There’s definitely a perception that, if you have had a book published, you’re set for life. Only yesterday on twitter, I had a lovely bearded chap called Bill in my mentions (no, not Mr Bragg, another middle aged white man with a beard who likes telling women what to do - yes, can you believe there’s more than one of them?). Bill was responding to a series of tweets I wrote in response to the amazing Hadley Freeman’s bombshell Woman’s Hour interview. In my thread I had tried to explain that a woman talking about her own experience of being censored doesn’t mean: “there isn’t actually a problem because, hey, she’s allowed to talk about it on the radio so der! there's obviously no censorship going on is there?!”, as countless Bills kept opining.
Anyway, Bill showed up, along with a whole army of other Bills, one of whom, without a trace of irony, told me on a thread about censorship of women’s voices to ‘keep your mouth shut’. But this Bill was different. He didn’t just tell me to keep quiet and get back in the kitchen, he - and he’s by no means the first man to take this line with me on twitter - took issue with the fact that I actually earn a living, and not only that, he went and looked me up on Amazon and declared I had written five books (news to me) and that they were in the ‘top 100 to 250 in their category’, therefore concluding I was part of some writerly elite and absolutely minted.
This post is not going to be all about Bill, although there’s definitely something more to be written about the free pass for public displays of misogyny that trans activism seems to be offering to him and to Bills everywhere. Bill’s speculation about the immense wealth that he feels I shouldn’t have been allowed to accrue ironically came just as the ALCS published the latest in a series of surveys into author’s earnings, and it doesn’t make very inspirational reading for those of you who are perhaps subscribed to The Book Forge because you hope for a future career as an author.
The ALCS survey found:
The median self employed income of a full time author has dropped from £12,330 in 2006 to £7000 in 2022.
The sex pay gap (I use the word sex here for clarity rather than ‘gender’) is widening: male authors are earning typically 41% more than their female counterparts (vs 33% in 2016/17)
Black and mixed heritage authors typically earn 51% lower than white authors.
Recently in the Book Forge I have written quite honestly about my struggle with book 4, and, to take that honesty a step further, some of that struggle and anxiety has been money related. It’s very difficult to write truthfully about finances, it’s not considered the ‘done thing’ to talk about what you earn and it also risks upsetting those who hold the purse strings - in my case, publishers - which is probably not a great career move when you’re already on the back foot. But it’s definitely time to shatter the illusions anyone may have that book writing is, to paraphrase Bill, akin to a ‘19th century Gentleman’s Club’. (I’m pretty sure Bill’s unconscious came up with that analogy because he secretly longs for a return to ‘19th century values’, and specifically, the concept of the man only club, but, of course, this post is not about Bill).
Book royalties are a strange game. For starters, you don’t really know how your books are doing until you get the payment, which comes (for me at least) twice a year in Spring and Autumn. Then you get sent a statement which details all the sales, paper, digital, audiobook etc, and, if you’re lucky, something plops into your bank account. One thing I always find curious is that you have to trust that your publishers have got the maths right - you really don’t have any way of checking the numbers so there’s a lot of trust involved. If they say you sold 352 paperbacks then you have to believe they’ve got that right. And in between May and September you have literally no idea what the next payment will be. I can’t think of another profession which involves this somewhat anxiety provoking combination of trust and surprise.
Then there are the advances. What seems to happen here is the publisher decides if they want the whole project to be their gamble, or yours. I have spoken to authors who have been paid tens of thousands in advance for a first book. In this case, it’s the publisher’s gamble. They are literally willing to bet a big stack of their chips that the book will be a success and that they will make that money back. In other cases, my own (and I suspect the majority of authors) included, it’s the author’s gamble. The advance will be much less, anywhere from £2k to £12k in my own experience. This is still a lovely amount of money, but remember, a) it’s for a year or two of your working life, and b) it’s an advance. Also don’t forget that you have to pay tax on that, your own National insurance or pension etc, and a cut to your agent of about 12% too.
If you get a low advance, this means it’s your gamble - if the book is a flop you won’t see any more money for it. ‘Advance’ means that it’s a payment against any possible royalties. So, if you get say £5k up front, then you have to sell a LOT of books before you ‘earn out’ your advance. Roughly, in my brain, it’s about £1 a book for my two grown up books, and 50p a book for my children’s book. So (very roughly) to ‘earn out’ £5k I would have to sell 5000 grown up books or 10000 children’s books. Only once your advance has ‘earned out’ will you start to get royalty statements in which you are effectively ‘in credit’. Some books never sell out their advance and it will be all the money the author ever sees for the project. You might get lucky with translations of your books (I’ve had a few), and for this you get another small ‘advance’ from the foreign publisher, which, depending on who owns the foreign rights, either comes to you direct via your agent, or just counts as sales against your advance.
Advances are also paid in three instalments (again this is my personal experience, other contracts may vary). So you get a third when you sign, a third when you deliver the completed manuscript and it’s approved, and a final third on publication. The period of time between signing and publication can be quite long - I think it will be nearly 2 years for this book I’m working on now. So when you take an advance, chop it into three, take off agents fees and tax, and then spread that out across two years of a writer’s life, well…it’s unlikely to be possible to live exclusively on this money and you will definitely have to substitute your income in other ways.
On the positive side, being an author of books gives you a certain amount of ‘kudos’ and ‘gravitas’. I will never tire of seeing my books on my own bookshelf, getting nice messages from people who have been helped by them, or seeing them in Waterstones etc. This kudos and gravitas also means you might be invited to go on the radio, or TV, or podcasts, or speak at events - although you rarely get paid to do this, because so often, the expectation is that you will be happy to do it for ‘the exposure’. But if twenty people buy your book after hearing you on Radio 2, then at a pound a book that’s £20 - the kind of exposure you can definitely die of.
I’ve been fascinated to follow Anna Wharton’s progress in setting up her own ‘real life’ book shop via her substack The Book Room. This week she was honest about her struggle to make a profit out of it, even when she lugged her entire pop up bookshop to a poetry event. Anna is wondering if she can continue to make a life out of running an independent bookshop, I am wondering if I can continue to make a life out of writing books. Both of us are good at these things and bring a passion for words and our own unique take on the world to the table. But we don’t live in a world in which passion and knowledge are enough to sustain us - we both need money too for this time and expertise. In the world of books, as in so many other industries, the money is unfairly distributed - Amazon’s net income for the past year was $11 billion; the ALCS survey showed the top 10% of authors earn nearly half of the profession’s total income.
I’m not going to offer a solution here, my expertise definitely doesn’t lie in the theory of economics. All I can offer is my thoughts and experiences hammered out into words for you to read. One such thought is that if we value books and bookshops, we need to find a better way to support those who write them and run them. For authors, I think this support should come in the form of better advances that at least reflect a living wage (if a book is going to take a year to write, for example, then the advance for it should not be less than an acceptable year’s salary within the publishing house itself). It shouldn’t be the writer’s ‘gamble’.
Speaking of gambling, I’m off to my club for a rubber of bridge and a whiskey or two. See you next week when I’ll hopefully be writing something about body image as I begin work on the next chapter. Cheers! Oh and here’s to you Bill! Up yer bum!
The Book Forge follows me as I work on my fourth non fiction book, and brings together all of my passions around writing, feminism and women’s health in regular articles, podcasts, and (for paid subscribers only) a regular diary of my progress. If you are enjoying it, please do consider supporting me with a paid subscription. Milli x