Writing: Gaza, Freelance Hackery

Sharyn and I did our first book event this evening, to a small but warm and interesting audience at Manchester Muslim Writers – hopefully a good intro for Sharyn for the substantial tour she has booked all around the UK.
One of the audience was a guy who, on his Manchester Evening Snooze blog, has done a neat analysis of the Sky TV 'documentary' about Ross Kemp's trip to Gaza. Congratulations to Azaad on sitting through the whole thing. I should make it clear I haven't seen the programme. But I'm putting inverted commas around the word documentary because it has Ross Kemp in it. Maybe I'm a crashing snob. Probably. But I've never quite gotten the point of him.
Anyway, our advance order of the books turned up last week, and what a strange experience that was. A real book, rather a nicely designed one and on nice looking-paper. With our names on the front. Bizarre. Both of us had similarly bemused, slightly stunned reactions, and then have had to keep going back and remind ourselves that the product of that frenzied chunk of work last summer really happened. I had another Oh! moment today when I had to find something from the book and realised I could look in the index. It has an Index. Somehow that made it more real too. As did having people buy it and ask to have it signed for their friends and mums. Very odd.
Reading the accounts of the same days a year ago, from the depths of the hellish bombardment and invasion, is also very odd. But not in a good way.

On a completely different note, I came across a link to this more parochially depressing article today, analysing the state of the freelance writing market. Last week one of my regular (and better-paid) sources of work informed me that they have had to impose tight constraints on their freelance budgets, so no more work for me for the moment. It's not a surprise – it's a publication which is substantially dependent on public-sector advertising for its revenue. But it's happened sooner than I expected.
So the LA Times overview of some of the developments in freelance writing markets is interesting, looking at the risible sums paid by many of the contractors on freelance job sites like oDesk or peopleperhour, or by pay-per-hit 'news' sites like Allvoices. Many of the advertisers on the contract sites make it abundantly clear that they're not interested in the quality of the writing they commission – they simply want search engine-friendly-text that will lure people to their websites, selling whatever kind of tat they're in the market for. And the huge amount of free stuff on the web means there is no incentive for them to pay anything approaching a proper rate. But, as the LA Times writer points out, it also behooves writers who actually want to make a living out of their writing to see themselves to some extent as business people, offering a service, rather than as creatives who are owed a living for churning out our chosen art form. Hmm.