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

"Are you rich?" SPOILER: No (Anne Rooney)

 

I'm going to continue the theme started by Dawn yesterday with her excellent post on school visits: being a professional, being paid. This doesn't just affect the authors who are or aren't paid, it affects everyone. It determines who can write and so which books you see on the shelves. It's the elephant in the diversity room, and gets into a lot of other places, too. It's quite a nimble elephant, though a very large one.

For those of you who are not authors but readers, librarians, teachers, parents, here's a brief (simplified) rundown of how authors are paid. There are two basic models. 

The author might be paid a flat fee for a book, in which case they are paid, say, £1200-£3000 depending on the length and complexity of the book (we're talking children's books here). 

Alternatively, they will be paid an advance against royalties. This means that ultimately they will be paid a percentage of the publisher's takings for each copy sold (not a percentage of the cover price). It's likely to be 8-10% maximum, but if there is an illustrator the royalty is split, so each will get 4-5%. If a book sells for £7.99 (call it £8), the publisher's income from the book might be £4 (or a lot less), so 5% is 20p per copy. An advance is an advance payment against royalties. So if an author has an advance of £1200, that covers 6000 copies sold at 20p per copy. Most books never earn out the royalty so the author never gets any more than the advance. If their royalties eventually add up to more £1200, they begin to be paid the extra (this is likely to be years later and can't be depended on). Big names will get a higher advance, but they still won't get more money until the advance has been earned back in book sales. CAVEAT: many publishers sell a lot of books for far less than the cover price. Bulk sales to book clubs, discount shops like Books Etc, are at very low prices and often also pay a lower percentage royalty. 

Incidentally, flat fees and advances have in general not gone up — and indeed have often gone down — since I started writing children's books more than 20 years ago. With publishers I work with continuously, I usually manage to push them to an increase about every five years. The standard fee now for a book I was paid £2000 for in 1999 would be between £1350 and £1750, most likely £1500. (Actual figures, not adjusted for inflation.)

Looking at a recent royalty statement, I see I was paid £5.42 for sales of 250 copies of a book in a 'specials' deal. That's 2p a copy. It's less than I would get if someone borrowed it from a library (about 8p per loan). This is the kind of book a child might read in school, or pick up in the library as it's produced by a big publisher that sells directly into schools and libraries as well as bookshops. The rate can be less than 1p per book when the books are parcelled up with other titles in massive deals to Chinese publishers. Of course there are authors who earn a lot, but they are very few and far between. I know plenty of big-name chidren's authors who have other jobs because you can't raise a family on this level of pay. 

Most children's authors do paid school visits and rely on that income. Many make more from visits than from books. The books support the visit income, not the other way round. That's why it's vital they are paid properly for visits — no income, no more books. It's also why many authors bring their own books to sell: they will get more than 2p a copy if they have bought them at a discount from the publisher. 

What does the writer do for this money? They will do the writing, make revisions in line with the publisher's suggestions, suggest which pictures should be used or drawn, check the pictures, usually twice or more if they are commissioned illustrations, and specify changes as needed, and they will check the final pages (arranged text and pictures), again usually twice. If they are on a royalty contract, they will also be expected to do a lot of free publicity. On a flat-fee contract, they might be expected to do it but probably won't as it won't increase their earnings and takes away the time they could be earning by writing another book. It's arguable whether publicity pays back on a royalty contract — an hour of publicity would have to sell, say, 100 copies to get back £20. Will a blog post that takes an hour to write yield 100 full-price sales? Unlikely. 

Income here is turnover, not earnings. Authors have expenses that aren't paid for by someone else. If you go to work in an office, your employer has paid for the computer and software you use, the heating and electricity in your office, the fast broadband, the phone bill, the stationery. You don't have to spend unpaid hours reading contracts, sending invoices, chasing payment, contacting helplines when stuff doesn't work, ordering things you need. If you have to go on a business trip, you don't have to pay your own train fare. I pay over £1000 a year just in software licences and domain hosting. That has to be paid even if I don't write a single book, as not having them would mean I couldn't write a single book. (Though that doesn't apply to someone starting out, who could write their first book in Open Office. This is because I have established relationships with publishers and work on a lot of books with a very high level of illustration.) 

Looking at 2018-19 as the last normal, pre-pandemic year, my expenses were around £3000 for the year. There is, of course, no sick pay, holiday pay or anything else. Suppose a person wanted to earn the average UK wage of £26,000 pa (Feb 22 figure). They would need a turnover of, say, £29,000. At £2000 a book, that's nearly 15 books a year, more than one a month — one-and-a-half a month if you take out 8 weeks for bank holidays (8 of them), holidays (4 weeks) and a bit of time to have covid. Once you are established, there is a trickle of income from PLR (public lending rights, from library loans) and ALCS (from photocopying) and royalties build up over time if your books earn out. But books also fall out of print and aren't reprinted (no more sales) and library and school copies fall apart and aren't replaced (they buy new books) so you have to keep producing new books. 

This is why there is not much diversity in children's publishing, just as much — if not more — than because of lack of diversity on editorial boards. People who have no independent source of income, or another job, can't afford to be published writers. Most writers start by writing in their spare time, but if you are already working two jobs and perhaps raising children in poverty, where is that 'spare time'? If you are worried about paying the bills, or kids being bullied, or that your flat is damp, no amount of talent will get you the head-space and time you need to perfect and sell a book. And writing the book is only about half the time the book takes (see tasks involved, above). Most professional children's writers I know have an earning partner or a pension or another job. I don't, but that's unusual. 

There is no easy solution to this. It isn't that publishers should just pay more to their authors (though authors should benefit more from the cheap, bulk deals which are drawing sales away from full price books and benefiting only the publisher). Looking at that book I used in the example, that earned £5.41 for 250 discounted sales: the total income to the publisher for that book in all sales is £34,000, of which I have had £1,750, so pretty much the 5% royalty rate. (This one hasn't actually sold many on cheap deals. It's quite a recent book, so discount sales will likely come along later rather than early in its life.) That's for 12,500 copies, so the publisher's takings are about 50% of cover price. It required a photoshoot, had in-house editorial costs, was printed, shipped, stored, had to cover a portion of the overheads for premises, staff, utilities, marketing and so on. The publisher is not raking it in on this title, and I'm not being particularly short-changed. 

The real problem is that they are getting as much for a book as Costa gets for a cup of coffee. We don't value books and we don't value the people that produce them. We can't expect people from under-represented groups, who are often already struggling, to produce all the books we need to have a truly diverse offering, just as a passion project. We need some more creative solution to the problem than publishers and agents specifically inviting people from under-represented groups to submit to them (though that is a good thing, too). To say people feel that 'authors don't look like me' is (while possibly true) to skirt around the real, intractable issue. Writing doesn't pay. To get to the point where it does — or, rather, might — takes a long time and a lot of work. (And even then it can be taken away at a stroke if the type of book you write is no longer fashionable and publishers no longer want it.) Work that has to be subsidised by other work, or a supportive other person. You don't fix the problem of under-representation by making the under-represented people pay for representation. Something else is needed. 

If you're interested in more detail of how authors make a living (or don't), ALCS has produced a series of interviews with writers called 'My Writing Living. I've done one, too, here. 

 Anne Rooney

My course on how to write children's non-fiction, with the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) at Cambridge University runs from 11 July

Out now: Miles Kelly, Dec 2021

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