If Author Incomes Are Indeed Declining, Who or What Is to Blame?

New research—complemented by a series of panels hosted by the Authors Guild—looks at the financial fortunes of writers in the digital age

Not a year goes by that a new study isn’t released from an author organization, announcing that writer incomes are on the decline or otherwise threatened. (Here’s our coverage of the 2018 study in the UK.)

Just a week into 2019, the Authors Guild has released such a study; it reports a 42 percent decline in median US author income since 2009. Before anyone concludes that a crisis is at hand, we’ll issue our usual reminder that such efforts must of course rely on data that cannot be independently verified and that comes from a self-selecting pool of respondents. There simply is no comprehensive, industry-wide pool of data to draw from. In December, the CEO of Penguin Random House USA, Madeline McIntosh, pointed out during a panel (more on that in a minute) that when citing such statistics, we have to “be really clear on … the population that you’re referring to. In the US, the population of authors who … responded to the survey may not be 100 percent representative of the population of books published in the past year.” While that doesn’t mean the study is devoid of value, it does mean that its most fundamental data may not represent the market as a whole.

Regardless of the limitations of such studies, the resulting publicity and coverage is used to garner attention and bring about change—whether through industry pressure or lobbying and legislation. In this case, the Authors Guild is calling for action on several fronts, many reflecting long-running issues in the publishing industry:

• increased royalties on ebooks and deeply discounted books
• the ability for authors to negotiate collectively with Amazon, Google, and Facebook—including a legal exemption to antitrust law to allow it
• payment of royalties by resellers for sales of new books (meant to target sales of new books by Amazon third-party sellers)
• a federally funded equivalent of a public lending right to provide authors a benefit from the public use of books (something like this exists in other countries)

As part of its author-income awareness initiative, the Authors Guild has partnered with the New York Public Library to host a series of panels called Who Owns the Word?, moderated by author Richard Russo, about writers’ declining wages. The first panel focused on journalists. The second, held in December, was on authors; it included three established authors as well as McIntosh. While we couldn’t attend this panel in person, we did watch the recording (available here).

The panel is noteworthy for the question it didn’t definitively answer: why author wages appear to be declining. And it nearly subverted the premise of the question. One of the panelists, Alexander Chee, said his income has never been better. McIntosh strongly implied that if there is an income decline (which she seems to doubt, as we noted above), then it isn’t because publishers are paying less. She said of Penguin Random House (the biggest US publisher), referring specifically to her company’s own financials, “Advances are slightly up this decade. Not irrationally up—there’s not some bubble—but advances are up. More important as an indicator of the market, paid royalties are actually up.” That makes sense, of course, given that sales are up for the industry as a whole. McIntosh then asked, “What is going on below the surface in terms of what kind of books are selling?” The answer was left unexplored, aside from a brief comment on the declining sales of mass-market paperbacks, but it’s an important issue, as some authors’ incomes may be declining because of shifting trends in the marketplace.

The Authors Guild does offer explanations for why their report shows declining advances and royalties. One is that publishers are experiencing losses as a result of doing business with Amazon, and that loss in turn affects authors. Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger told the New York Times that Amazon charges commission and marketing fees to publishers that essentially prevent their books from being buried on the site; this causes a hardship for small and independent publishers, which have fewer resources and bargaining power. Furthermore, traditional publishers’ 25 percent net royalty rate on ebooks has long been of particular concern, as authors, arguably, don’t get a fair share of the higher profit margin yielded by that format. (This slide on print vs ebook profits from a HarperCollins presentation tells the story.)

However, the Authors Guild panel was notable for its overall positive tone and recognition that horrible, dire industry predictions from a decade ago have not come true. Print remains stable despite predictions of its decline relative to ebooks, and there’s been a natural ebb and flow among formats rather than a decimation of print. Panelist and author TJ Stiles shared the words of another author, Daniel Handler: “For as long as I’ve been writing, it’s always been the worst time in publishing.”

The one challenge that emerged most strongly in the panel: how publishers and authors can reliably and consistently create demand for books. McIntosh noted that emerging fiction writers have often been best supported by physical bookstores, but in the last decade, buying has strongly shifted online, regardless of format. “What tends to happen is that the books that are selling [online], … be they fiction or nonfiction, [are those] where the author or publisher has been able to create demand externally,” McIntosh said. “Either it’s a sensational thing in the news cycle, or you need the support of the review media, or awards; or word of mouth has to spread over time. It’s certainly one of the most important things for us to grapple with as publishers. How are we going to create demand [as online retail or Amazon gets bigger, when] the retailer itself is not the one creating demand?”

She then admitted later that “the part that we feel bad about” is that a publisher’s key answer to this challenge has been putting authors to work in securing earned media. (Earned media is shorthand for online word of mouth, usually sparked by social media activity.)

Bottom line: During the panel, Chee was transparent about how he’s made his career grow. He said, “I do credit social media and blogging for the place that I have now. It’s gotten me relationships with editors, it’s gotten me teaching jobs, it’s gotten me speaking engagements.” During the panel, Russo floated the idea that market saturation may be a factor in declining author incomes—and not just from self-published work, but from the greater number of people now graduating from writing programs. As a university creative writing teacher, Chee pushed back on that, saying, “I know most of my students will not become writers. I remember Annie Dillard giving us a stern warning [as students]: Most writers don’t earn a living writing. They have to do something else. There are only a few who do get to only write.” That’s exactly why the expectation of these studies may actually be unrealistic. Despite the wish or perception that writing books should generate a sustainable living wage, it has always been a small number of people, historically, who can earn a living by writing alone in the garret.