The first-time novelist asks why the media are so interested in herself, not her book, and why can’t she be paid?

Last year my first novel Malarky was published in Canada; it is about to come out in Britain. I received a $1,000 advance from my Canadian publisher and a megawatty – by my impoverished standards – £6,500 advance from OneWorld in the UK. That might sound a lot, but Malarky took me a dozen years to write. Those were a dozen years of dire poverty. "You're lucky to be published at all" is the default response – and they're right, I am. (I am lucky that independent publishers took a bet on me.) I realise readers of this article will think I'm wrong to complain about my lot, but it's not really my lot that I'm concerned with here: it's the business of publicising a novel, and of what it is to be a writer these days. I might be considered lucky (though I've worked for it), but we don't tell train drivers that they're lucky there are trains. Nor do we ask train drivers to drive trains up and down to Scotland unpaid, for the glory of saying to the public: look, here is a train, consider getting on it someday! So I have three grumbles, or rather I want to raise three tricky questions.

First: why do the media care so much about the novelist – what pen she uses, what time she gets up in the morning – when they should be concentrating on the novel?

A debut author's publicist tells her, as every honest publicist should, the bald truth: that newspapers like personal stories. Ideally, confessional stories. Best of all: confessional stories that relate to the fiction she spent years making up. So she spends years using her imagination only to discover that she must dig about in her psychoanalytic compost heap, and retrieve something that reveals that, in fact, she has not made it up at all.

As Malarky is an exploration of grief and sexuality, such a confessional would require, say, the insertion of an anecdote about how I liked to spy on men having sex in bathhouses. This would tidily explain how (or why) I created a novel in which, among a myriad other things, an Irish mother re-enacts her gay son's love acts.

The truth is otherwise: sadly, no splashy bathhouse peeping. Instead, I sat in a library surrounded by medical students and made it up. If you want the specifics: it was a banal cubicle at the back of the third floor of Vancouver general hospital Diamond building. I did, however, read an excellent book on Syrian underwear and ogled Comin' at Ya!: The homoerotic 3D photos of Denny Denfield.

The rest of my life was an anxious combination of a chronic lack of cash, obsessing about the weather, and my 13-year-old wishing for a mother who could cook stew. Not very glamorous, yet here come the questions: do you write with your knickers up or down? Your immersion switched on or off? Do you find the similes come smoother when you haven't brushed your teeth? I actually spend much of my time writing gambling news. You don't care? Why should you? It's more relevant to find out about the person who drives the 42 bus, or nurses your granny.

Second: why can't I get paid for many of the articles I write? (Though I am getting paid for this one.)

These days, an author, especially an unknown author, must – in order to entice any readers to her work who aren't blood relatives – write endless unpaid blogs, articles and responses for newspapers and magazines and random people creating things in basements. What results is the subsidising of publishers by outsourcing the marketing of the book to the writer, and now and again the subsidising of often giant media corporations, who in times gone by would have had to pay her.

There is a general decline in the value placed on labour. The situation is comparable to other areas of the workforce, where several jobs are collapsed to one and the pay slashed. The reporter who must now shoot, edit video, audio-record and type all stories while tweeting. The security guard who is not allowed to tweet, but must also do the cleaning. Or the hospital cleaner who is forced to reapply for his own job but on lower pay, because it's been outsourced to an American multinational.

Third: why is there so much fuss in the media about how to write a novel – "everyone can become an author" – when the more important thing is how to read one?

A hearty number of writers, as a result of the unpaid author scenario, end up providing blogs, lists and endless tips on "how to write".

How to write fiction. Tips on getting started. Tips on writing a book in a month, tips on writing a book on your fingernail, tips on how to get laid and write a book on the back of the person in bed beside you. Or how, if you're quick enough, you can write one on the bottom of the foot of that person opposite texting furiously on the train. You can write your way out of any situation. You can write your way out of the Conservative party and up the arse of a goat. You can write away austerity. You can write with austerity. You might save the NHS if you only finish your novel-in-progress, especially if you sign up for this writing course – see the advert over there on the right-hand-side.

There are no adverts that instruct you to sit down, have a cup of tea and read. This, I suspect, is because there's no economic advertorial kickback from those acts.

A potential writer shouldn't start with "writing tips". These tips don't provide the answers to the questions that matter. (For me, the questions that matter most at the moment are: how do I fix my vacuum cleaner? How do I replace the windscreen wipers on a 1995 Ford Contour? Why won't my fennel grow in a bucket? Why have I got acne at 42?)

The author engaged in a bookshop reading event (usually unpaid) has been known to become a vessel through which other authorial fantasies can flow or ferment. Unless the moderator steers it otherwise, a Q&A can turn into a session on how that ubiquitous determined man at the back can be published. He has an email from an agent from years ago … I sympathise, but I also want to ask him: whom do you imagine will buy and read your work if you do not buy and read books?

There seems to have been a shift from a reading culture to a writing culture, a diminishment of critical space for the contemplation of literature. Writing needs to be discussed and interrogated through reading. If you wish to write well, you need to read well, or at least widely. You certainly need to contemplate reading a book in translation, unlikely to be widely reviewed in newspapers, many of which are too busy wasting space on "how to write" tips and asking about an author's personal fripperies. It's a great deal more fulfilling to read and think about a fine book than to attempt to write one.

There is something wrong with how much of the media approaches authors and books. They seem to believe we no longer appear to value the labour that it takes to read. That we value most of all the status we imagine will come from publishing a book. Are they right? The only really useful status comes from reading and thinking.