Median earnings of professional authors fall below the minimum wage

More than 200 years after Samuel Johnson asserted that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”, a comprehensive new survey of the UK’s authors has found that many make nothing at all from their writing.

According to a report into the earnings of almost 2,500 working writers released on Monday by Queen Mary, University of London, there is a “huge inequality” in the amount of money made by writers, with the top earners taking a vast proportion of the total money earned.

The top 10% of professional authors, those who make £60,000 or more a year from their writing, earned 58% of all the money made by professional authors in 2013, and the top 5%, those making more than £100,000, earned 42.3% of that money. The top 1%, who make mean average earnings of more than £450,000, take 22.7% of all earnings, said the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, which commissioned the UK-based survey.

The picture for lower-earning writers was much bleaker. The bottom 50% of authors were those who earned less than £10,500 in 2013, and accounted for just 7% of the amount earned by all writers put together. And 17% of all writers did not earn anything at all during 2013, said the ALCS, adding that 98% of those authors had published a work every year from 2010 to 2013.

“Thus, at least 17% of writers are continuing to work without any expectation of earnings,” said the report, The Business of Being an Author. “It appears that writing is a profession where only a handful of successful authors make a very good living while most do not.”

Philip Pullman, president of the Society of Authors, condemned the findings as “a national disgrace”.

The award-winning author of the His Dark Materials trilogy said: “In the past ten years, while publishers’ earnings have remained steady, the incomes of those on whom they entirely depend have diminished, on average, by 29%. While bankers and hedge fund managers (who do nothing that can be understood) gather in more money than can be imagined, the work of authors (who give delight, or knowledge, or consolation) is rewarded on average with little more than 40% (£11,000) of the national median earnings.

“While Amazon makes earnings of indescribable magnitude by selling our books for a fraction of their value, and then pays as little tax as it possibly can, the authors whose work subsidises this gargantuan barbarity are facing threats to their livelihood from several directions: from publishers’ increasing habit of letting backlists disappear while concentrating largely on proven bestsellers, as well as from the government’s obvious disinclination to do anything to help keep the library sector alive.”

Nicola Solomon, Society of Authors’ chief executive, said “We are not surprised to see that there is a high concentration of earnings in a handful of successful writers whereas most do not earn much at all; that has always been the case. However we are saddened to see that the inequality is increasing.”

She added: “That confirms our observations that publishers are tending more and more to concentrate on safe choices and celebrity brands, sometimes at the expense of supporting backlist and midlist authors who sell steadily but more slowly.”

Solomon also pointed to the difference in earnings between genres: according to the survey, adult fiction writers made a mean net income of £28,809 in 2013, children’s fiction £25,614, non-fiction writers £14,135, travel writers £8,539 and academic authors £3,826. “Non-fiction and particularly academic writers fare badly in comparison with fiction,” she said.

“It is notable that in the areas where income is lowest, terms and conditions are worst. Academic writers are less likely to have received advances and fiction writers are more than twice as likely to retain their copyright than academic writers or travel writers. We have long been concerned that the worsening of terms in academic and educational writing is leading to a decline in writers in these fields as it is simply not worthwhile to write the type of quality books for which Britain is renowned and which contributed to the huge export sales of British books last year.”

James Dawson, an award-winning young adult novelist, is a full-time writer. “That’s because I decided to make it work,” he said. “I pitched a non-fiction title because I thought if I’m able to write two books a year I’ll be able to manage. I also do one day a week for a charity, and I write journalism. I just have to make it work, but then I don’t have a mortgage, or kids – no one’s depending on me.”

Dawson said he didn’t begrudge the top 10% their sales. “It’s the fact there’s such a gap – it feels like there’s nothing in the middle,” he said. “I was lucky to get a really good deal as a debut author; it seems publishers gamble a lot on a debut, but then if it doesn’t pay off, the pay plummets. But that’s the system, and I don’t see it changing. There’s an element of alchemy to it – they’re trying to create gold, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Daniel Hahn, chair of the Society of Authors, said: “Anybody interested seeing in a future with books in it should be profoundly troubled by what today’s report is telling us.”

The comprehensive report follows the release of initial findings from the survey last summer that the median earnings of a professional author, defined as someone who spends more than half their working life on self-employed writing, were just £11,000, down 29% in real terms on 2005 and less than the minimum wage. The median earnings of all authors were just £4,000.

Secondary sources of income are limited for authors, as Pullman pointed out: “The writers of the books that we know people love to read cannot earn a living by going on tour, filling stadiums night after night, and then signing books at the door. Our business doesn’t work like that. We’re not demanding special treatment: just pointing out the need for simple financial justice.”

Queen Mary’s also revealed that “there remains a significant gender pay gap among professional authors”, with women writers earning 80% of that earned by men, compared to 91.5% in the population as a whole. This “discouraging finding”, said the report, is “balanced slightly” when the earnings of all writers, not just those who define themselves as “professional”, are included: female writers then earn 97.1% of what male writers make.

Just over a quarter – 26.5% – of respondents had self-published a book in the last year, revealed the report. The top 10% of self-published writers made a profit of £7,000 or more, and the top 20% made almost £3,000. But the bottom 20% of DIY earners made losses of at least £400, revealed the report, adding: “it remains a risky venture therefore, but one where there are meaningful returns on investment in some cases”.

David J Rodger, who has self-published nine novels, said that “if I was to value the time I’ve spent writing, according to my commercial rate as a digital project manager then I am definitely in the ‘making a loss’ category”. But he’s still chasing “the big success. That one book that goes supernova in the media and satisfies public hunger for newsworthy fiction.”