The oldest author earnings survey I’ve ever found was conducted in 2005 by Bournemouth University and included 25,000 British and German writers. The report’s agenda was clear in the opening: to show that existing copyright laws have failed to ensure that creators receive sufficient reward for their work. All such surveys that have followed, whether conducted in the UK or US, have sung the same tune: We need stronger copyright protections to increase authors’ earnings and/or we need publishers to pay more.
Almost never remarked upon: that writers and artists have, throughout history, led a precarious existence. That pursuing any artistic endeavor does not entitle one to or otherwise guarantee reliable earnings. That most artists will not achieve commercial success, and that publishing has never been an equitable affair where all aspirants can expect similar rewards. John Scalzi, a successful commercial author, has written a frank summary of this reality.
Yet these earnings surveys are used again and again to essentially threaten that writers will stop writing and no one will produce art if creators are not ensured a living wage. That argument is nonsensical and has never been true. And never in my lifetime has the amount of writing decreased—only the opposite. Why would stronger copyright law lead to greater author earnings (remember: the book publishing industry broke sales records in 2021) when the biggest challenge is getting anything noticed in the first place?
Those who’ve followed me for years know how much I distrust these surveys, yet they get cited again and again in the mainstream media, and no one questions their methodology or conclusions. These surveys poll all types of writers, not just commercial authors. They rely on writers’ memories instead of well-documented data to report earnings. They include people who are academics and teachers as well as full-time authors. Etc.
And what’s especially annoying: Once you dig in to these survey results, you’ll find the number of authors earning their income solely from writing is pretty stable, and it’s almost always supplemented by teaching, speaking, editing, freelancing, and so on. Yet a neutral or positive takeaway is never offered. The headline always trumpets the most dour interpretation possible.
Ultimately, you can make these surveys support whatever argument you wish to make. Which is why I congratulate and applaud the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), an organization that advocates for self-published authors, for conducting their own author earnings survey. It acts as a strong counterpoint to the usual victim storyline and illustrates how much author earnings depend on where you look and who you ask.
ALLi surveyed more than 2,000 authors in 2022 and found that the median income for self-published authors was $12,749. That’s far better than traditionally published authors, if you put trust in these surveys—the average income for them is around $8,600 in the UK and $6,080 in the US as of 2018.
I was not surprised at all by the results. When I asked Orna Ross, director of ALLi, if she expected this finding, she wrote me, “We were always surprised at surveys that said author incomes were falling, because it wasn’t what we were seeing among our members. Our experience was that once an author had done the work to acquire good writing and publishing skills, they would see their income rise year on year as they improved their writing and publishing craft. We were also seeing a proportion of our members earning extraordinary amounts of money for a single-person, micro-publishing business. But we also didn’t know if we were making false assumptions, because of course we also saw many who hadn’t (yet) acquired the necessary skills and were earning little or nothing.”
Of the authors that ALLi surveyed, more than half are writing genre fiction: romance, science fiction and fantasy, and mystery/thriller/suspense. (A full quarter: romance authors.) Over half of respondents had published more than 10 books, and 20 percent had published more than 30. About three-quarters of respondents described their business model as primarily selling their self-published books through retailers (rather than, say, earning money from direct-to-reader sales, crowdfunding, licensing, etc.). Sixty percent of respondents said their income had increased in the past year. While some supplement their book sales through speaking, teaching, or freelancing, the majority of surveyed authors are focused on driving book sales.
I’d still take these results with a huge grain of salt. Ross admitted to me that all statistics are a kind of lie, but they can still be helpful. And for the self-publishing community in particular, she felt it important to try to measure what’s happening. “The self-publishing platforms don’t release data. Indie author sales are scattered across numerous outlets, not least authors’ own transactional websites, a growing trend among indies,” she wrote. “So there’s a big data gap. In media and publishing, a data gap is a visibility gap. Self-publishing is the most invisible sector in the publishing industry, and the data gap is filled with lots of assumptions and misinformation.”
Bottom line: Every time the Authors Guild comes out with an author earnings survey, it’s written about in outlets like the New York Times. I have so far seen no mention of the ALLi survey in a comparable outlet—only in places like Publishers Weekly. There could be many different explanations for this, including Ross’s point that the self-pub market remains largely invisible. In part, I believe the mainstream media just doesn’t take the self-publishing market all that seriously. And by doing so, it continues to ignore one of the biggest publishing stories of the last 15 years: that this market accounts for around 20 to 30 percent of all books sold in the US. And that’s probably a conservative estimate.
ALLi plans to conduct its author earnings survey every two years. They’re also gathering supplementary data from around the community that will be released later this year, so stay tuned for more.
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.
