Friday 9 December 2022

Cost of living crisis? You bet - Anne Rooney

 This week CREATe produced the results of the latest ALCS survey into authors' earnings. If' you're an author, there will be no surprises in it. If you're a reader, you will (I hope) be horrified. The survey is conducted every four years, and involves questioning authors about their income. The first survey was in 2006; this year's (2022) reflects income affected by Brexit and covid. It isn't pretty.

First, a defintion. The figures relate to people who are "main income" or "primary occupation" writers. That means people who devote at least half of their working time to writing, so the person who once wrote a book that still brings in £10 in royalties every year isn't counted in the figures. The accountant who's written an accountancy book that earns thousands in royalties each year isn't counted if they mainly work as an accountant. Even the teacher who writes a few reading scheme books isn't counted. These figures are from actual, working, career authors.

The headline figures are what you really need to see. The median income from writing for authors in 2022 was £7000. Yes, £7000. In 2006, it was £12,330. Adjusted for inflation the 2006 figure would be £17,608. That means that in real terms our income has dropped by over £10,600 in the last 16 years. Even in actual numbers it has dropped more than £5000 in 16 years. Put another way, what a median-earning author earns today is worth just under 40% of what they earned in 2006. The media is full of working groups demanding pay rises because their income has fallen behind. None of them has fallen this far behind. We have not seen even straight numerical increases since 2006 — we have seen a numerical decrease. Even if we still lived with 2006 prices, our income would be less than 60% of what it was 16 years ago.

Authors' incomes 2006–2022

I can give you a real-world example of this. I wrote my first children's book in 1998, so 24 years ago. I was paid a flat fee of £2000 for 48 pages. The last book contract I signed this year was for a flat fee of £2225 for a book 128 pages long — so more than twice the length of the first book for only £225 extra in actual figures, ignoring inflation/cost-of-living rise. (This was a relatively easy book; a more typical book that length on a flat fee would be £3000.) 

If we took the 1998 book and adjusted for inflation, that book should now attract a fee of £3546.63 (figure from Bank of England inflation calculator). I don't write many 48-page books these days, but a likely figure would be around £1500, so a drop of £500 over 24 years. Most books I write now are either 32 pages or 128 pages. The one I'm writing now (128 pages, contracted a year ago) has a fee of £3500 and I had to negotiate the fee up. It's more than two-and-a-half times as long as the 1998 book for marginally less than the inflation-adjusted fee for 48 pages. That means my hourly rate is less than half what it was 24 years ago. (In reality, how long it takes to write a book depends more on the content than the page extent. But publishers don't work it out like that, they work by page extent.) This is what the figures in the document really mean.

This is also why you should not ask writers to work for free, not ask them to do free school visits, and not ask them to give you books (even for charitable causes). 

Of course, writers can't live on £7000 a year. They need to subsidise their main job, sometimes by doing writing-adjacent work like school visits or teaching writing, sometimes by having a different type of part-time job. I know writers who do pet-sitting, farming, legal work, web design... but if it takes more than half their time they aren't counted in the survey, of course. Many, possibly most, are subsidised by an earning spouse, a pension fund, family money, or money they made in an earlier career. This last means the pool of writers from which publishers can take books is angled towards privileged, usually white, middle-class, able-bodied people. While pubishing is trying (it claims) to be more inclusive, the very low pay means it isn't going to be. A person without someone else supporting them can't, typically, make a living from writing. You might want to read a book by a young Black writer, a neuro-diverse older person, or a working-class woman with three children, but they probably can't afford to write one for you to read. 

In the paragraph above, I used an example of a flat-fee book (flat-fee now accounts for around a third of publishing contracts) because it made comparisons easier. Many books are paid for with an advance and royalties. The advance is paid in three stages, the last typically being when the book is published — an event outside the author's control. It means the writer might wait up to three years for payment. Advances have dropped considerably since 2006. I don't have average figures, as publishers are very cagey about advances and they differ immensely. But a person getting a £1000 advance today would not be atypical, and many smaller publishers pay no advance at all. The author has to wait for the royalties (their share of the sales income), which will come years after they started writing the book. Royalties are paid every six months, and are usually around 8% of the price the publisher receives, which is itself around half of the cover price. So if your book sells for £10, you will get at best 80p a copy and more likely 40p a copy. On bulk sales of children's books, I sometimes get less than 1p a copy. When teachers buys books from places like Book People, the author might get 2p a copy. We would honestly earn more if you borrowed them from a library. (Borrowing from a council-run public library pays an author around 10p per loan. Borrowing from a school library or volunteer-run public library pays nothing.)

I'm going to anticipate the 'you could always self-publish' comments that are bound to follow this post. No, it doesn't work like that. For one thing, it's hard (and expensive) to self-publish illustrated books, which most children's books are. You have to pay an illustrator or pay rights to use pictures from picture libraries, and pay an editor, designer and layout artist. You have to publicise and market the book yourself, which is hard and time-consuming. And honestly, if you are good at publicity, you can make a lot more money working in publicity than you can by writing books. Selling stuff and writing books are not the same job. But that's not really the point. The point is that if you write books good enough that a publisher wants to publish them, and trusts they can make money from them, you should be paid fairly for the work.

Finally, for clarity: I have focused on book authors here, but authors include screenwriters, translators, journalists and many others. Around half of the writers in the survey identified themselves as book authors.

You can read a summary and the full report to get more gruesome details.

Anne Rooney

Out now from Oxford University Press






 

Baby Polar Bear, illustrated by Qu Lan

4 comments:

Mary Hoffman said...

I got far less than 2p a copy when the Book People took thousands of copies of one of my books years ago. Something like 0.03p. And don't let them kid you they are concentrating on buyers who would never go near a bookshop, not when copies of their catlogue fall out of your Radio Times or Guardian. Everyone involved in publishing a book makes more than the originator does. A sad state of affairs and, as you say, not conducive of diversity.

Stroppy Author said...

That makes sense. I calculated one of my Book People titles and thought it came out to 0.02p, so assumed I'd missed a £/p conversion — obviously not! I didn't realise they distributed their catalogues with Guardian and RT

Susan Price said...

"This is also why you should not ask writers to work for free, not ask them to do free school visits, and not ask them to give you books (even for charitable causes)."

"Of course, writers can't live on £7000 a year. They need to subsidise their main job...This last means the pool of writers from which publishers can take books is angled towards privileged, usually white, middle-class, able-bodied people...You might want to read a book by a young Black writer, a neuro-diverse older person, or a working-class woman with three children, but they probably can't afford to write one for you to read..."

Hear [insert hearty expletive of your choice] hear!
I recently refused an offer to write a series of educational books, producing 'first drafts' and 'finished drafts' on a sort of rolling production line over six months. It would have paid me (if everything went well) about £370 a month, which wouldn't even cover my household costs. But wouldn't leave me time to do much else.

There was no evidence that the publishers had any idea of the kind of thinking, re-thinking, planning, research, organising and concentration -- in other words, Hard Work! -- that would be necessary to actually do this -- and not even a guarantee that my work would be accepted and paid for! Thanks so much, but no thanks.

Rowena House said...

Thank you for this, Anne. Glad that the book industry's lip-service to diversity is being called out. Unpaid/massively underpaid work is sending us back decades.