How much does a writer get paid? It’s no secret that the most avid readers of freelance literary writing are writers themselves. And so I’m sure many of you have found yourself reading a story in Granta or a poem in Overland and wondering ‘What is that worth?’ How is it measured? Per word? By hits? Based on how many other publications you’ve been in? How many awards you have?

The urge to find answers for these questions is, I will argue, an important kind of gossip-mongering. In an industry that seeks to appear professional to funding bodies and government, but simultaneously must hold onto certain romances, talking about money can be awkward. Without exposing the standards and expectations of editors and publishers, writers will never able to know if they are getting what they deserve.

For writers starting out, finding that monetary reward upon logging into one’s internet banking account has value in itself. Someone, somewhere, thought your writing was worth paying for. But to use the word ‘paid’ whilst ignoring the spectrum of payment that freelance must navigate is a farce. Feature reviews for street publications pay as little as $30 for pages and pages of work, while major broadsheets will pay anywhere between 50c and a $1 a word depending, it seems, on who you are. We talk about ‘paid writing’ as though the old socialist ‘waged’ and ‘unwaged’ still applies; as though the business of writing has the same ledgers as the business of dock work or manufacturing.

So here’s what I propose. A national, thorough and current resource on how much publications that accept freelance work pay. Margaret Simons, bless her, has made a similar effort on her blog at Crikey — but her focus is mostly on journalists. They are not the only writers who seek payment. I want to know what New Matilda pays, what The Brag and the Australian Book Review pay. And just as importantly, if these payments are guided by policies, aims and visions, how often they change, if and when an editor is allowed to tamper with them.

Transparency is basic. In other industries where freelance work is standard, such as graphic design, workers know what they can charge. They invoice based on an industry-wide understanding about what a graduate student is worth and what a senior art director is worth. By asking publications to regularly report what they are paying, writers will not only be able to make decisions about who they pitch to, and how much effort they put in, readers will be able to decide whether they want to support an organisation that never pays its writers despite printing on glossy stock and finding room for plenty of ads. And if publications choose not to report what they pay, then let that be noted too.

If, as appears self-evident, the industry is in a state of flux, how we treat our writers will be an important index to watch.

Bhakthi Puvanenthiran is a writer, editor and co-director at the National Young Writers Festival, which ends on 3 October.

On the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day, over 100 bookish types packed among the shelves of Readings Carlton in Melbourne to hear a panel of Australian literary women talk about the very timely hot topic of the moment – the oft-suspected, recently proven underrepresentation of women in the world of books and writing.

The session was chaired by Rebecca Starford, editor of Kill Your Darlings. Participants were Sophie Cunningham, novelist, former publisher, commentator and recent editor of Meanjin; Louise Swinn, editorial director of Sleepers Publishing and a writer and reviewer; and Monica Dux, The Age opinion writer, author of The Great Feminist Denial.

The conversation began with a sobering reflection on those statistics recently released by VIDA (a relatively new US organisation for women and the arts), which revealed a stark gender bias in the pages of a wide range of literary institutions, including The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review and Granta.

Rebecca Starford presented the findings of her own mini-survey of the current situation in Australia, based on the records of trade magazine Bookseller & Publisher’s weekly supplement, Media Extra, over the first two months of 2011:

In The Age, 133 books were reviewed: 90 authored by men, 43 (or 33%) by women. Of the reviewers of those books, 72 were men, 61 by women.

In The Australian, 88 books were reviewed: 61 authored by men, 27 (or 30%) by women. Of the reviewers, 55 were men, 33 were women

Things were still skewed, but less so, at Australian Book Review. In 2010, 356 books were reviewed: 210 authored by men, 146 (41%) by women. The numbers of reviewers was fairly even. Interestingly, though, only 27% of the books by men were reviewed by women.

At Australian Literary Review, the stats were more damning. From October 2010 to February 2011, 51 books were reviewed: 41 by men; 10 (less than 20%) by women. Of the reviewers, 36 were men; 15 (29%) were women.

One of the explanations commonly offered for this disparity is that men are more willing to put themselves forward than women. Talking to The Book Show recently, (in a segment that was often cited during the night’s discussion), the literary editors of The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald all mentioned that they receive far more pitches from men than women.

Sleepers Publishing’s Louise Swinn reported that she receives more book-length submissions from men, though the submissions for the annual Sleepers Almanac anthologies of short stories are evenly split between men and women.

Sophie Cunningham, talking about her recent role as editor of Meanjin, had a particularly interesting story to tell – gender ratios “varied wildly” depending on the genre of the submission. “I had to work very hard to make sure that women were properly represented in non-fiction,” she said. “Because in terms of essays received, I was getting a lot more essays by men, if you keep memoir out of it. The pieces by women did tend to be a lot more personal and written out of their own experience.” Looking back on her time at Meanjin, Sophie said that while 52% of the essays overall were by women, 75% of the memoir pieces she published were written by women. (In that time, incidentally, 53% of the fiction and 35% of the poetry was by women.) Speaking specifically about Meanjin’s CAL-sponsored series of essays on cultural institutions, Sophie said it was difficult to find women to write these pieces. “Women often said, I’m not an expert, I don’t know that I’ve got the time, and were generally a lot more diffident about tackling those subjects where they were expected to be fairly aggressive in their analysis.”

