Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

pyramid. While the market may be highly skewed to a few big winners, 

that doesn’t mean even they are in a good position when compared 

with other periods or countries. 

In short, what all of this means is that it is harder to be a professional 

author full stop. In 2005, an ACLS-commissioned survey found that 

40% of authors earned a full-time living solely from writing. By 2013 this 

had dropped to just 11.5%. In 2013, 17% of surveyed writers earned no 

money at all from their writing. Between 2007 and 2013 author earnings 

fell by 28% in real terms.

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 The author Philip Pullman has recently been 

vocal about this trend, even asking the EU to investigate the situation 

around author incomes.

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Author income inequality as outlined above exceeds available data 

for UK income inequality generally, where the top 1% take around 

14–15% of the total (less than in the US but much more than most 

countries in the OECD). However, this isn’t the case when we look 

at wealth as opposed to income: the top 1% own as much wealth as 

the bottom 55%. That is to say, wealth inequality is much greater than 

income inequality. It suggests that books should be seen as assets 

(wealth) rather than income for those at the very top, where the scale 

of inequality reflects the sharper degree found in wealth inequality. In 

terms of income, then, the book market is more unequal than the UK  

as a whole; in terms of ‘wealth’ it is not.

Other researchers support the overall picture outlined here. Angus 

Phillips, Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing 

Studies, has tracked the publishing market against GDP for Publishing 

Research Quarterly. He wanted to see if growth or decline in the wider 

economic context fed through to UK publishing. Looking at data going 

back to 1985 he finds that for the years 1985 to 1999 there is indeed a 

strong correlation between the economy and publishing; GDP growth 

appears to feed into growth in book sales. But in the noughties, and 

especially in the wake of the financial crisis, this relationship breaks 

down. Economic growth in the years after 2008 has not fed through to 

books, apart from in children’s. Publishing has in effect decoupled from 

deep patterns of growth and consumer spending. Rising per capita GDP 

no longer means rising book sales. Phillips argues his data indicate an 

historical inflection point, a structural change in the publishing landscape 

where we may have reached ‘peak book’. 

How to make sense of all this? Digital, as we will see, is a factor. 

Yet aside from that, our interviewees and survey respondents had 

numerous explanations. A common theme, as mentioned above, 

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http://www.thebookseller.com/news/huge-inequality-writer-earnings 

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   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/14/philip-pullman-resigns-oxford-literary-festival-patron-pay-authors 

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