How much do writers earn?

Much less than you think. Much less.

I am currently working on a book for the British Library about ‘when books go bad’ (out later this year if I get a move on) and this week have been writing about H.G. Wells and his feud with American writer Henry James. As we all know, one thing leads to another when researching something and by the highways and byways of the interwebs’ rabbit holes I came across a letter from Wells in June 1888 which detailed his earnings (see snippet above).

At this point he was at the beginning of his career, writing short stories and articles, and working on The Chronic Argonauts, a short story about a man who invents a time machine, which was a dry run for his 1895 The Time Machine. Still, it’s a good indication of the problems facing writers in terms of ready money.

Things have not improved for those of us scribbling away. In 2022, a report for the UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) by the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Research Centre (CREATe) indicated that professional authors earn an average of £7,000 a year. That figure was down £3,500 on 2018’s figure. Looking a little further back, it was £12,330 in 2007. That’s a hefty drop over just 15 years and underlines the precariously impecunious nature of a writing career. It’s a topic I’ll write about again later in the year.

On the plus side for Wells, things looked up nicely soon after the 1888 annus horribilis. In 1893 he made £380 13s. 7d (about £41,000 in today’s money - “it had been extremely difficult to keep things going” he wrote in his 1934 memoir Experiment in Autobiography). In 1894 he earned £583 17s. 7d. (£64,000) and in 1895 £792 2s. 5d. (£88,000). By 1896 he had reached the dizzy heights of £1,056 7s. 9d. (about £119,000).

I’ll end with this post by James Wright earlier today on Bluesky which also caught my eye. While it focuses on public speaking fees, it does also include a pertinent section about how much authors make from their books when they sell copies themselves as opposed to when bookshops sell them.