UK Study Shows Precipitous Decline in Authors' Incomes

Status
Not open for further replies.

rugcat

Lost in the Fog
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Sep 27, 2005
Messages
16,339
Reaction score
4,110
Location
East O' The Sun & West O' The Moon
Website
www.jlevitt.com
The previous thread about HarperCollins indicates publishing is getting back on track.

However, not so much for the writers of books.
Will Self's lament for the death of the novel earlier this summer has been cast into stark relief by "shocking" new statistics which show that the number of authors able to make a living from their writing has plummeted dramatically over the last eight years, and that the average professional author is now making well below the salary required to achieve the minimum acceptable living standard in the UK. . .

. . . Commissioned by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society and carried out by Queen Mary, University of London, the survey also found that in 2013, just 11.5% of professional authors – those who dedicate the majority of their time to writing – earned their incomes solely from writing. This compares with 2005, when 40% of professional authors said that they did so.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/08/authors-incomes-collapse-alcs-survey

This study was specific to the UK, but I would guess the situation in the US is not that different.
 

RightHoJeeves

Banned
Flounced
Joined
Nov 28, 2013
Messages
1,326
Reaction score
155
Location
Perth
Worth making the point that he seems to be quite focused on literary novels (I think from a brief look).
 

Roxxsmom

Beastly Fido
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 24, 2011
Messages
23,083
Reaction score
10,780
Location
Where faults collide
Website
doggedlywriting.blogspot.com
I think there's a general trend towards stagnating, or even declining income (in terms of real, adjusted dollars) for many professions (including some of those highly touted STEM fields), but it seems like professional writing has been particularly hard hit. The profitability of the parent industries is not the answer in most cases. For some reason, all the profits that various industries are making are not trickling down to the workers, or in the case of publishing, the people who actually create the material being sold.

As far as I know, it's not because people aren't reading anymore either. Maybe it's because the number of readers hasn't increased as fast as the number of books being produced? Or could it be that reader interests are more compartmentalized (even within a given genre), so it's relatively harder to become one of those authors who appeals to a wide enough audience to sell tons of books?

I can see why self publishing would be tempting, but it doesn't look like it's been much help here.
 
Last edited:

frimble3

Heckuva good sport
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 7, 2006
Messages
11,574
Reaction score
6,396
Location
west coast, canada
Of the authors mentioned in the article, the only one who's name I recognize is Wendy Cope. I have three of her books (as e-books), for what it's worth. At a rate of really liking only about 4 poems per book, I can't really justify the shelf space.
I wonder about the statistics. The article said they surveyed about 2,500 writers. How many are there in total, and how has that number changed?
And, how is that number calculated? Who counts as a 'professional' author? Is there a standard, or is it self-declared? Did they count every enthusiastic writer who eagerly puts their self-published, and unmarketed book up on Amazon?
Not saying that doesn't count as 'real' writing, and, yes, the article was full of individual stories, but, statistically, are hundreds of new authors who only sell a handful of copies changing the average amount earned per author?
I can't help but think that there's a correlation between the new, relative ease of self-publication, and e-publication, and the dropping average income.
 
Last edited:

Helix

socially distancing
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
11,698
Reaction score
12,083
Location
Atherton Tablelands
Website
snailseyeview.medium.com
I wonder about the statistics. The article said they surveyed about 2,500 writers. How many are there in total, and how has that number changed?
And, how is that number calculated? Who counts as a 'professional' author? Is there a standard, or is it self-declared? Did they count every enthusiastic writer who eagerly puts their self-published, and unmarketed book up on Amazon?
Not saying that doesn't count as 'real' writing, and, yes, the article was full of individual stories, but, statistically, are hundreds of new authors who only sell a handful of copies changing the average amount earned per author?
I can't help but think that there's a correlation between the new, relative ease of self-publication, and e-publication, and the dropping average income.

Two clicks brings you to this document, which is a bit light on, but provides some answers to your questions.
 

frimble3

Heckuva good sport
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 7, 2006
Messages
11,574
Reaction score
6,396
Location
west coast, canada
Two clicks brings you to this document, which is a bit light on, but provides some answers to your questions.
Thank you, I will do the clicking, possibly in the morning. Oh, yeah, technically it is morning.
-----
(scant minutes later) Interesting. I'll read it more carefully tomorrow, but it seems that one of the conclusions of the study is that the author keeping the rights is a big factor. Apparently re-use and re-sale is a big part of the potential earnings? Huh. I always assumed that they were sort of a subsidiary thing, a sort of after-thought, that the chief issue was to be able to get the rights back if the publisher went belly-up or lost interest in your work. I guess these days it's easier to make full use of your rights?
It does pay to read your contract carefully before signing!
 
