CREATe research on authors’ pay cited in Parliamentary Inquiry and reported in Guardian and Financial Times
In May, the School of Law’s Copyright & Creative Economy Centre (CREATe) released a major study on UK Authors’ Earnings and Contracts based on a large scale survey of 50,000 authors conducted in 2018. The study was funded as independent research by the UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).
The research provided an important input to the Inquiry into Authors’ Earnings of the All-Party Parliamentary Writers Group.
Their report (published on 11 June 2019) cites the research prominently:
“Despite the continued growth of the creative industries, now valued at £101.5 billion, studies show that writers’ earnings have fallen by 42% in real terms since 2005.” (page 5)
The report also uses the findings relating to the so-called ‘gender gap’: “The most recent ALCS survey suggests that female authors earn around 75% of that earned by their male counterparts. This issue seems to exist in both earnings and opportunity. 16% of working screenwriters are women and only 14% of prime-time TV is written by women.” (page 5)
The Guardian, reporting on the study on 7 May 2019, focuses on the risk to diversity. Alison Flood writes that: “Writing is in danger of becoming an elitist profession, with many authors being subsidised by their partners or a second job in order to stay afloat, according to new statistics.”
In the Saturday edition of The Financial Times (9 June 2019), Emily Rhodes’ feature: “How do authors earn a living? It’s a Catch-22 situation” extensively references the new research. Rhodes writes: “The ALCS survey also shows that an increasing number of authors no longer get any advance at all: only 69 per cent of primary occupation writers said they received an advance, down from 82 per cent in 2006.”
“Even with new potential revenue from events, options and audio rights, falling advances demand that authors must commit to writing the book before earning much (or any) money from it. Professor Martin Kretschmer, who led the research for the ACLS survey, commented on the drop in authors’ earnings: ‘It can be argued that this is making writing more elitist as a profession.’”
Other reports of the research include:
Bookseller (11 June 2019)
Books + Publishing Australia/New Zealand (8 May 2019)
BookBrunch (8 May 2019)
http://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/corporate/writers-are-overwhelmingly-white/
Society of Authors (7 May 2019)
ALCS news release (2 May 2019)
https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/authors-earnings-research-researchers-publish-full-report
The full study can be downloaded below, including links to previous surveys conducted in 2006 (also led by Kretschmer), and repeated in 2014 (by Gibson, Johnson & Dimita out of Queen Mary, University of London). Prof. Martin Kretschmer says: “This series of surveys offers one of the first opportunities to assess robustly the effects of digital changes on the labour market and working conditions of a specific professional sector.”
Link to full study:
https://www.create.ac.uk/uk-authors-earnings-and-contracts-2018-a-survey-of-50000-writers/
