Dismal Economics
So you’re writing a book, and you’re wondering if it might be published and earn you a lot of money. Fair enough. It’s a perfectly reasonable question. Let’s do some numbers.
Some years ago I did a stint as a manuscript reader for a publisher in London. In my time there I looked at 200 manuscripts. I passed twenty on to my bosses for a second opinion. Of those I thought six might be publishable. In the end they published one. They hadn’t been expecting me to find any.
So that’s one out of two hundred submitted. When I compared notes with my editor on this he thought that the ratio - at least in the UK - was nearer one in five hundred. I can’t adjust for the effect of one book being submitted a number of different publishers in succession (as Harry Potter was, and Watership Down and no doubt many other novels that went on to be very successful.) But let’s say the chances of acceptance are around one percent or below.
Depressing? Yes. But new authors do get published – even now. And lotteries do get won. So let’s say the book’s accepted. What are the chances of success (ie: big sales, household name, publisher clamouring for sequels and old life totally rotted up by celebrity)?
They’re better. But they’re still not great. A University of Bournemouth survey of professional authors in the UK found that 50% of earnings go to just 10% of us. So that’s say one in ten of us making the big time. The rest of us get by on sums that fluctuate from year to year but on average amount to about two-thirds of the UK average wage. That’s a useful second salary for a household (especially if you manage to do it part time) but not the path to riches.
The point is that there are far more of us wanting to write than the public want to read. Most readers enjoy reading more if they can talk about the book afterwards to someone else who has read it. And a reader is most likely to pick up a book by an author they haven’t read if someone else tells them it’s good. Today’s readers may well be far more diverse in their tastes than in the past. They will have more ways of chattering about more books. But the social need is, as it always has been, for small numbers of books that large numbers of people can talk about. Not the other way around.
And yes, quality is part of the social need, but only part of it. Beautifully written, intellectually challenging books only attract a minority. Anything that offers a good gossip or a nice, heart-warming dream will stake a far bigger claim on the reading public’s purse. Wail if you like, but that’s the truth.
I don’t think there’s any point blaming the industry for any of this. If publishers and booksellers get swept away by the advent of the e-book I think we’ll find that all these effects will persist, and will probably become even more marked. More of that another time, maybe.