Surprised guild
Sir: Members of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain will be surprised if not amused by Kingsley Amis's description (`Sod the public II', 15 October) of the Guild as 'this Socialist trade union'. Our rules specifically forbid party political affi- liation of any kind. Kingsley Amis is well aware of this fact, having been a member of the Writers' Guild until fairly recently.
To turn now to his particular gripe, the Minimum Terms Agreement. The Guild as a pressure group together with its sister union the Society of Authors has carried out a sustained campaign for agreements with publishers which will set down mini- mum terms as far as royalties and condi- tions are concerned. Publishers who have signed our agreements have found that they work extremely well and without problems. Our campaign has been such that publishers who turned their face against the idea of an agreement with us have actually started incorporating many of the clauses we have outlined in our negotiating document because they find that indeed our proposals are sensible.
Finally I can assure Mr Amis that new writers and recently published writers as well as much published writers have found our Minimum Terms Agreement working for their benefit. I think we can safely leave Mr Amis to the 'free market'. We shall concentrate on seeing that new writers have a much better deal than Mr Amis managed to achieve for himself when he first went into print.
Walter J. Jeffrey General Secretary,
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain, 430 Edgware Road, London W2
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