Authors and the Truth About Money

Update on the state of things

Oct 18, 2024

Sourced free from Pixabay in 2016. Source no longer there. I know.

In March 2016, I wrote a version of this post on my website. It went semi-viral. My comments got flooded by people telling me I should self-publish. The Guardian invited me to write a follow-up piece — my first and so far only piece for them, because it attracted a tidal wave of personal attack. A lot has changed since then. Since I have now removed all blog posts from my freshly revamped website, and the issue of author earnings is back in the news, I thought I’d publish an updated version.

The Rich Writer Myth

One of the biggest myths about becoming a successful novelist is that it means you must be rolling in it. 'Six-figure-advance' trips off the tongue very easily, as if it were normal. 'Royalties' sounds juicy. Money: still something that people who want to write a novel want to write a novel for. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I got a very handsome £75,000 advance for my first novel, The Marlowe Papers. But that was £75,000 for four years' work, and it was paid over another two years, so in essence £12,500 a year (before agent's commission and any income tax). Add to that the fact that I had, like many startup businesses, launched my career by getting into debt to an amount almost equalling the advance, and you'll realise it wasn't actually a life-changing amount of money.

I also hadn't realised that unless your debut novel becomes a best-seller — slim chance for a novel in verse, no matter how feted — you'll not get that kind of money for the second book. My advance for Devotion (2015) was £5,000. That's £5,000 for two years' work. This is not because it was 1/15th as good as The Marlowe Papers. Some people liked it very much indeed, and it got shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. But that low advance (which is actually a pretty normal advance) caused me headaches. Thanks to the critical success of The Marlowe Papers, and 15 years of teaching experience, I got half a job (2.5 days a week) as a creative writing lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. With time plus effort, I was promoted to Senior Lecturer. But it was half a salary, which meant that every month I had to find ingenious ways to drum up the other half to meet my living costs. Those ingenious ways were time-consuming and not always money-generating. In short, what they did was get in the way of writing more books.

You can see the outcome of this now, in 2024. Where is novel number 3? It has been a long, long time in the making because a) I had to earn a full-time living, b) it was a very ambitious project. It is finished. Whether you will be able to buy it any time soon is an interesting question that I can’t yet answer.

In July just gone, the security of my half salary was removed because, along with most of the senior staff in the English Department, I was made redundant. Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award, Ross Raisin (a former Goldsmiths colleague) still has the lecturership that keeps him afloat (mentioned in the Guardian) after moving back North during the pandemic, but how many writers are going to be able to support themselves this way with the ongoing contraction of the Arts and Humanities in Higher Education?

Writer Royalties

What about royalties? Surely if you've written books that win prizes and get reviewed in the mainstream press, you must be getting regular royalty cheques?

Only if you've earned out your advance. An advance, to give it its full title, is an advance on royalties. And the way things have gone in publishing — with margins squeezed and authors bearing the brunt of that squeeze — makes it increasingly hard for an author to earn out their advance. Plus, once a book is a couple of years old, it’s unlikely to earn significant royalties unless it a) becomes a timeless classic or b) becomes a film or TV series.

In March 2016, as I was bracing myself to ~~put out the begging bowl~~ set up a Patreon account (which I kept up for a couple of years), I pulled out my publishing contracts and put my royalty figures into a spreadsheet. I found out that in order to earn back that £5,000 advance on Devotion I would have to sell 12,500 copies of the paperback through Amazon, or 7,500 copies through independent bookshops. (That's because Amazon and other large retailers press publishers for large discounts, and the publisher passes on the effect of those discounts to the author.) And most “upmarket” fiction doesn't sell in those quantities these days unless the book wins a major prize or — again — winds up on film or TV series. We have less of a ‘cultured’ culture than we used to.

Supporting Authors

The traditional way to support an author is to buy their book, read it, and, if you like it, tell other people about it or even buy it for them. This gladdens our big juicy author hearts. It gets our words out to more people, making, we hope, a positive difference to their lives (if only in terms of providing a little entertainment).

