The State of the Modern Professional Writer

Marc Maron ends the first track of his 2008 comedy album Final Engagement with a rip on an ostensibly fictional crowd member, “That's a really great way to enter a comedy club: not like ‘I'm excited, let's laugh.’ but like ‘This better fucking work, because I am this close to putting a bullet in someone, or in me.’” He continues in the fourth track “No Plan B folks; this is it. No Plan B.” projecting onto the crowd his existential angst. “It's sad when you get older, when you commit your life to something as fuckin' ridiculous as what I do. You start off like ‘This is it man, I'm gonna fucking do it!’ and the about midway through you're like ‘I’m doin’ it man. This is alright. ... This is pretty good after twenty-five years, right?’”

Now, I haven’t been writing for twenty-five years... yet. (Fifteen if you’re being generous and counting tons of bad fanfiction; Five if conservatively counting the number of years I’ve written with money in mind.) Everybody is a writer, in some capacity. We all text our friends and relatives. Some of us tweet. Fewer rant on Facebook for so long you have to hit “Read More…”.

The thing I get stuck in my head about is how a modern, professional writer makes money. Reckon most of the issue is one of conflation, between writing the skill and writer as an identity. That conclusion is the result of asking the same question over and over, and more often than not returning from books, magazines, industry reports, and general Google-holes with what being a professional writer definitely isn’t. Being a lowercase-w or even an uppercase-w writer doesn’t have to be the chambers loaded Russian Roulette game my next source has made it out to be.

With a title like The Profession of Author in the 21st Century you would think all the thought work on this topic had already been done. It's written by the US's oldest author advocacy (lobbying) group, so I had to read all 52 pages of this report with one of those yard-long pixie sticks worth of salt.

Inside the report are numbers. Some kind of fudged numbers, by way of using medians for everything instead of averages and only removing low outliers, but numbers. (Can't expect writers to be mathers too.) Based on the self-reported 2017 income of a little over 4,600 respondents, 54% of those full-time authors earn less than the federal poverty level pre-tax, which starts at about 12,000$ a year for a single person and adds another 5,000$ per person. 25% of these writers made zero money.

To add some context, in this survey fielded by the Author's Guild the average respondent's age was 57, and 75% of them were org members. Because of this specific population sample, it would be useful to point out the -35% drop in traditional publishing income and the +86% peak in self-publishing income from 2013 to 2017. While our grandmothers love reading on their new e-readers, I'm not sure they know how to publish to them.

These numbers are scary! According to the Author's Guild, what writers - novelists particularly - are financially capable of is shrinking beyond grim. (While simultaneously admitting that historically writers have never made, and oftentimes, never needed to make money because of the social strata the successful authors belonged to.) I'll read their whole report and shake my fist at individual numbers or statements, but I agree with most of their conclusions: Yes, writers and journalists (among many, many others) should unionize, and demand better pay from publishers (who are far from blameless); Yes, the United States should put to good use their anti-trust laws and have a talk with Amazon as well as the Big Five publishers; Yes, everything about digital licenses is gross and copyright law is ancient and bad and could certainly use a revamp - nobody other than Disney is arguing against that.

Keep in mind, anytime you or I hear "censorship of the marketplace" and "important to democracy" we all need to check who's saying it. In this case, it's Authors Guild president Douglas Preston sniping at Amazon. This same non-profit, despite being up-in-arms barely years ago about Barnes & Noble and how they had monopolized physical book sales, Barnes & Nobles is now their bastion, Authors Guild's last hope for bookstores. Well, them and Bookshop.org, the indie Amazon.

I want to jump back to that +86% gain mentioned earlier. Thinking for a moment, it’s likely due to Amazon and their sliding royalty pay scale on books. (Set to 75% if the price is 2.99$ to 9.99$, and 35% if above or below those prices.) That's unbelievably high when you consider traditional publishing royalties max out at 30% on hardcovers, 15% on paperbacks, and 25% on e-books. Sure traditional publishers give advances but they normalized charging authors for marketing and editing packages, normalized royalties coming from "proceeds" and not list price.

You have Amazon pressuring authors to sell their books for less, for higher royalties, paired with traditional publishers handing authors money with one hand and taking it back with the other. Industry reports like these will blame the collapse of physical book sales on the internet and e-books, but said industry suffered almost no change to their 27 Billion Dollars Annually from 2003 to 2017. But book sales are down? Clearly traditional publishers found somebody other than readers to take money from to make the difference. Oh weird, that -35% loss for traditionally published authors from earlier starts to make sense now. Statistics can be a dark math when in the hands of lobby groups.