There has been some debate this week (as so often) among the members of the SAS who bring you this blog about why authors earn so little, and what can be done about it. I can answer the first bit, but not the second. It has to do with how little people pay for books, and the small proportion of that little that gets to authors and illustrators.
Imagine you have written a picture book that sells for £10 at full price. You will receive 5% of the money the publisher gets for the book, and the illustrator will also receive 5%. This is called a royalty. The publisher will very rarely get £10 for a copy of the book — only if they sell it from their own website, really. Most of the time they will get about £5 (if they are lucky) after the distributor and shop/Amazon have taken their share. So now, as author, you can claim your 5% of £5. That's 25p per copy. But wait — lots of copies will be sold at *huge* discounts and you will be lucky to get 2p a copy. No, ignore that. Let's see what you could get if everyone played fair. You get 25p. Of course, if you have an agent, you will lose 20% of that 25p, so now you have only 20p per copy.
How many 25ps do you need to live on? To make the numbers easy, let's say you want £25,000 — though that is turnover not profit and is not enough to live on. To get £25,000, you would need the publisher to sell 100,000 copies of your book. I have been writing for 25 years and have only ever written two books that have sold more than 100,000 copies. Most books sell fewer than 10,000 copies. And those sales are over its whole life, not in one year. Let's pretend your book will sell 10,000 copies over four years. That's 2,500 copies a year (though it won't be that even). You will get £625 a year. To have an inadequate turnover of £25,000, you will need 40 books earning for you, each selling 2,500 copies a year, every year. If we assume the earning lifespan of a book is four years, you need to publish (not just write — some will be rejected) 10 books a year.
(Let's pause to use better figures: 20p a copy (you have an agent) and you need a turnover of £40,000 because remember authors get no sick pay, no holiday, no employer's pension contributions [pension? what pension?] and have to pay all their own running expenses. At 20p a book, you need to sell 200,000 copies. Every year. At 10,000 copies, over four years, you will have only £500 a year. So you will need 80 books that are earning you royalties every year, publishing 20 a year.)
I've simplified this. Most books are sold for an advance against royalties, which is paid up front by the publisher, usually in three chunks. The advance has to be earned back before you get any royalties. So if you have an advance of £3000, and you are making 20p per book, the publisher will have to sell 15,000 copies before you get any extra money, above the £3000. Most books never earn out — they don't sell enough to generate any royalties. So most authors are living on advances, which at least don't take four years to get (though they can: the staged payments can be years apart). The earning-out problem is massively hindered by discounted sales. If your book is sold to a discount outfit like Book People in large numbers, you might be earning only 2p a copy (or less). It takes far more sales to earn out the advance, and as a lot of people buy the book cheaply, there are fewer readers who want it who will be paying full price.
There are a few extra chunks of money. You should earn money from library loans (PLR, Public Lending Rights) and photocopying of your books (ALCS, Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society). Let's be optimistic and say you earn £5,000 a year from these. Now you need to earn only £20,000 (or £35,000) from royalties/advances, so you only need to sell 80,000 (or 175,000) copies a year, so you only need to be publishing 8 (or 17.5) books a year.
Of course, out of your £25,000 or £40,000 you have to pay tax, and for all your computer equipment, software licences, broadband, travel for research/meetings/conferences and any other expenses. There will be days, if not weeks, wasted while publishers don't get back to you with information you need. There will be book proposals that initially look as though they are being accepted and are then rejected further down the line. Occasionally, a publisher will go bust and never pay you.
Could it ever work out well? Suppose you got a digital-first deal of 25% on a genre novel that might sell 100,000 copies. (But digital-first sells for £3 or so at most, and isn't an option for children's writers.) Even so, 25% of half of £300,000 is still only £37,500. A full-length novel every year, every one of them successful, and you could just about survive. Yes, self-publishing. Do you really think you can shift 100,000 copies without a marketing department? A few people can — they either got in early or they already have a name through traditional publishing (or being a celebrity). Most people can't. Most people who want to be writers want to write, not market stuff.
The average income for a professional writer is £7,000. This is why: maths.
Out now: 81 Mind-Blowing Biology Facts, 1 April 2024, Arcturus
8 comments:
All horribly true. Thank you for putting it all so clearly, Anne.
Thank you, Anne, for sending me the link to this excellent summary. It's all true, and I accept it. However, I have been writing for more than 30 years now. I can remember when it wasn't true. Like you, I am good at maths. I well remember when: Fulltime lab wage- Childcare =writing wage. A calculation that I did many times before making the jump. Granted, I still had to buy in a bit of childcare, but on the other hand I had not such a long and still in print backlist as I have now. The difference is in the advances, I think. They've gone down, or rather, they've not gone up. Because you are right, we've always lived on advances and royalties have been the extra. Although a very significant extra. I used to be able to expect £5k a year twice a year for combined royalties. It's now a 10th of that at best, with a far longer backlist of well reviewed and award winning books still in print. So my question is, what has happened in publishing to make that change? Because something has, for sure. Nobody could make the jump from fulltime professional work to writing income these days (unless they had a partner who could support them or private money. I had neither.)
Hilary, as you say, advances have not gone up, but I think also because *so many* copies are massively discounted that no book is likely to earn out, so the small advance really is all we get. I often get less now than 20 years for a comparable book,not just less after adjusting for inflation. I put in a 1999 amount of £2000 to the Bank of England inflation calculator and the current value is £3668. So we essentially get half what we did 25 years ago, at best, and now without the the extra royalties because of the discounted sales.
Excellent if depressing thoughts, confirming my fears. It's slightly comforting to hear of others in a similar `place'but I guess we won't stop writing....
Had a royalty statement recently for 32p..🤣
Discounting happened! The Net Book Agreement finally died in 1997, I believe?
"Most books sell fewer than 10,000 copies" That's a vast understatement. 99.9999999999 percent of books sell less than 10,000 copies. And for you to say you've "only" written two books that have sold more than 100k copies is totally tone deaf.
Thanks so much for setting this out, Anne. I think it's really helpful to have the facts and stats. For anyone outside the industry they will only ever hear of the huge book deals, and even the £7k a year average is so far skewed by those big celebrity deals - people don't realise that's not what the average non-celeb writer is earning through writing. If debut writers can go in with this knowledge they might have a better chance of retaining their sanity/self esteem.
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