Definitely do this. Sales are essential. Publishers won’t be so keen to publish us again if our previous books haven’t sold very well. But as far as supporting an author financially, buying their book doesn't help them out as much as you might think.

Royalties per book (UK)

Here's what I get1 if you buy a paperback of either The Marlowe Papers or Devotion (RRP £8.99).

Buy directly from the author at full price: author gets £4.502 (minus any postage)
Buy from an independent bookshop/Hive: author gets 67p
Buy from large-chain bookshop: author gets somewhere between 40-67p
Buy from Amazon: author gets 40p
But second-hand from Amazon marketplace: author gets nothing.
Buy from second-hand bookshop or charity shop: author gets nothing.
Borrow from library: author gets 7.67p.3

Royalties per book (US)

US sales will net me even less, because they are based on "price received" rather than the recommended retail price. The US paperback retails at $15.99, but the publisher will receive something on a sliding scale between 70% ($11.19) and 30% ($4.80) of this amount from the retailer, and my paperback royalty rate of 7.5% is calculated on that figure So in the US:

Buy from an independent bookshop at non-discounted price: author gets 84 cents (68p)
Buy from Amazon.com (at maximum discount): author gets 36 cents (28p)

Audiobook Royalties

In 2016, when I wrote an earlier version of this post, the audio book of Devotion had just been released. According to my contract, my royalty on that is also on price received, and I couldn't even tell what that would be, because although it was retailing for £16.62, the most prominent price was £0.00 next to a notice that potential listeners could get it free with a trial of Audible (£0 for 30 days, then £7.99 a month). As I said at the time, “What the author will get from that is anyone's guess.”

From inspecting my eight years of royalty statements, I no longer need to guess. The audio rights were sold to Audible for £1000 and 50% of this nominally went to me, to be offset against that £5000 advance. Hypothetically there could have been a million audiobook purchasers since, with all the proceeds going purely to Audible (i.e. Amazon). After the modest initial payment, the person who created the content gets zero.

Normal trad publishing contracts

Friend, I should add that these are not abnormal contracts. They were vetted both by my agent and by The Society of Authors. This is just a reflection of the state of trad publishing and is the reason why average author income continues to shrink year on year (see 'Author's Incomes Collapse to "Abject" Levels'). Since 2016, publishing has — as most writers and writers organisations will tell you — become even more challenging. There are still discerning editors out there, who are passionate about great books, but the industry is more risk-averse than ever. You are more likely to get a book deal from your massive social media platform than your well-turned sentences.

Which is why I’m on Substack, writing for free every week and sending it into 2,500 inboxes. Yes, I love the engagement. Yes, I love the sense of building a real community of readers and writers here. And I’ve been finding it valuable to share what I know of domestic abuse in chunks of my in-progress memoir. It’s good to be in service to my fellow humans.

But also… I have a really great novel about a real-life female soldier and pirate waiting to meet its ideal readers. If I can get to 10,000 free Substack subscribers, the chances of a rendezvous are significantly improved.

Indie publishing

So why not self-publish? Indie publishing is perfectly respectable now. You get a much bigger cut of your sales price. There are lots of people who have made good money out of self-publishing.

I’ve written about this before and got into trouble. I will therefore aim to be less amusing (than I thought I was being then) and more serious. I will say only this, for now. I have tried it. I don’t like it. I am crap at marketing. You have to spend your own money on outside editing and cover-design, and then a lot of time and energy and possibly money marketing it, and unless you’re already famous or are innately suited to making reels for Insta and Tiktok, forget it. Might as well row out to sea and drop your compellingly-written book into the ocean. And a couple of thousand pounds (for production costs) while you’re at it.

Total respect to anyone who can make it work. It’s not for me. Hybrid publishing, the same. And crowdfunded publishing like Unbound? You need a platform to make that work too. And marketing skills. Have you seen

Tom Cox

working his arse off round here? I am in utter admiration, but I could never do what he does.