Last edited:

Persei

Let it go
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 5, 2012
Messages
530
Reaction score
44
Location
Brazil
This reminds me of USA's Great Depression. They started to make more stuff than their population or other countries could buy and things went slightly downhill (or so I remember from history lessons haha). While it seems obvious for author's income to drop when it's so easy to self-publish and there are so many books available, both in digital and physical form, the survey itself doesn't seem quite right.

The division between "professional writers" and "all writers" is a bit shady though... Professionals are people who get paid to do stuff, not people who spend a lot of their time doing something.

I wrote a long ass post thinking the "all writers" group was a separate group but even so, I wouldn't completely trust the data about the professional writers group. What if a person who earns all of their income from writing doesn't spend the majority of their time writing?
 
Last edited:

Hapax Legomenon

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 28, 2007
Messages
22,289
Reaction score
1,491
I'm pretty confused about the paper.

The division between "professional writers" and others does not make sense. Considering the group that put it out, do all members of the group need to have been paid for writing to get in, like SFWA?

The ebook section is also very confusing. "With a typical return of investment of 40%" do they mean 40% on top of what was put into the work, or just 40% (meaning the work did not pay for itself to be produced)? The little graphic doesn't really help because it shows 40% of 100 people, and we're counting money, not people.
 

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
7,632
Reaction score
1,204
Location
London, UK
Website
torgoblog.blogspot.com
I'm pretty confused about the paper.

The division between "professional writers" and others does not make sense. Considering the group that put it out, do all members of the group need to have been paid for writing to get in, like SFWA?

The ebook section is also very confusing. "With a typical return of investment of 40%" do they mean 40% on top of what was put into the work, or just 40% (meaning the work did not pay for itself to be produced)? The little graphic doesn't really help because it shows 40% of 100 people, and we're counting money, not people.

The ROI stat seems to be about self-publishing rather than ebooks (though I assume most respondents on self-pub were talking about ebooks.) All I can imagine is that respondents made 40% more than they spent publishing books. But of course a lot of people aren't going to be spending much to publish, so it's not a terribly meaningful stat I think.

I would like very much to see more detail on the methodology, as I'm finding it hard to parse.
 

shadowwalker

empty-nester!
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 8, 2010
Messages
5,601
Reaction score
598
Location
SE Minnesota
This was, if I'm reading correctly, not a 'study', but a 'survey' - ie, they didn't randomly select published authors but rather they put up a questionnaire and people voluntarily took part. So that tells me that there's an almost automatic bias - the writers who are most unhappy (ie, their income has fallen) are going to be most interested in voicing their unhappiness.

Also, they seemed to concentrate on royalty payments, which I thought, based on all the discussions here and on other forums, are kind of a 'bonus' for most writers as a matter of course (the whole earning out business).

So based on that, I'm wondering if this is more "the sky is falling" with a bit of reality tossed in here and there. ??
 

Filigree

Mildly Disturbing
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 16, 2010
Messages
16,441
Reaction score
1,529
Location
between rising apes and falling angels
Website
www.cranehanabooks.com
For many of us in digital publishing - either self-publishing or commercial - royalties are our major aim, not a 'bonus'. We don’t get advances, or we get very small token advances well under $1000 (and often split into a schedule). We thrive or die based on royalty statements.

I'd *love* to sign a $6K or bigger advance contract with a Big Five science-fiction or fantasy imprint. That's one of the goals my agent and I have, for my mainstream work. But right now, earning royalties on my digital erotic romance works is more pressing than fishing for an advance.

When I first started writing in 1987, there were many mass market paperback authors in the SF&F genre who could write one or two books a year, and make a comfortable living between relatively generous advances and generally small royalties. That model has altered over the decades.

Even given the doom-filled tone of the UK survey, I think publishing has more potential earning power for more people than it did in '87. I just did some admittedly sloppy calculations of the June 2014 Amazon sales of two pro writer acquaintances (based on some sales numbers that even the monitoring service admits can be underestimates). I came up approximately $13K for one author, and $5K for the other. That's advance money territory, right there.
 

shadowwalker

empty-nester!
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 8, 2010
Messages
5,601
Reaction score
598
Location
SE Minnesota
For many of us in digital publishing - either self-publishing or commercial - royalties are our major aim, not a 'bonus'. We don’t get advances, or we get very small token advances well under $1000 (and often split into a schedule). We thrive or die based on royalty statements.

