How writers can earn more - by Nicola Morgan

Most children's writers find it very hard to earn anything like a living from their writing. Most of us carry on anyway, managing however we can, because we love what we do. But there are some ways we can earn more and still love what we do and do what we love.

I did a talk recently for the Scattered Authors Society on how to earn more from doing events and I'm going to be writing that up properly soon. But meanwhile I thought I'd write generally about some ways of increasing your income as a children's writer.

Please don't think I'm all about money. I am so very not. But I find that money is the only currency that mortgage lenders, utility companies and supermarkets will accept. Funnily, when I get to the checkout, the sales assistants don't seem to go for the "but it's good for your profile" line, so I can't afford to do things for profile either, unless it will be really good for profile, which it usually won't. Anyway, profile just doesn't taste that great in a sandwich.

So, here are my suggestions.

A. Make more money from events

1. Decide your minimum fee for a day away from your desk doing an event and turn down all (or almost all) invitations that can't pay that. Every time you are underpaid, you are also losing time in which you could be writing. I'd rather not do an event and have the time to spend on something else, either writing or doing another income-generating thing. I DO sometimes say yes to underpaid things, because I sometimes really want to do the thing, but I just cannot afford to do many like that. And, when setting your minimum fee, don't forget to factor in prep time, travelling time, and admin. So, if an event is going to take 2-3 days altogether, make sure your fee reflects your earnings needs for 2-3 days. Use this earnings calculator from Andrew Bibby.
2. Do more events - and I'll be giving lots of ideas about how you get more events when I write up my notes from the SAS talk. (That doc will go to SAS members and I'll put it on my own blog, too.) But doing a large number of "normal" school or library events, which are generally not well paid, means you will be exhausted, so it's hard to envisage actually earning a living doing school events. You wouldn't be able to do it every day or even every week and you'd never have time for writing.
3. Do better paid events. Again, I'll give more details in that other document but there are two main ways to do this: a) establish your expertise and pitch for events about it, something which gives you a genuine USP. ("Author who writes great books" is not a USP unless there is some reason why your particular books are the only and specific ones a school wants, which is possible if they're studying them in class, but not likely.) And b) think about INSET or other training that you can offer to schools and educational organisations. (This is now almost exclusively what I do and how I can charge something more like a professional/ commercial/ business training rate - and we're talking £1000-£1600 a day for such things. That may sound a lot but there is a lot of preparation and delivering a whole day of training to a bunch of strangers is mentally and physically exhausting..)
4. Find ways to sell more books at school events. 

(There are many more ideas, but I'll talk about them in that other document.) 

B. Write more books

Obvs. Now, of course, you can't write/publish many full-length novels or some other sorts of "big" books a year and obviously it takes a while for advances and royalties (if ever) to kick in, but writers should remember these things:

1. If we don't write books because we're doing too many events or blogposts, we will soon not have a platform of books about which to be asked to do events.
2. We can't do events forever, so if we want an income of any sort after we've finished doing events, we need to write books and those books need to stay in print.
3. There are books that we write because our heart cries out to write them and there are books that we write because they pay the bills and because we are writers with a skill and a job to do. You only have to look at the incredible hard-working professionalism of our own über-prolific Anne Rooney to see what a writer can do when she turns her mind to making a career out of saying yes to books and no to events.
4. If self-publishing, it's a well-known "rule" that you need to keep producing books and that doing so generates more sales for each.

C. Create some other things to sell

I don't mean start a home-baking stall! To sell the following things, you can either get your web designer to build in a shop element to your website - I did this and it wasn't expensive, even though mine is not the simplest and sells ebooks as well as physical items, and allows me to create discount codes - or you can just create a page on your site with details of what you're selling and get people to email you an order and pay via Paypal. 

Here are some suggestions:

1. Create teaching notes and lesson plans for one of your books and sell them as pdfs or ebooks. It requires a substantial amount of work to create the materials, set them up and market them, but once that's done it's very simple and every sale is money to you. And you can garner more events like this, too, and/or offer a free one to any school booking you for an event. (Creating add-ons is a good way to attract schools to invite you.) It doesn't matter if your book isn't fantastically well known. Find the teaching points it offers and create some materials around that. Teachers love things that are ready to use in the classroom.
2. Create teaching materials in your area of expertise (link them explicitly to the curriculum, which you can discover online or through a teacher friend) and sell them as pdfs or ebooks on your website. I've gone further than this and created a huge and therefore high value set of materials (called Brain Sticks) about brain health and wellbeing, linked to PSHE and Wellbeing elements of the curriculum, and these are selling very nicely.
3. Or/and do the above and sell them on Amazon as ebooks. It's a lot easier to sell non-fiction than fiction and you stand a decent chance of making it financially worthwhile if you do it right.
4. If you've got a shop set up on your website, sell your published books on it. (Your contract with your publisher may say you can't, but you can if you negotiate a seller's account with them.) This is not going to boost your income very much, though, and you need to spend quite a bit of time packing and posting.
5. Tea-towels! Or other merchandise, but tea-towels are great because they don't break or perish and are cheap to post. OK, so you have to be a bit creative and imaginative, but you are! I've made a nice bit of extra money doing tea-towels for two of my books. (Tea-towels need to appeal to adults, not children or teenagers, who are not known to appreciate such things...)