For all its challenges, the traditional publishing model is what suits me. Other people blowing my trumpet (which I’m happy to amplify). But my skills are in long-form words, not short-form video. And actually, what I do, the kinds of books I write, are very well suited to the traditional model. Prize-worthy yet story- and character-driven. But yes. Everyone needs to make money.

I tell you who is going to have no trouble at all selling her self-published book. Taylor Swift. Tay-Tay is self-publishing. And this is surely a major issue for traditional publishing’s insistence on large platforms. Once you have the required huge platform, do you still need traditional publishing? I hope it survives. Perhaps by returning to championing really good writing.

Why Substack is helping

In the meantime, authors need to find new ways of supporting themselves, as well as reaching new readers. And in an online world filled with clickbait, outrage and adverts, readers looking for nuance, depth and a place that doesn’t gnaw away at their very souls need a new home. Thus Substack was born.

It has been my lifeline this year. The thing that has lifted my spirits time and again when other events have threatened to crush them. And most of that uplift has been due to your support.

A free subscriber recently emailed me to say he didn’t understand paid subscriptions at all; why would he spend £40 (my current annual subscription) on a single author, no matter how much he enjoyed their work? This was my response.

If there were no payments to authors, the platform wouldn't be full of so much great writing and amazing writers (George Saunders, for goodness sake!), and it would also have to be full of ads. One of the things I love the most about Substack (especially the app experience) is that it is a self-curated, calm, ad-free space.
Substack has to make money somehow to keep the platform up and running and also develop features, etc. They have a really good support back-end, and I find the site/app really easy to use to communicate with my newsletter subscribers (compared with Mailchimp). Writing on it is very clean and easy, much better than WordPress and Blogspot in the old days.
Plus, unlike either of those, the platform itself finds you new eyes for your writing in a way nothing else ever has. Their algorithm is a little bit of magic; my list had been static (hovering around 750-800) for 10 years despite huge efforts on my part to grow it. Within five months of posting weekly on Substack, I tripled it, and it is still growing. This is a priceless gift to writers, as far as I'm concerned.
So, I'm happy to support myself and Substack by having a paid subscriber option. It costs me nothing, and indeed, it gives me everything. I am finally getting paid for writing in a way that is within my control (not dependent on the whims of agents and publishers or the latest publishing craze) and can write what the hell I like, beholden to no one. If others like it enough to pay me to do that, I am immensely grateful!

So I suppose I am saying, thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. If you appreciate my writing, and you’re not subscribed, subscribe for free, and I will love you for bumping up my numbers, which gives novels 3 and 4 a better chance of seeing bookshops. From more than just me bringing the MS out of my backpack in Waterstones and saying, See this, child of mine? This is a bookshop.

If you have been subscribed for a while, thank you for sticking with me! If you appreciate what the Substack platform is doing to help both readers and writers, and you have room in your budget, consider taking out a paid subscription to one or two writers you want to support. Because boy, do we ever need it! But if you don’t have room in your budget — and I get it, believe me! — I just appreciate you being here.

Until next week… when I shall probably dish out another chunk of memoir, unless I’m distracted by a bright shiny object.

Sidenote: I know musicians have it even worse than writers. Way, way worse. Check out my incredibly talented friends The Indelicates, and their new album Avenue QAnon. And Simon’s Substack piece about trying to get it out there. It is a travesty, what is happening to the arts.

Post it Notes

This week I have:

Submitted the best possible TED talk application I could muster after two weeks of intensive development and revision
Guested on a podcast (not yet available)
Finally (after a 6 month extension) submitted my US tax return, after a process that brings me nothing but pain and anxiety, and is the sole reason why I am in a queue to renounce my citizenship (at significant cost).

Over to You

I welcome your thoughts, engaged and intelligent friend.

Are you aware that non-celebrity authors are an endangered species?
Are you aware that most celebrity books (novels, biographies, children’s books) are ghost-written?
Do you read books? Do you read as many as you would like?
Do you like pate?

Discussion about this post

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