Never known for being timid, Nicola Solomon, the UK’s Society of Authors chief, has raised some hackles with a call for publishers to reveal what they pay authors.
“We challenge publishers to state in their accounts how much they pay to authors, illustrators, and translators in advances, royalties, and secondary income. It can be done,” she wrote in a piece at the Bookseller this month. She used the independent house Profile Books as an example; Profile has reported that 22 percent of its revenue goes to authors. The society sees the normal percentage of what goes to authors at closer to 5 percent.
In an interesting comeback, Profile Books was somewhat defensive, at least on behalf of the industry. Andrew Franklin of Profile stressed that his company is weathering things better financially than many others. He made his key point on behalf of all publishers: “We must make a profit.… We mustn’t lose sight of our duty to remain solvent.”
When longtime London literary agent Andrew Lownie weighed in on the issue at Publishing Perspectives, his main message was that precious few sales—he puts it at fewer than 15 percent—made in the UK will result in the best royalty rates for writers. Discounts and special sales to large retailers and wholesalers reduce the basis on which royalties are calculated. And he points out that benefits to the publisher of such arrangements—larger, more cost-effective print runs, for example—don’t help the author.
Bottom line: We agree with Solomon that publishers would do well to report the percentage of their revenue going to authors, and corporate investors might actually like to know what “the talent” is making. We don’t think that Solomon in any way suggests that publishers don’t have to remain solvent—everybody gets that they do. Still, Lownie’s points about how actual royalty rates get compromised are good ones. We think that transparency in revenue percentages for authors could be helpful in raising those numbers over time. As Lizzy Kremer of the UK’s Association of Authors’ Agents said, it’s good “to remind publishers that authors are their business partners, and as such they should be included in conversations about the economics of publishing.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
