Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
20

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, 
8
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/huge-inequality-writer-earnings 
9
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/14/philip-pullman-resigns-oxford-literary-festival-patron-pay-authors 

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