as said above there are minimums agreed by the @TheWritersGuild , and they are generally good money. Sometimes very good.

Butttt you don’t get it all at once. Generally, you get some of the money on signing the deal, some more when you turn in the first draft, and then some more when the script is complete/ready to send out to broadcasters/be shot.

(So that big number in the graph is not a full script fee. It’s a combination of different things, including part of a script fee.)

Or that’s how it’s meant to work. But because of the frequent delay in paperwork (see above) you may actually have finished several of these steps before you get paid anything at all. Which is not ideal.

Now some say you shouldn’t start any work until you at least get the signing fee. It’s an admirable position but given the realities when starting out, it’s also one that’s difficult to maintain.

[Note: I’m not talking about working for free here. That is a different animal. Before starting work I at least want an in principle agreement there will be *some* money getting paid at *some* point, & the more & the closer the better. Also trust comes into it.]

However, I might also gently propose that putting the emphasis on the professional ethics of the person with the least power in the relationship may not be the fairest or best approach.

People *will* expect you to start before you get the money. Maybe not all of them, but many. And you’ll have to decide for yourself how to approach that.

So, back to Script Commissions. It was because a producer invested in me and gave me a script commission early on that I managed to keep writing.

And it was because of that deal that I could financially support myself through that first year.

And it was because of the experience of writing that script - the first time I was doing it not on spec, with clear deadlines & notes all the way through - that I finally felt confident enough to call myself a real writer.

And that’s some of the many reasons I think giving new writers commissions is much better value in the long run than treatments and the like.

And to those in the position of deciding what to pay for from writers I’ll simply say that I think there is a strong line to be drawn between the financial security that came with that first commission & the quality of work produced.

And that’s not a subjective point, it’s objective, because the commission is the one that made it through.

Annnnd that’s about all I can think to say on this for now.

[Ed note: that's a lot of 'and']

As always with these threads I hope it is helpful but also don’t take this as gospel. It’s not meant as ‘advice’, only an example. This is just my experience, others may differ greatly, but if we don’t talk about it we’ll never really know for sure.

Also, The Times Are A Changing... so now is a good time for working writers to be collectively thinking hard about what the business is going to look like in the near future so we can make sure we get properly paid for making stuff up ✊