D. Critique manuscripts

Something else I do. I don't advertise this service except that it's surreptitiously mentioned on my website, because I actually don't want to do much of this work, but one client a month is about right for me and that comes without my advertising myself. You could do a lot more if you promoted your service. See here for details of what I offer. Feel free to copy me or even undercut me!

Some tips/warnings: 

a) It's time-consuming, eye-straining and tiring - and it's screen work, which you may feel you do enough of already.

b) There's a substantial risk (if you don't manage this in advance) that you will find yourself with a client who simply cannot take the constructive criticism which you must give. I have never once had a bad experience but I think that's because I vet clients first by rigorously ensuring that they know they are not going to be lathered with praise but that they are going to be blown away by the level of detailed criticism in my report.

You might also consider applying to become a tutor/expert reader for one of the big consultancies such as The Literary Consultancy, Writers' Workshop or Cornerstones.

E. RLF Fellowships 

Not something I've applied for but I certainly would if I wanted to: details here. I know several people who have done and enjoyed them.

F. Retreats

Ideally teaming up with a writer friend, why not organise and set up a retreat weekend and do the tutoring yourselves? There are so many ways this might work. It would be complicated the first time but much easier after that. Ask amongst your writer friends to find out what they'd like and what they wouldn't like. Talk to people who've been on retreats, if you haven't yourself. 

G. Online tuition

Again, lots of work to organise it but once you'd set up all the materials it would be a manageable way of increasing your income. You could use Skype or a webinar set-up - there are several organisations that facilitate webinars.

H. Get a part-time job

I don't think any writer should view this as a negative step to take. Whatever that job is, it brings new experiences, it may bring new people to talk to and new ideas. All of which could fuel your writing.

I. Make sure you're claiming everything you can against tax.

If you don't have an accountant, here's the link to the HMRC list of things you can claim - keep all receipts, of course.

Of course, you can't possibly do all of these things. There aren't enough hours in the day. Some of them, I admit, don't bring in a great deal of money (selling things from your website, for example, is really only going to be a drop in the ocean) but others do, such as finding a way to do higher paid events. But pick a few that appeal to you and that you think you could make work, and look forward to watching your income grow.

Good luck!

Talking of luck, have you entered the Great #UKYAEggHunt yet? Or, if you don't want the HUGE prize of DOZENS of books yourself, I bet you know someone who does! There are over 30 authors involved and you can start you egghunt here.

Pockets of hope - John Dougherty

I was at the ALCS panel discussion at the House of Commons about which Anne Rooney blogged last week, and it was pretty sobering. The figures as revealed by the ALCS survey are grim: since 2005 authors' median income has dropped by 29% and the percentage of authors making a living solely from writing has declined from 40% to 11.5%.

Yet ALCS also finds that "the wealth generated by the UK creative industries is on the increase... the creative industries are now worth £71.4 billion per year to the UK economy". In fact, it would appear that while authors are being paid less, publishers are doing quite nicely - a situation that the General Secretary of the Society of Authors describes as both unfair and unsustainable.

Meanwhile, dark mutterings and rumblings grow about literary festivals charging ticket prices and paying organisers, booksellers, musicians and entertainers - but not the authors. There's something quite absurd about all of this - the very people who create the product's value not being themselves valued.

There are, however, pockets of hope. The evening before the ALCS discussion I was at another event, at The Ivy in London. This one was organised by the Chipping Norton Literary Festival, of which I am proud to be a patron, and they'd organised it in order to make a very special announcement:

From now on, any profits made from the festival "will be split equally between all authors involved."

I should say that ChipLitFest, as we like to call it, already has a reputation for looking after authors properly - great accommodation, a fabulous green room, lovely meals, and so on - and many other festivals would have rested on their laurels. But from its inception only three years ago, the organisers have been aware that without authors there is no festival; and if anyone should be rewarded for the festival's success, it's the people who create the content.

 Any chance of publishers following suit?