Louise backed up Sophie’s point with a quote from Alizah Salario’s piece, ‘Twenty-Three Short Thoughts About Women and Criticism’ on Bookslut: “At her most basic, a good critic must possess a certain amount of chutzpah in order to believe other people will read – and care about – what she has to say. Call them audacious or simply arrogant, critics must have the confidence to write with conviction. They must demonstrate to readers why, of an infinite number of interpretations, theirs speaks a truth (but perhaps not the truth).”

Louise reflected, “I think maybe we’re not always encouraged to think that our experience can be the experience.”

Monica Dux said that though the VIDA statistics are “appalling”, she’s “not actually that surprised”, having spent the last couple of years of her life looking at women’s representation and writing about women. “It’s a reflection of society. I think we have this idea that writing is somehow more transcendent, and that it must be more noble.” She cited the current debate about the underrepresentation on women on boards as an example of where this situation is reflected in the wider world.

“I think that women actually need to push themselves out of their comfort zone, otherwise we’re stuck in this loop,” said Sophie. “I got really frustrated with the number of women who said, I’m not an expert. I tell you what, the men I was ringing up asking to write on subjects weren’t saying, I’m not an expert.” She said that she often tended to use good female non-fiction writers “several times over”, citing Sian Prior and Lorin Clarke as two of her go-to writers. She believes this likely results in her figures being “fairly skewed, in the way I think The New Yorker figures are … I think if you took Susan Orlean out of the mix at The New Yorker, you’d end up with about two [non-fiction women writers].”

Monica agreed with Sophie’s idea about the need for women to push beyond their comfort zones, drawing on her own experience as an opinion writer. “Those first few experiences of sending an unsolicited opinion piece were excruciating. Writing is, by its nature, very much about confidence.” She said she started writing “almost by accident”, as a result of some pro-active female editors who encouraged her. “There are people out there who are looking to publish women. You just need to be persistent and push.”

Louise reflected that, as a writer, she needs to “not take rejection so hard and just keep going”. A seemingly confident and polished public speaker, Louise admitted to being “incredibly nervous” about public speaking, and having done “lots and lots” of public speaking courses, as well as acting and singing classes, in order to feel comfortable performing in public. “At Sleepers, when we’re asking people to do events, we always have to ask two women for every one man,” she said. “You’ve got to start saying yes. And start pitching.”

Sophie said, “The men I’ve worked with – writers like James Bradley, a really fine writer and reviewer – would constantly pitch stuff at me.” She emphasised the effort she consciously put in to achieve gender balance at Meanjin and the importance of “as an editor, as a publisher, taking affirmative action really seriously. Doing the statistics.”

Louise held up a flyer she’d happened upon, for a series of seminars, running over the next few months, on VCE English texts. Of 15 set texts discussed, only two of these were by women. “These are kids going through school and this is what they’re reading,” she said. “And then we tell the girls that their voices are just as worthwhile.”

“I think it’s getting worse,” observed Sophie, pointing to the recent Triple J Hottest 100 furore as an example of the culture we currently inhabit. (For the first time ever, no female solo singers were featured in this list, put together from public votes.) And of course the panel all recalled the infamous “sausage-fest” all-male Miles Franklin shortlist of 2009.

I’ve done my own quick calculations (since the event) on how women have fared in general with the nation’s leading literary prize. Over the course of the Miles Franklin Award – which has run since 1957 – a woman has won 13 times. Three times this was Thea Astley; twice she shared the award (in 2000, with Kim Scott; and in 1963, with George Turner). The Miles has been awarded 50 times in all. Over the past decade (since 2001), two women have won, from the pool of 10 awards.

There’s much more to be discussed around this issue – and hopefully there will be further events and more public discussions. (For instance, on International Women’s Day, Melbourne’s The Wheeler Centre ran a terrific piece by novelist Kirsten Tranter on this very issue.) Perhaps, one year on, we should take another look at the statistics of women in print and see if anything has changed?

Jo Case is associate editor of Kill Your Darlings and books editor of The Big Issue.

(The Book Show also did the sums on the gender split of guests on the show, read the breakdown here)

She quotes Wells Tower, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith warning of the dangers of the internet – all recommending that fiction writers work at a computer not connected. Wells Tower says:

‘As writers … we need to care hugely about each word, each syllable, its valences, its music, and we need readers who care enough and read closely enough to be susceptible to our art. I think the internet is noxious to this sort of aesthetic transaction.’

I see the wisdom in all of this. I agree with all these observations. And yet. My own experience offers a twist on this cautionary tale – not a rebuttal, but another dimension to what the internet can offer creative writers, beyond fact-checking and news gathering.

From the time I could form letters until the age of 20, I wrote compulsively, filling exercise books and stapling scrap paper together with invented stories. As a cousin recently reminded me, I used to turn up to family gatherings bearing stories I’d written about my relatives and force them to read them – into my early teens. At high school, I wrote stories about my friends and the boys we had hopeless crushes on under the desk during class. At home, I wrote pages and pages of ‘serious’ novels that eventually trailed off. And at university, I started a series of (now cringeworthy) short stories about tragic Adelaide characters. I had a couple of small successes – a placing in a competition, publication in an Adelaide newspaper.

