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Author economics: the brutal truth
Simon Kuper: I’ve found pdfs of my books free online. ‘Information wants to be free,’ says a modern mantra. Well, my information doesn’t, Oct 3, 2014
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I’ve just had the latest royalty statement for my first book, published 20 years ago. This January through June, I sold 654 copies of the British edition. My earnings: only £257.20, or 39p a book.
Honestly, the problem isn’t just me. Only fools ever wrote books to get rich but today very few authors can even live off it. Our agents and publishers congregating at next week’s Frankfurt Book Fair will squabble over a shrinking pie. Author economics keep deteriorating. That is changing the kind of books that get written.
Close reading of my royalty slip reveals the first big problem: discounts. On almost every copy I sold, the publisher gave the bookseller – typically either Amazon or Waterstones(a British book store) – a discount of more than half the cover price. That’s normal nowadays, and much higher than before, explains my agent, Gordon Wise. Even if the customer paid the cover price of £8.99, I get just 39p.
But few customers still pay £8.99. On Amazon my book costs £6.29 new or only 1p second-hand. Finding used books has never been easier, and pays authors nothing. Or you could buy an ebook of mine on sale for 99p. In the latest discounting battle, Amazon is reportedly pressuring French publisher Hachette to cut prices for its ebooks. And if Brussels lets customers resell their ebooks, I’ll get nothing at all.
Many readers today philosophically oppose paying for words. I’ve found pdfs of my books free online. “Information wants to be free,” says a modern mantra. Well, my information doesn’t.
Anyway, nowadays you can enjoy yourself with unprecedented ease without reading my book. Instead, you could watch almost any TV show on earth, or mess about online, or read one of the one million-plus other books published in English this year. No other struggling industry has this many product launches, notes a publisher. Little wonder that publishers concentrate their remaining cash on a few bestselling authors.
The consequence: the median income of British professional writers (ie people whose main job is writing) is now £11,000, down from £15,540 in 2005, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. That’s even though British writers earn more per capita from translations than their peers anywhere else. The low incomes make total sense: if you’re getting 39p per copy, then even moving 20,000 copies a year will earn you just £7,800.
Worse, authors must now work as unpaid self-promoters forever tweeting and blogging about their books. The New Yorker magazine recently ran a skit about an author offering readers her cellphone number, home address, and adding: “In fact, if you drop by and I’m not home? SLEEP WITH MY HUSBAND. Seriously, go ahead.” For now, this remains a parody.
Of course, few writers ever lived from books alone. Most worked as academics, journalists or advertising copywriters. Often, journalistic or academic work effectively funded research for non-fiction books. Not any more: all those professions have shrunk and taken big pay cuts. That must reduce the number of well-researched books.
One ancillary profession has grown: speaking. If you write a business book, you might get £5,000 for giving a 40-minute talk about it – more, probably, than you’ll earn from book sales. But few novelists get paid to talk.
Nonetheless, half the planet still wants to be a paperback writer. People are right to write. They just need to be realistic about it. A friend writing his first book said to me, “I hope it makes a splash.” Cruelly, I told him: “It won’t.” I said most books are like stones thrown into the ocean: they sink soundlessly at once. Many get zero reviews.
But, I said, if a few peers like your book, your professional status will rise. Then one day your great-grandchild will find the thing on the bookshelf, read a few pages, and say, “That’s the man my great-grandfather was.” You write to leave a trace. As the critic Cyril Connolly warned, few books live 10 years – less than a dog or car – but small contributions to the culture are worthwhile too. My friend’s book got nice reviews, and sold some copies. You don’t need to be Tolstoy.
Another reward: your book is your entry ticket into the world of authors. Good authors are curious, original, articulate and sometimes even funny people. I’ve never found better company.
So people keep writing. But many now do it as self-expression: a book as a Facebook page writ long, memoirs of unremarkable lives. Nearly 400,000 books were self-published in the US in 2012, reports Bowker, the market research group. These writers aren’t doing it to make a living. Hardly anyone is any more.
To survive in this former profession, you probably need a rich spouse or rich parents. A publishing friend says he now struggles to find writers “from a non-upper-middle-class background”. There aren’t many new Philip Roths(a Pulitzer-winning writer) recreating lower-middle-class Americans or new Dickenses giving us poor London. Surprise, surprise: the 1 per cent is taking over.
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