Doom, doom, doom

Every few years, a British authors’ outfit, the ALCS, commissions a survey. And every few years, the ALCS reports the results in doom-laden tones.

The results this year (to quote Joanne Harris and the boss of the Society of Authors, a body that represents authors) are once again dire:

“When the ALCS first ran its survey of author incomes in 2006 it found that the median self-employed income of a full-time author was £12,330. In 2022 – a year in which multiple publishers have posted record profits while freelancers in all professions are still reeling from the impact of Covid-19, Brexit and rising living costs – the median full-time income has fallen to £7,000. That’s a drop of more than 60% when accounting for inflation.”

She also says:

“I have made a career out of being an author. It has been a great privilege to be able to do that. But I am deeply saddened that the job I love has become inaccessible and unsustainable for others – and increasingly ruled by luck …

We arrive at what we imagined would be the creative heart of an industry, but it turns out to be a room full of slot machines. Some of us are lucky enough to feed the right slot at the right time and hit jackpots of varying sizes. Others bring their own luck to the room – they can afford to feed the slots regardless of what they get in return. But what about everyone else? Who can honestly afford to stay?”

You won’t hear me arguing about the role of luck. Indeed, my last email, about the literary multiverse, talked about exactly that. It argued that book sales themselves are a hopelessly unreliable indicator of real quality. There are just too many other factors in play.

But do we have to be all doom-mongery about this?

Let’s start with the survey itself. These ALCS surveys are very long and very boring. I imagine that the completion rate is very low. There are 60 questions on the form and, personally, I’d want to scream after the first dozen or so. The form is also extremely data-hungry. It asks you, for example, about royalty rates on every major book format. Really, to fill out the form, you’d need to do it with a file of earnings and royalty statements beside you as you did it.

News of the survey is thought to reach around 60,000 authors, but there’s no restriction on who can fill it in. If the form reached your hands, and you had made any money at all from publishing, you’d be welcome to fill it in and return it. In total, the study got about 2400 responses, or 4% of the pool they were trying to survey.

Now one point is obvious: if you base your conclusions on a self-selecting 4% of a group, you have really no way to know if the results are even vaguely meaningful. Why should they be?

In short: I don’t believe the results of this survey. I don’t even disbelieve them. I just don’t think there’s any reason to think that the results are well-defined to start with, or consistent from survey to survey.

And as for the core message of the survey – roughly: “It’s getting ever harder to make a living from writing, and that’s a Really Bad Thing” – I’d have ask: is it?

I mean, let’s even say, on the basis of terribly little evidence, that it’s getting harder to make money from writing. So what? Absolutely none of us thought, “I really want to be a writer, because I love Ferraris so much, and I bet you make loads of money as an author.”

The opposite. Most professional authors – you know: ones with Big 5 contracts, and books in the front of bookstores, and even ones who feature on bestseller lists – most of those guys run a regular job alongside the writing. What’s wrong with that? That’s a nicely balanced life, no?

For nearly all of us, writing is a passion, for which it’s possible to get paid. Hooray for that.

There’s also something a bit odd in this obsession with publishers. The Society of Authors and bodies like it all over the world were set up to deal with an Author vs Publisher world. That’s what they know. That’s what their audience knows.

But – self-publishing.

We have good reason to believe that there are more self-published authors at every level of income than there are traditionally published ones. There are more indie authors earning $1,000,000 from their work than there are trad-published ones. There are more indie authors earning $100,000. There are more indie authors earning $10,000.

For sure, indie authors have their grumbles (mostly to do with the random, aggressive, non-communicativeness of Amazon), but – they make money.

Indeed, as I see it:

• It’s never been easier to become a professional author
• There have never been more routes to publication
• It’s never been more possible to write niche books (Viking Romance, Alien Invasion, LGBT / Sci FI) and locate an audience
• Until ebooks and KDP came along, it was impossible to get 70% royalties on book sales. Now it’s routine. You can get them yourself by clicking a button.
• There have never been more powerful tools for author-led marketing
• There has never been a greater diversity of publishers
• There have never been more high quality publishers who don’t require you to have a literary agent first

Most of those bullet points are just factually true, and they’re never mentioned in those ALCS type surveys.

So, yeah, if you want: doom doom doom. Everything’s bad. We should all cry or – better still – blame someone for the mess.

My preference: this is a great, great world for authors. It’s full of commercial AND creative possibility. For sure, most of us will never make a ton of money from writing, but that’s been true since Dickens first picked up a pen. It’ll be true long into the future too.

But we love it. And we’re happy doing it. And we’re going to go right on.