Following our much-discussed coverage of the international author contract reform coalition being led by the Authors Guild and Society of Authors, we’re reminded there are more ways than one to “mind the gap,” as they say in the U.K.
Normally, “mind the gap” is the helpful advice of railway and Underground signage about stepping carefully from the train to the platform, of course.
But a big gap of another kind appears in a roundup of 2015 sale figures based on Nielsen BookScan data. The Bookseller’s Tom Tivnan has revealed that “the top 50 authors (perhaps around 0.1 percent of all authors)” in the U.K. market “earned a massive 13 percent of BookScan sales last year.”
The top-earning 200 authors, Tivnan writes in his commentary on the data, represented just 0.3 percent of authors being tracked in that marketplace, and they earned 23 percent of the takings.
What’s more, the data reveals a sharp jump in the upper bracket’s earning power: Tivnan’s top fifty authors’ sales “rose a massive 21 percent” in 2015 over the same subset in 2014.
Remember that these are trade authors, not self-published writers. (Neither Nielsen nor the rest of us can track or count self-published sales with any accuracy because the biggest retailers hold those numbers close to their chests as proprietary information.)
Here are the ten top-earning U.K. authors, based on sales data, in 2015, per Tivnan’s report, in pounds sterling and U.S. dollars:
- Julia Donaldson, earning £13,854,045 [$19,611,093]
- David Walliams, £10,967,099 [$15,519,651]
- J. K. Rowling, £8,315,667 [$11,771,242]
- J. Hazeley/J. Morris, £7,352,534 [$10,407,181]
- Jamie Oliver, £7,250,232 [$10,262,377]
- James Patterson, £7,166,337 [$10,144,308]
- Jeff Kinney, £6,842,231 [$9,681,346]
- Paula Hawkins, £6,115,022 [$8,656,119]
- E. L. James, £5,990,604 [$8,477,603]
- Harper Lee, £5,798,661 [$8,204,757]
But here’s something we might not have expected to see—a strongly earning cohort of trade authors on the upper end of the next tier down. Tivnan describes it as “a massive amount of money [being] made by the author serf class.”
In his original report (paywall), Tivnan writes, “The top 5,000 authors of 2015 … rang up £866.5 million [about $1.22 billion] through the tills, 57 percent of print sales.… This means that a sizeable part of the market—£651 million [$920 million], or to put it more evocatively, roughly equivalent to what Penguin Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins combined earned through the total consumer market last year—was generated by authors earning low five-figure returns. It is not just the mega-selling authors who generate cash for publishers.”
Bottom line: While there’s a big (and growing) gap to be minded between what the haves and the have-nots earn, that 5,000-author contingent on a continental shelf of earnings just below the celebrity archipelago suggests a robust midlist population of authors. More analysis will be needed. Meanwhile, Tivnan characterizes what he’s seeing as the top authors “standing not on the shoulders of giants but on the backs of tens of thousands of authors who generate low five-figure totals—and who are arguably just as important to publishers’ bottom lines as the mega-sellers.”
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.
