When I started thinking about today’s post, I had a certain feeling of déjà vu. Checking previous posts I found one of January 2014 titled “Underpaid and Overrated Authors: Hierarchical Reading in the Age of Globalization” in which I discussed an article published in The Guardian according to which, as the title reads, “Most writers earn less than £600 a year”. Today I am considering again the matter of authors’ earnings because of an article by Joanne Harris, current Chair of the management committee of the UK Society of Authors apart from being a very well-known author. The article is called “Horribly low pay is pushing out my fellow authors – and yes, that really does matter”.
Harris cites a survey by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society’s (ALCS), the fourth since 2006. This is the subject of another article, by Sarah Shaffi, “Writers’ earnings have plummeted – with women, Black and mixed race authors worst hit”. According to the ALCS’s report (actually carried out by the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Research Centre, CREATe, based at the University of Glasgow), British “professional authors are earning a median of just £7,000 a year”, which suggests that the word ‘professional’ is becoming an oxymoron. The ALCS has painted accordingly a bleak picture by which writing might become “the preserve of the privileged”. Shaffi’s article notes that there has been a drop of 33% in writers’ earnings since 2018, and of 43% since 2007, “when the median income was £12,330,” still too low to guarantee a reasonable standard of living.
In her article, Harris speaks of writers being subjected to the vagaries of luck once they publish their books, in an erratic market which favours big names over newcomers. The figures indicate that 10% authors (guess their names) receive 47% of all earnings. Harris warns that “We need to start seeing contracts with fair payment, higher advances, better payment terms, better control of rights and clearer accounting, as we’ve called for in the Society of Authors’ Creator campaign”. In the article by Shaffi, Nicola Solomon, chief executive of the Society, refers with bitterness to publishers’ boasting “record profits” while writers struggle to earn “a living wage.” It seems, then, that the root of the conflict is the approach of publishers to writing as a generator of big hits rather than a sustainable market for all authors.
The ALCS report, Sarah Shaffi informs, “also found a gender pay gap of 41.4% between men and women”, with female authors’ earning diminishing faster than men’s. Likewise, Black and mixed race authors earn far less than white authors, and “experience steeper losses year to year”. All this constitutes a harsh reality check against the optimistic impression that awards and progressive scholarship are producing in relation to an increasingly inclusive book market. I am returning to the point I made in my previous post about how women’s current dominance of awards in the SF field is not resulting in an upheaval in sales, still very much dominated by traditional white male authors.
It all possibly boils down to how much money readers have in their pockets, which is considerably less than before the 2008 crisis. In a pre-crisis context, many readers, including myself, would regularly go to bookshops and spend money on lesser known books in a sort of fun gamble. I used to go to Gigamesh here in Barcelona and return home with a bag full of SF paperbacks cheap enough to try my luck with no qualms. In a post-2008 crisis, we are all more careful with our money. Readers who buy very few books a year have started buying even fewer (perhaps just one book for Sant Jordi, our local Book Day). Readers who read frequently have started using libraries more often and, yes, downloading books illegally. As we all know, one thing are sales and quite another how many times a book is read by legal or illegal means. In short, the very high sales of the top 10% are easy to explain: readers prefer spending money on safe choices. I don’t think that the lower sales of the 90% writers outside the top have anything to do with their gender or race, but with readers’ increasing reluctance to spend money on books they are less familiar with.
Concerns about the devaluation of creative work are widespread too in other artistic areas, from music to photography. I don’t know what the situation is in the world of art, in which the unique object still dominates and copies are seen as frauds, but all the cultural products that can circulate as illegally downloadable copies have seen their markets drastically diminished. Platform subscription may have decreased piracy but it is not helping authors to earn what they deserve (I’m thinking here of Spotify). It has, besides, killed the sales of CDs or, for films, of DVDs. Subscription platforms for books have not really taken off, perhaps with the exception of Audible for audiobooks, but that might also be a factor for the future of authorship. Additionally, it is clear to all concerned that, whether we work for a small independent press or a corporate behemoth, we authors are still trapped by business conventions absolutely exploitative. That authors receive between 8 and 10% for royalties is, simply, disgraceful. It is clear to me that authors should always make more money than their publishers but the possible solution to that problem, the dream by which each author would directly sell their books through their websites, has never materialized. Even self-published authors put their work in the hands of Amazon, where it is not really more likely to be noticed than on their own website.
