A Rising Tide

This article grew from a conversation with @shannoneichorn@universeodon.com who asked about solutions to the falling median earnings number discussed in my article Wagging the Long Tail.

“A rising tide lifts all boats.” It's practically a cliché now but it started as the motto of the New England Council of the Chamber of Commerce. JFK allegedly cribbed it (with attribution, I should add) in a speech he made in 1964 and used it many times after.

The Survey.

In early 2022, the UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ACLS) commissioned the UK Copyright & Creative Economy Research Centre based at the University of Glasgow (CREATe) to establish an online survey[1] investigating author earnings in the UK. The survey used prior works from 2006, 2014, and 2018. They offered it online to ACLS members and selected populations of writers including the Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. The Bookseller website publicized it in early February.

Recently, they released the results.

The survey found that the median income for self-employed writers fell to £7,000 (just over US$8,000) from an inflation adjusted level of £17,608 (just over US$21,000) in 2006. Of the estimated (and widely touted) 60,000 authors polled, only 2,759 chose to respond. The survey counted partial responses in their data set and deemed the response rate to be “sufficient for statistical analysis.”

The Problems.

First, that response rate falls well shy of research baselines. Wu, Zhao, and Fils-Aime found response rates nearly ten times higher. Further, they note that focusing on particular populations improved the results in the survey data they studied.

The average online survey response rate is 44.1%. Our results indicate that sending an online survey to more participants did not generate a higher response rate. Instead, sending surveys to a clearly defined and refined population positively impacts the online survey response rate. [2].

While CREATe might have deemed the response rate as statistically significant, the discrepancy gives me cause to question the accuracy of its findings.

Second, the sample may not accurately reflect the actual population of UK writers, as the report clearly cautions on page 12.

As such, these response rates should be treated with caution when extrapolating to the broader population of authors.

If we assume the actual median has fallen from the heady days of “barely above poverty” in 2006 to something considerably less – even if we don't know what the actual number might be – what might we glean?

Looking at the reported demographic data, almost 52% of the authors responding reported some self-publishing income while 87% reported some income from publishers. The results seem skewed toward the traditionally published with a healthy leavening from self-publishing.

Also, 27% report that they do mostly academic writing with fiction running in second place at 25%.

If there's a market that pays less than poetry, certainly it must be academic publishing. Journal articles – the necessary but insufficient factor for continued employment and tenure – pay nothing yet nearly every professional academic faces an expectation that they “publish or perish.” Text books run on paper thin margins to populations increasingly resistant to purchasing new editions at ever increasing prices.

That's a heavy anchor to hang on median earnings.

Fiction authors covers a lot of ground – from short stories up to novel length works. Not all of those forms pull high revenue numbers for their authors. Short stories seem popular with writers but the markets for them narrow by the day as magazines fall in and out of favor with the subscribing public. Anthologies offer limited venues but compared to the larger market in novels, those short story writers have to work hard to achieve even moderate sales.

Lumping all the fiction authors into a single mass ignores the market reality that some forms of fiction just do not command very high prices. On top of the academic writers who earn nothing for their writing, that anchor just got a lot heavier.

The last drag on the median comes from adding self-publishing income to the mix.

Traditional publishing has a finite production capability, even if it's very large, placing an upper bound on the number of authors they can put on the shelves. Reduced shelf space in physical stores constrains that number even more. While that keeps authors out of the market, it doesn't raise the median unless they quit – which many did in the last part of the 20th century and continue to do today. Docking the long tail by removing traditionally published authors earning the least helps to boost the median. Given the current level of advance payments, few of them exceed the median earnings level, placing those authors below the median from the start. Should that contract fail to earn out, that's where the author stays.

Self-publishing was not a significant factor until mid-2011. It had barely reached its stride by the 2014 survey. Between 2006 and 2014 the median dropped by 30% accounting for half the loss. Without the 2014 survey, it's hard to draw conclusions but some part of the additional 30% loss between 2014 and 2022 must almost inevitably be a result of self-publishing activity given the demographic numbers reported.

Self-publishing has no lower bound limit. While many self-publishers do very well, a significant number report single- and double-digit earnings. Add those to the traditionally published writers being limited by publishing's finite production and the median gets pulled even further down.

