How can it ever work? (Anne Rooney)

 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.

Anne Rooney

Out now: 81 Mind-Blowing Biology Facts, 1 April 2024, Arcturus

 

Publishing as a Business Part II: A Call to Arms! by C.J. Busby

Last month on ABBA, I wrote a post on the publishing business and authors' earnings (Publishing as  Business - is it time to revolt?). It took off from the campaign arguing that festivals don't pay authors a fair fee, and asked if actually it's time to start looking at publishers' payments to authors. I suggested that maybe high profile authors like Philip Pullman, who were making waves about festivals, might start turning their ire on publishers.

Well - lo and behold!

Philip Pullman turned some of his ire on publishers in an open letter to the Society of Authors (reported on here, in the Bookseller). He likened the publisher-author relationship to that between a "steamroller and an ant" and urged publishers to "treat authors more equitably" or risk them becoming "an endangered species".

Sadly, I can't polish my magic wand just yet - Pullman's letter came out before my blogpost. I just hadn't noticed it.

But perhaps it shows that the issue of publishers' profits and writers' incomes is beginning to have traction. Beginning to be something we can't just keep wringing our hands about.

Publishers, as I pointed out in my last post, are making profits, despite the loss of the net book agreement, despite Amazon, despite video games and the easy availability of entertaining apps on phones. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of children's books, generating something like 30% of the books market according to the Cover Kids Book campaign (here).

The problem is, very little of that money is getting through to the people who actually write the books. As we know, the average income for professional writers is £11,000, and while some earn astronomically more, many earn less. This means that if you aren't one of the lucky few, you can only really afford to be a professional full-time writer if you have: a) very little need for income, b) a salaried partner, c) other better-paid part-time work (perhaps doing school visits, or something quite unrelated to writing) which is subsidising your writing career, or d) you work like stink on non-fiction or writing for a packager. Only a) and b) are going to help your own fiction-writing career flourish.

But how can we change things? Given there is a huge pool of non-professional writers out there, desperate to get a contract and live the dream, publishers have us over a barrel. Don't like your advance? Fine, we'll give the contract to someone else. It's the law of the market.

Except - things don't always have to operate according to neoliberal fantasies of markets red in tooth and claw. There is such a thing as ethics in public life, and companies can be taken to task on ethical principles. There are strong arguments and campaigns for a "living wage", for example, or for the benefits of fair trade, which have been able to force changes in companies like supermarkets, chain stores and restaurants.

Even with the campaign for fair fees at festivals, we have seen that an outcry by major authors can force an acknowledgement of basic unfairness and the beginnings of better practice. How much more effective could a campaign aimed at major publishers be? After all, festivals aren't making profits - publishers are. And if their response was to say that if they had to pay higher advances, they'd have to publish fewer books, well, so be it. Maybe that would be a good thing. Fewer books might mean more discrimination about giving out contracts, more emphasis on publicising those books rather than letting them sink or swim alone, more emphasis on nurturing and developing writers, who would represent a more substantial investment to the company. All these things would be good. And if they meant I never got another contract again, that would be fine by me - so long as some people were, and they were being treated well, and our writing industry was in robust health, rather than limping along exploiting people's dreams of being J.K. Rowling.

So here's a challenge. The Society of Authors could investigate what it considered to be a minimum fair advance for novels of different lengths, acknowledging that writing 30,000 words of well-crafted prose takes less time than 100,000 words (but not a third of the time, since plotting and coming up with ideas and doing research can be equally time-consuming for both). They could then act like a proper union (like Equity does, for actors, another profession subject to the vagaries of a market where so many people want to act that if Equity didn't exist, the minimum wage for a jobbing actor would most likely be 50p per day). They should set that advance as a benchmark for fair trade, and publicise the fact. And if they do, I'll join them. (At the moment, I can't justify the expense.)

Obviously publishers would be free to offer more for books they think are particularly skilful or marvellous - but no one is ever offered a contract unless they are considered to be a good writer, and as such they surely merit at least minimum wage. Thus a minimum advance seems entirely reasonable. Based on my own output, I should say £10,000 per MG novel is the very bottom end of what should be considered a living wage for writers (that's three times what I was offered, in fact, for my first book).

Once this is in the public domain, we can campaign on it. Publishers could be encouraged to sign up to it as a common standard for the industry - to pledge they would offer at least the minimum living wage to all their writers. Their established writers could request that they do so, and perhaps think about leaving for a more fair-minded publisher if they didn't. New writers would be encouraged to insist on the minimum wage, in the same way that actors generally ask for Equity rates, in the same way that we are now all beginning to feel the pressure to ask for proper fees for festival visits. It's right, proper and fair - and it's time we pulled together to make it happen. Otherwise we risk seeing writing disappear as anything other than a hobby for the already rich and famous, or the incredibly lucky. This would narrow the breadth of writer's experiences, narrow the social groupings they came from, and narrow the kinds of writing our children had access to. It would be a tragedy.

So - who's with me?


CJ. Busby writes humorous fantasy adventures for ages 7-12. Her latest book, The Amber Crown, was published last year by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)