Perhaps, and this is just an unsettling thought, the book market is not big enough to guarantee the professionalization of most writers. Authors appear to be trapped between the publishers’ expectations of profit and the readers’ lack of funds to invest on purchasing books, but perhaps their median income is so low because the market is saturated. For writers to earn a middle-class income, which is, arguably, what most authors expect seeing their more successful peers, the market should have to grow. Publishers will logically resist offering better contracts unless the market grows, but reading is not right now the kind of activity that can attract more persons. Reading will not expand among the adult population (it did expand during lockdown), and the young appear to be interested in the genres aimed at them (YA fiction) but not in reading per se. In fact, the only cultural industry that is still fast growing are videogames, with gamers now found in all demographics below sixty. Maybe aspiring authors should consider starting careers as videogame writers.
Something that puzzles me in the two articles I am commenting on is what I can only call a sense of entitlement relative to language. Authors who write in English (or Spanish, or Mandarin) may aspire to professionalization because their language is spoken by hundreds of millions. Matters are very different for authors writing in other languages, with just a handful of millions or fewer. In the Catalan-language area, with about 10 million speakers, there are very few professional writers even though the book market is lively enough. Iceland, with a population of just 372,295 (2021) publishes 1500 titles a year in Icelandic, which is simply amazing, though I doubt that any of its writers are full-time professionals. In contrast, I have met young British writers who had abandoned less glamorous occupations the moment their first book had sold past 50,000 copies. This, which appears to be immensely successful, might not be enough, however, to sustain a long career in such a volatile book market. My assumption is that a Catalan, or an Icelandic writer, would keep their breadwinning jobs and be less keen on professionalization.
We need to wonder, too, whether professionalization is a desirable goal. Obviously, anyone with a strong vocation will argue that nobody can be a ballerina or a sculptor part time, and that, ideally, a talented person should be able to use all their time in the pursuit of their art. I happen to be quite sceptical of this claim in relation to writing. There are countless examples of writers who have produced high quality work while working eight hours a day in another profession. Just to name two, Anthony Trollope was a mail service inspector, Philip Larkin was a librarian. A truly vocational writer, like a truly vocational reader, finds time for books. If the books an author writes make enough money to free them from employment in another profession that is great, but authors also need to be realistic and not expect their writing to be a means to make a living.
Each author works for a particular market and must know the rules of that market. Nobody that publishes academic books would dream of quitting teaching for full-time employment as a writer in that genre because our market is tiny and our profits next to non-existent (I wish I made £7,000 a year, or even £600!). Novelists work for a much larger market but even so few can support themselves by writing novels, so why should any of them suppose that their earnings should be enough for a living? Perhaps they have joined the book market expecting to be the next Stephen King, but being so successful will only happen to 1% of all novelists. King also did his share of humble jobs, by the way, before becoming the King we know today.
To sum up: yes, the book market needs to grow (it can grow indeed if reading becomes as fashionable as playing videogames) and yes, authors should be earning much more thanks to better contracts. However, authors need to be realistic and understand that their market (our market) is rather small and much overcrowded, taking into account besides that the number of readers is not really growing and that they are much poorer than they were in 2008. I am not telling authors, young or old, that they should quit writing. I’m arguing that they should not approach writing as a full-time profession but as a complementary activity, as it has been for many other writers in the past. This is realistic. A vision of the profession in which most authors make, say, £50,000 a year is not. The book market has never operated in that way and it never will – except for that lucky 10% at the top.