Canelo / Arts Council England

Part II – Models of Support

1. Advances

The classic model of writing went something like this. Write a brilliant 

manuscript. Get discovered by a powerful agent. They then land you 

an enormous book deal with a great publisher. This pays sufficiently 

well in and of itself to support years’ more writing; given the advance 

the actual sales are, if not irrelevant, then not an immediate financial 

concern. The book does well and income is supplemented by a US 

deal, foreign rights deals and other subsidiary rights, along with select 

pieces of writing and perhaps the odd bit of prize money. Eventually 

the advance earns out, the publisher is happy, royalty income starts 

coming in, and everything is queued up nicely to repeat with a new 

book. 

While our research suggests this model isn’t completely dead, it 

has certainly seen better days. (And it is worth mentioning this 

wasn’t the historical norm for writers, but a phenomenon of the 

late-20th century.) Before explaining why, however, the first thing 

to acknowledge is that finding any reliable or widespread data on 

advances is impossible. Even within publishing companies and literary 

agencies, this information is often highly confidential. For obvious 

reasons, almost everyone is unwilling to go on the record about their 

advances from whichever side of the table they are sitting. The best 

that can be done is to piece together anecdata and compare it to our 

own experiences and any available data. 

With that proviso in place, there is a common opinion amongst both 

our survey and our interviewees that advances are falling. This was 

clearest in the survey, where the results were starkly unequivocal. 

No less than 98% of our respondents believed that advances were 

falling. Of those we interviewed, no-one had the view that generally 

advances were going up, although there were a range of views as to 

scale. From both those we interviewed and our survey the answer 

could not be clearer: advances for literary fiction in particular are going 

down. This also tallies with our experiences. 

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