The one with the depressing statistics
MUSING
We vaguely know that most people doing some sort of art for a living don’t make much out of it. I doubt it’s particularly egregious for writers over, say, actors or dancers, but it’s worth knowing, because often our first port of call when we’re still somehow not full-time-writer-bestseller-millionaires is to blame ourselves as failures. (Especially when we’re already published, *cough* talking about a friend) Other people have managed it, we think, why can’t I? What the shit is wrong with me?
But, well, here are the odds we’re up against.
This is a survey of 9,000 writers from 10 years ago. Caveats: 1. I don’t know the biases for the gathered data (do millionaire authors bother with surveys?) and 2. well, it’s old data - but I’d actually argue, and there are some bits of evidence for this floating around, that it’s actually gotten a lot worse since then.
This isn’t the only survey of its kind I’ve come across that paints a similar picture. The decline of author income over the last couple of decades is well documented. It also jibes with the anecdotal evidence I have from my experience in working for one of the biggest publishers in the world and getting to see some numbers over a decade of time. Basically, according to the above:
Over 50% of traditionally published writers made less than $1,000 from their writing in the given year surveyed.
Over 85% of them made less than $10,000.
And nearly 95% of them made less than $30,000.
95% of traditionally published writers, who had already beaten the laughably massive odds not only to get a literary agent, but to land a book deal with a publisher, did not make a liveable wage in the given year. 95%.
So 5% - let’s be generous and call it 6%, I had to squint a lot at the graph - of all traditionally published writers made enough to live on, depending on your metric for ‘enough to live on’. Well, shit, I say. That’s depressing. (Warned you!)
A possible reason for this: the publishing industry hasn’t expanded much by revenue over the last 20 years, but the number of traditionally published books and writers has, by an overwhelming amount. So they’re publishing far more titles than ever before into the same amount of market, and everyone’s share of the pie has decreased enormously.
If you’re anything like I was when I wanted to become a writer, I had no interest in being told the terrible odds, thank you, because I was gunning to be the 6%. (Still am.) So I say this not to put anyone off trying, but if there was one absolute boon my time working in traditional publishing gave me, it was an inside look into just how astronomically hard it is to be a working writer. I know many (most?) debut writers I’ve come across had no idea of the odds they were working with, because no-one told them. It’s gotten easier to discover that dismaying shit for yourself via the internet, but still the pervasive myths persist.
Published writers have already bucked tremendous odds by getting published at all, but it doesn’t stop there. In this kind of business, once you’ve miraculously reached the success level you want, you don’t just stay there. We have to keep trying to stay there, over and over again, and most of us will fail.
There’s just too much competition, and tired, overworked publishers, who anecdotally have as much idea how to make a sure-fire hit as Hollywood studio executives (i.e. pretty near zero), and can’t even promote the vast majority of the books they acquire, never mind launch the kind of vast marketing, publicity and sales campaign it takes these days just to make a dent in the noise. (The inside workings of publishers is a post for another day.)
Every time a book goes out on submission, it’s another job hunt. Every time you pitch a script idea, it’s another job hunt. Writers spend all their time job hunting, and they don’t get the vast majority of the jobs they go for. It’s exhausting, and demoralising, and because of the human tendency to trumpet our triumphs and hide our failures, we don’t seem to understand that this is the overwhelming norm.
So if you’re struggling to cobble together a decent living out of writing, you’re not alone. 94% of writers are doing the same. Solidarity, meine freunde!
FEEDING
HOLY MOTORS is a gloriously demented French movie, and a wonderful kaleidoscopic love letter to performance. Go into it knowing as little as possible. Denis Lavant equals chameleonic maestro.
Oh god. TIME SHELTER was equal parts horrifying and nostalgic and painful and, fair warning, not massively optimistic about the future of the human race. But it did score a mark in my soul.
WRITING
Here’s the opening of a spec script1 I’m working on that no-one, not even my manager, has read yet. This scene might not survive a subsequent draft, and that’s the nature of drafting. It’s an uncomfortable feeling for me to publish raw draft stuff on the internet for strangers to read, but frankly I’d find it fascinating if a writer I liked did that, so I’m giving it a go.
For the unitiated, a spec script is a movie script that you write a full draft of in the hopes that a well-placed someone will go ‘oh, that’s good’ and want to buy it.