Writers including Neil Gaiman, Marina Lewycka, Nikesh Shukla, Philip Pullman and John le Carré warn that the book industry is just one of the many that will suffer if the UK leaves the EU
We are writers. We are your writers, the United Kingdom’s writers. We write the TV shows on UK screens and the books on UK shelves. We are part of the bubbling soup of the creative industries – along with games, film, theatre and the rest – which together are worth £10m an hour to this country. In fact, the UK publishes more books per head than any other nation on Earth, and millions of UK citizens believe they will one day join us and write the book they have inside them – and lots of them will.
That is possible in part because books printed here, in English, can be sold into Europe as easily as at home. Exports account for 60% of UK publishing revenues, and 36% of physical book exports go to Europe, and that is only the most straightforward concern about what will happen. It’s fashionable among politicians to sneer at the creative industries, but our work is work just like anyone else’s, and like anyone else’s it can only happen if we get paid. Without any idea of what Brexit might look like, it’s impossible to know exactly what we might lose. A tenth? A fifth? A third of what we live on? We’ll have to make compromises. Should we ditch part of the beginning, the middle, or the end of the story? Would audiences prefer not to know whose fault it all is, how the crime was solved, or who’s still standing at the end?