Then I got a job at a publishing company, where I read through the slush pile and was jointly terrified by all those authors who were terrible and didn’t know it, and those who could write but were still nowhere near producing a publishable story. And I stopped writing for the next decade, paralysed by my new awareness. The few times I did try to write again, it was both forced (through my layers of self-doubt) and stilted. And all the fun – the pure joy of it – was gone.

A decade later, I was working at Australian Book Review, trawling through some literary blogs to get a sense of what might work for a blog I was starting for the magazine, when I took a few detours and discovered a network of bloggers who wrote about their personal lives in engaging fragments that bounced off and interacted with each other. They wrote about things like a building that intrigued them in their neighbourhood, or an aspect of work that they loved, or an incident with their kids that made them reflect on contemporary motherhood. It wasn’t just the things they wrote that fascinated me, and drew me back to their blogs – it was the way they wrote about them.

After a few weeks of coy lurking and dropping the occasional brave comment, I took the plunge and started up my own blog, on impulse – and almost against my own judgement. A large part of me thought blogging was self-indulgent and silly, that writing about myself was being an unnecessary show-off. I’d worked as a freelance reviewer and feature writer for many years by now and ‘I’ was a word that was discouraged, a word that editors struck out if you forgot and left it in. Most people I knew (including me) were sniffy about ‘I’ writing.

My first blog post was about making cupcakes for my son to take to class on his birthday at the end of a long work day, having not properly shopped for ingredients, with my husband deeming the final, laboured-over product (produced at midnight) a bit odd-looking. I have no idea why I wanted to write about this. Maybe it was because the thought of writing about ordinary life – of framing it as a story – had been percolating in the back of my mind. And so I made a joke of it, of my disorganisation and ineptness and the deadpan banter with my husband that actually kind of hurt (and my guilt about full-time work manifesting in this badly executed stint as a home-baking mother). When I finished, I read it through – this crafted but not pre-meditated fragment of my life – and I actually quite liked it. I set up an anonymous blog, posted it, sent the link to my mum and sisters, and went to bed.

At first, no one seemed to be reading my blog. Which was fine – I didn’t actively look for readers, though I did comment on those blogs I liked using my new identity. I continued to craft fragments of my life, for my own pleasure, and post them online. Then, after about a month, I got my first readers and gradually became part of a community of bloggers, all drawn together simply by the fact that we liked each other’s writing and ideas.

For the first time in ten years, I was regularly writing, and my writing was getting better. There was none of the pressure and expectation that had haunted me for the past decade. This wasn’t ‘real’ writing; this was a hobby. So, though I worked hard on my blog posts, I didn’t feel they had to be perfect. And while I do agree with Wells Tower that writers should labour over each word in a published work, this was a netherworld between draft and publication. And that lack of gravitas was what freed me to write.

Cate Kennedy says in her essay:

A writer is someone on the lookout, pretty well constantly, for patterns – patterns in speech and events, in forgetful self-disclosure, in the bigger existential narrative.

This is what I became during my time as a blogger – a person constantly on the lookout for stories, embedded in the fabric and seemingly inconsequential details of everyday life.

Two key incidents allowed me to make the leap between personal, creative writing on an anonymous blog and that kind of writing under my own name, out in the world. One of the writers I befriended through the blogosphere, Penni Russon, a published YA author, told me that she’d been talking to a friend about short stories and had shown her my posts as examples. I had never thought of them in that way before – and was blown away by the fact that a published writer I respected obviously thought I was good. Then Louise Swinn of Sleepers, someone I knew as a reviewing and book industry colleague, sent me a curious email, asking if I was the writer of a blog she’d stumbled on, and if I was, inviting me to submit to the next Sleepers Almanac. I was, I did, and to my absolute surprise and delight, my story was accepted and published – and then, in a twist worthy of a novel, republished with Penni Russon’s first adult story (which I had asked her to submit to The Big Issue, after discovering her via her blog) in Best Australian Stories 2009.

I no longer write my blog, and I have a very long way to go before I consider myself a ‘proper’ creative writer. But I am writing short stories – slowly, painfully, agonising over every word, sentence and draft – and have enrolled in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing Course. I had a non-fiction essay of the kind I used to publish on my blog published in The Age earlier this year. None of this would have happened for me had I not gained the freedom, practice and confidence in my writing that I did online.

I completely understand where Cate Kennedy is coming from. I think her Overland essay is important for sparking discussion about the subject of how the internet affects writers and writing. But I also think the internet offers opportunities – and not just the obvious ones of self-promotion and recognition, but opportunities for writers to dip their toes into the waters of creative writing, to experiment with shaping experience into stories. It can be – as it was for me – a stepping stone between the world of the mind and the world of official publication.

Kill Your Darlings has published several writers who have been discovered via the blogosphere, and has commissioned crafted, polished and extended pieces that have originated as blog posts.