Given the stated demographic information in the survey, I think it's reasonable to believe this could be a factor.

While I believe the median is, in fact, lower than it was in 2018, too many structural issues lead me to think that it's higher than the survey indicates, perhaps much higher based on the low levels of responses.

Paths Forward.

I started this to examine the causes of the reduction in order to look for corrective actions that authors can take. I see a path, although it won't help everyone and some authors face intractable issues.

The largest problem with academic writing is not how little the authors make, although it's certainly one important issue. The main problem is that the pace of innovation has gotten shorter than the research and publication cycle that drives it. More and more academic writing consists of research that became obsolete before the articles go out for peer-review. That whole segment of publishing has been overdue for an overhaul before I got my PhD. It requires a structural change in higher education that authors alone cannot drive.

I think we can raise the median, even if we can't break the fundamental truth of the long tail. A few people at the top will earn the most. Everybody else shares the rest. The long tail distribution all but guarantees it. Fundamentally, writing fiction for a living will never be possible for the majority of writers. History says it never was. The penniless author scribing away in their garret, dying broke and alone with a trunk full of unpublished work has become a recognized trope.

Even in the heydays of pulp, a few writers managed to make a living while dozens more held down night clerk jobs to support their publishing habits.

Things haven't changed that much but today's writers have an advantage that didn't exist before 2010.

Direct access to a significant public.

The roadblocks to reaching that public can be broken from the author side but only if the author is willing to swing the hammer.

Self-publishers – particularly in romance – have broken this path open since mainstream readers adopted ebooks in 2011. The largest obstacle to reaching that audience is not some mythical algorithm or how much you can spend in ad buys.

It's failing to understand the market.

Contrary to popular belief, traditionally published authors are not being pushed out of the market by the self-publishing tsunami of crap. They're being held out of the market by publishers. The Big 5 could tie a serious knot in self-publishing if they wanted to. They don't because they have too much invested in paper distribution. Divesting that threatens their base value-added proposition in the market place and requires thinking that's longer term than the next stockholder report. Publishers are not likely to want to shift the status quo, but their authors can by learning from self-publishers who know how to read their audiences.

Self-publishers aren't being held back by Amazon's monopolistic algorithm. They're the victims of years of misinformation and superstition, conflating sales and promotion with actual marketing.

Logically, the simplest way to raise the median is to chop off the end of the tail, removing all the authors earning next to nothing. This would drive the median up. It worked for traditional publishers for decades, if not centuries.

That genie is well and truly out of the bottle at this point.

The next obvious solution is moving those authors below the median into higher sales brackets to get them into higher pay levels. Remember: the median earning figure is derived primarily from sales. Sell more books. Make more money. The curve shifts.

Even traditionally published authors want to sell more books. One of the reasons they chose the path they took was to have the publisher do the lion's share of the work. With few exceptions, that's a problem. Publishers don't sell to readers. They expect authors to do it for them so the readers will spur the bookstores to stock the books, or at very least, order the books online, ideally buying the higher priced, lower cost ebooks.

Self-published authors accept the sales and promotion overhead from the start. A large number of them hate it, but they recognize that it's their responsibility. Most try to find the tools and techniques that work, but sorting the aspirin from the snake oil can be frustrating.

In both cases, publishers – traditional and self – forget the drivers behind readers buying books. There are only two significant ones.

The reader knows the author and likes their work.
A trusted friend recommended the book.

Between them they account for more than 70% of all adult book buying decisions. Everything else shares the remaining 30%. Ads, reviews, blog tours, events. They're all insignificant when it comes time for a reader to find a new book.

Too few writers take advantage of this but it points the way to a logical and viable path forward. A path forward exists, but you have to walk it. Some won't make it. Too many can't make it for one reason or another. Even for those who keep plugging, the rewards are far from certain.

The long tail can't be shortened, but it can be climbed. If enough writers climb the tail, the median will have to move with them.

Like any journey, it's one metaphorical step after another.

Up Next: Climbing the Long Tale: Stage 1

CREATe. (2022) “UK Author Earnings and Contract Report.” https://www.create.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Authors-earnings-report-DEF.pdf
Wu, Zhao, Fils-Amie. (2022) “Response rates of online surveys in published research: A meta-analysis.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Vol 7. Elsevier