Canelo / Arts Council England

That sales of literary fiction are falling: 
This does appear to be true. 
The data from print sales is clear. The price of books has held flat and 
value, in real terms, has fallen, sometimes significantly. Bookshops 
are closing. Ebook sales have boomed, but not for literary fiction. 
•
That marketing support within publishers for literary fiction 
is falling: 
There is no firm data to support this, but a widespread 
belief from our survey respondents that it is an issue. Against that, 
publishers are being creative with their marketing, putting in place 
new social media teams for example.
•
That there continues to be a problem for writers of BAME and 
other backgrounds to break into literary fiction:
Again, there is 
a widespread acknowledgment that this is true. It seems clear that 
class, race and geographical barriers especially make breaking into 
the literary world difficult. 

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Canelo / Arts Council England | 
38

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