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

 

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