Okay - I was fuzzy on the strictly digital pub thing. Was that difference noted in the survey/articles (between ebook only and "all format" books)?
 

Filigree

Mildly Disturbing
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 16, 2010
Messages
16,441
Reaction score
1,529
Location
between rising apes and falling angels
Website
www.cranehanabooks.com
I need to re-read the original article. *Goes to look*.

Okay, I'm back. Smythe's comment about 'earning out', I take to mean that his sales have never been more than the original advance, so he's never reached the stage of getting royalties. It happens. In the genre I'm in, it would take only a month or so of adequate sales to earn out my tiny advances. For someone looking at a $6K to $20K advance or higher, there's more incentive to focus on advance-paying publishers.

His comment about self-publishing is more opinion and transferred fear/envy than truth, I suspect. Self-publishing is a gamble depending on many factors, a lot of which are outside a writer's control. But aiming for pro-quality work is always a better long-term plan than self-publishing inferior work - and that's firmly in the author's court.
 
Last edited:

Filigree

Mildly Disturbing
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 16, 2010
Messages
16,441
Reaction score
1,529
Location
between rising apes and falling angels
Website
www.cranehanabooks.com
Oh, bother.

I am neutral about self-publishing: it has saved some authors' careers and opened up new opportunities. It has also made unwitting laughingstocks of many, many clueless and unskilled authors who've published before they're ready.

This article just comes across as a mix of entitled whining (Traditional publishing is broken, oh noes!) and cheerleading (Self-publishing will save us all!)

Reality is the grey area between. Nobody *owes* us a living at writing; we chose this, whether as a hobby or vocation.
 
Last edited:

williemeikle

The force is strong in this one.
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 17, 2005
Messages
3,735
Reaction score
669
Location
Canada
Website
www.williammeikle.com
Mark Morris, a well respected UK genre writer, posted on Facebook that he now needs to write 3-4 novels a year to make the same amount of money he made from one back in the early '90s.
 

TheNighSwan

Banned
Joined
Oct 20, 2013
Messages
398
Reaction score
54
Location
France
I remember an anecdote (can't find the source back though so take it with a grain of salt) that Victor Hugo was once offered a contract for one of his novel that would have given him 50% royalties. Apparently at the time this was considered scandalously advantageous… to the publisher.
 

Beachgirl

Not easily managed
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
3,848
Reaction score
232
Location
On a beach, of course.

Yeah, I see several problematic statements in that article. Such as:

...but authors are receiving less per book and less overall due mainly to the fact that they are only paid a small percentage of publishers' net receipts on eBooks...
I get 40% of list price on eBooks sold on my publisher's site and 50% of net from 3rd party retailers ("net" defined in my contracts as the amount my publisher receives from the 3rd party retailers). That's not a "small percentage," IMO.

And:

There is still an imprimatur of quality from going with a traditional publisher, and you may well sell more copies, particularly in physical, but you are giving a vast amount away for that: probably well over 90% of the list price of the physical or ebook. More importantly almost all publishers ask for those rights for the whole lifetime of copyright with very limited possibilities of getting your rights back, even if sales are woeful.
Seriously? If I were presented a contract with those terms I would RUN AWAY! Any contract that gives the author less than 10% of eBook list price and demands lifetime rights is a pathetic contract not worth the time it would take to read it.

Unfortunately, many people will read these claims in the article (and those like it) and accept those statements as truth.
 

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
7,632
Reaction score
1,204
Location
London, UK
Website
torgoblog.blogspot.com
On ebook royalty rates: the percentage of net receipts we're talking about it typically 25%. The publisher is eating the sales tax of 20% in the EU, and also giving up god knows how much of the RRP to Amazon. It's not the huge cash pile it might appear.

Furthermore, it's totally fine for publishers to acquire term-of-copyright publishing rights - so long as there's a reasonable reversion clause. It works fine so long as when the publisher is no longer selling a reasonable number of copies, you can just request your rights back. Otherwise, what would a reasonable limit be for term of publishing rights, and what would that do to advances?
 

Beachgirl

Not easily managed
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
3,848
Reaction score
232
Location
On a beach, of course.
Otherwise, what would a reasonable limit be for term of publishing rights, and what would that do to advances?

My terms are five years, but maybe that's something that is more common to the genre? And since most of the digital first publishers in my genre don't do advances, that probably plays into the higher royalty percentages.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.