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 John's latest book, Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers, is illustrated by David Tazzyman and published by OUP.

 Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Quest for the Magic Porcupine will be published in August.

Killing our darlings

This post was going to be a report from yesterday's important debate at the House of Commons, hosted by ALCS, on how authors can be fairly rewarded for their work. But my train was cancelled in the middle of nowhere and so I didn't actually get to the debate. Well done, railways.

The subject of the debate was outlined in an article in yesterday's Guardian: Authors' incomes collapse to 'abject' levels. There are several things wrong with the article, not least its concentration entirely on literary fiction as though that represents all, or even most, books. Most books are non-fiction. Most novels are not literary. But never mind. The survey behind the article actually asked writers of all types of books, even if the Guardian didn't. If you want to read the non-journalised account of the research, it's on the ALCS website.

The Poor Poet, Carl Spitzweg, 1839

The gist of it is that writers are a lot poorer than they used to be. As most people seem to think writers earn a lot ("look at JK Rowling") they don't imagine that matters. But they don't and it does. The median income of professional writers, the survey found, is £11,000. That's less in actual numbers, not just in real terms, than 2005 when it was £12,330. If the 2005 figure is adusted to 2014 prices, the drop is from £15,450 to £11,000: a drop of nearly a third in ten years, from poor to poorer. (I checked my own figures - down 25% over the same period.) Few people realise that most of the books their children read in school were written by someone paid between £1,000 and £2,000 for the book and sometimes less (that's before expenses, never mind tax). How long do you think they could afford to spend working on it? The amount I get for a book now is roughly half the amount I would get for a directly comparable book in 2000 (not adjusted for inflation - just bare numbers). Would *you* do your job for less than half the pay you had a decade and a half ago? That's why many writers are giving up writing full time.

The survey gives results for professional writers, which it defines as those who spend most of their earning time writing. That's a useful distinction because if the figures were distorted by people who wrote one book five years ago, it wouldn't be very helpful. But it also points out that the proportion of professional writers who can earn a living from writing alone has fallen from 40% to just 11.5% - most of us have to take on another job, or other freelance work. It wasn't clear whether 'income' meant 'turnover' or earnings after expenses have been subtracted (but before tax has been subtracted). To compare with people in employment, it should be the latter. Most people don't have to pay from their own pocket for the electricity they use in the office, the computer and software they use, and their office phone bill. If it's turnover, the situation is even worse as the cost of the items we have to pay for to do the job has gone up as our income as gone down, so they represent a greater proportion of turnover. - there's less left after paying for them.

There is little general sympathy for writers because we do a job we like and other people believe they would like to do. (It's odd that the same doesn't apply to other people who like their jobs, such as surgeons and landscape gardeners.) Those unsympathetic people probably imagine sitting at a desk in Tuscany for an hour or two each day 'penning' great stories when inspiration strikes. Yeah, right. Dream on. I work a standard 35-40 hour week and none of it is in Tuscany.


I'm principally a children's writer and this blog is about children's writing, so I'll focus on that. It's not a matter of simple market forces. We are not makers of slide rules crying because the world has moved on to calculators. Nor are we writing books people don't want to buy. That sometimes happens - it's an occupational hazard. We spend a long time developing a book and a publisher doesn't want it. Fine - if I've written an unsaleable book, I don't expect to be paid for it. The crux of the matter is that we write books that publishers do want, that do sell, and we are the only link in the chain that doesn't earn enough to live on. Printers and in-house editors haven't seen their income drop. The ALCS report found that professional writers earn only two-thirds of the amount considered to be a living wage. We can't live on the money we earn from the books we write. That average figure is less than a 19-year-old friend of mine earns working in a DIY shop - and his income will go up as he gains experience, not down.

Why should you care? Because if authors can't afford to live on their writing, they won't write as much. Yes, someone will still write fantasy series or some other type of fiction they feel like writing (probably not a writer with years of editorial input building his or her skills, though). But who will write the reading scheme stories, the reluctant-reader novels, the remedial maths texts, the books about space, dinosaurs, tractors, One Direction (God forbid we should lose those)? No one ever dreamed of sitting at a desk in Tuscany writing a comparison of fourteen types of digger, but that is exactly what might fire the imagination and love of reading of a five-year-old. If we kill off professional children's writers, our children and grandchildren will be the collateral damage. It's true - You don't know what you've got until it's gone.

Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
Latest books: Off the Rails and Soldier Boy (reissues), Ransom, June 2014
Go Figure: A Maths Journey (4 titles), Wayland, June 2014
Mega Machine Record Breakers, Carlton, May 2014 (does not include a comparison of 14 different types of digger)