How Much Do Writers Actually Earn?

It's that time of year when I receive my royalty statements...

Photo credit: bee32/istock

This week I received my royalty statement for Somebody I Used to Know, the first book that Wendy Mitchell and I wrote together.

It was the first royalty statement that I have received since her death in February. Usually we’d be excited to see how much of our advance we had paid off, hoping that we have reached the stage where we earnt royalties – and usually being disappointed.

I would always cheer Wendy up when she was sad at how much we still had to pay off.

“Yes but perhaps by this time next year…” I would say, sounding awfully like Delboy talking to Rodney in Only Fools and Horses.

Except Wendy is not here anymore. Another first without her ticked off the list.

For those who don’t know, this is how a publishing deal works, you get paid an advance for your work and this is usually in four parts: the first quarter on signing of the contract; the second quarter on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript; the third on publication in hardback; and, the final part on publication in paperback.

This means that you get paid your advances over a period of often two or three years, and when that’s a large six-figure advance it is rather nice to get those decent chunks arriving in your bank (though, you still need to be earning another way, unless we’re talking about million pound advances), but if they’re not big advances, it’s more like a trickle, a couple of thousand pounds here and there over three years. Perhaps enough to treat yourself to a little holiday, or a new patio set, or in my case it just goes in the bank to help pay the bills each month.

The advance that Wendy and I received for Somebody I Used to Know was a six-figure one, which was very exciting at the time and we were very fortunate indeed, but we have to pay that advance back in sales before we start receiving royalties – something that not everyone realises.

And that’s what Wendy and I were always excited about getting down to, that day when our advance was paid off, although sadly she didn’t live to see it.

So how much do writers get paid every time one of their books sells? Royalty statements are impossibly hard to figure out for us writers (remember we are words and not numbers people) but I got out my calculator so I could tell you.

So for high discount sales, which is when books are sold by the publisher to companies like Amazon at hugely marked down prices, we get eight per cent. So on a book retailing at £10.99, the writer gets 88p, and everything that Wendy and I did was 50/50, so I get 44p.

And the bulk of our sales during this period (royalty statements are published every six months and this statement was from 1 July 2023 to 31 December 2023) were from those high discount sales. So imagine how long it takes to pay back a large advance when you’re only putting 44p towards each sale?

Answer: years and years.

But what I can never understand is how, in this whole chain of people involved in selling books, the creator of the material, the person who came up with the idea, who sat down and wrote it often through sweat and tears, is paid the least out of everyone.

Some of you may not know, but in the winter of 2022 I opened a pop-up bookshop and I wrote about that experience on a different substack:

I Did It! I Opened a Bookshop!

Even as a bookseller, I received more than the writer for selling the book. On a book that retails at £10.99, I would get possibly (at the generous end of the spectrum) 45% so £4.95.

That’s more than ten times what the person who wrote it, the person who provides my stock, the person who grants me a means of making a living, receives. And don’t forget that writer doesn’t only grant me a living, but all those editors, the sales teams, the marketing people, the designers, distributors, people in accounts, the wholesalers, the printers, the literary review editors. And yet the writer is at the bottom of the chain when it comes to getting paid to keep producing books that keeps all those other people in jobs.

It feels so topsy turvy, doesn’t it?

And also, guess how much a writer gets when people buy books from charity shops? Nothing of course. So their product that funds that charity and all its various departments and big salaries CEOs is sold and the person who created it gets precisely zero.

So why are writers valued so poorly when they are the ones putting these beautiful words into the world?

Of course Amazon is one of the reasons why writers are at the bottom of the food chain, because they are the ones bulk buying at these high discount sales, unlike independent bookshops like mine.

When I was bookselling — a side hustle that I had to boost my income — Amazon was often selling books for less than I could buy them at the wholesalers. I remember one day a schoolboy came into my shop in his big oversized blazer and asked if I sold the Guinness World Records.

‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘but I can order it for you and it’ll be here tomorrow.’

He agreed and started counting his pocket money out in coins on the floor of my shop. Only when I looked up the price at the wholesaler, the retail price was something like £25, and I could buy it for a 35% discount, meaning I would make £8.75 on that sale. But, curious, I looked up how much Amazon was selling it for – it was £10 – and when I looked again at that little boy, emptying all his coins out of a plastic bag and counting them, it felt like stealing candy from a baby.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t take your money,’ I said, ‘if you were a grown up, I would, but I can’t take your pocket money when you can buy it from Amazon for less than half price.’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

But I just couldn’t do it.

Another thing that is choking writers is the huge advances paid to celebrities, people like Richard Osman with their million pound advances. Richard, and other similar celebrities, don’t make a living solely as a writer as I and others like me do, he doesn’t need to, but accepting these huge advances for his books means that the real writers, the people who pay the bills that way, suffer as we’re pushed further down the food chain. I bet he also doesn’t just get eight per cent each time one of his books is sold, too.

And yet we keep on doing it, we keep on attempting to make a living from our books. Why?

Well, because for many of us, writing is the only way we have ever made a living, and so we actually can’t do anything else, but also, of course, because we love it. We believe in books and we hope and pray writers will one day be valued and paid properly for this huge multi-billion pound industry that so many others get rich from – especially those of us who are single income households. We mostly just want to be able to pay our bills this way and lead a quiet life. Or at least I do.

But in the meantime we have our side hustles too, this Substack you’re reading for example, which is why people who pay for our words make such a difference to us - you literally enable us to keep writing. And this is a way of you supporting writers directly if you believe in words and beautiful books, rather than your support getting lost in part of a huge machine. And while we’re on the subject, do feel free to upgrade for just a few pounds a month – the price of a slightly pricey coffee perhaps.

Wendy would have been disappointed that we haven’t yet paid back our advance, we’ve got about £15,000 pounds to go.

She might not be here anymore, but as it was our tradition, I’ll say it to you anyhow…

“Yes, but perhaps by this time next year…”

Anna Wharton writes White Ink with Anna Wharton