Why Don’t We Pay Our Writers Like We Pay Our Sports Stars?

When it comes to sport, no price is too high to reward the top talent. The global sporting industry is powered by star players who operate as living, breathing brands that generates recognised returns on eye-watering levels on investment. Yet when it comes to another key global cultural industry, that of writing and content production, the opposite is true. The value of the writer, and of writing as a profession, has become economically, socially, and politically de-valued. By 2023 the median income for UK writers had fallen to just £7000 a year according to the Society for Authors, and this pattern is replicated across much of the world. So how and why has this gaping divide developed and what does it mean for our wider creative industries? 

The role of the writer has historically garnered respect and authority in cultures across the world. Building on the strength of oral traditions in early societies, the storyteller emerged as a source of trusted information, alternative perspectives, and wisdom about worlds far away from our own. In today’s age of fake news and disinformation, the stories that we tell and the storytellers who step forward to tell them have never been more vital in helping us make meaning from the world around us and in creating social cohesion. Writers have always had a significant social, economic and political impact: so why do we value them so very little today? 

Writing is a vital fuel line for everything from the stage to the big and small screens, the page and the digital realm. Writing also powers the publishing industry, a sector in which the UK leads the world and that continued to grow even during the pandemic. Last year alone the UK publishing sector sustained this growth trajectory at 22% and the UK is now the biggest exporter of books in the world. Aligned industries like publishing rely on writing for their production and presentation, yet the content creation that feeds their business models remains a relatively silent partner in the equation. 

And that impacts the literature we get to enjoy. Despite long term calls for greater diversity and representation in the creative industries, certain groups are still woefully underrepresented, and this imbalance starts at the stage of content creation. Who gets to write, whose stories and experiences get told, and who makes it past the publishing gatekeepers, has a long-term impact on the stories a society tells about itself. 

The danger today is that unless we pay our writers appropriately for the skill, experience and product that they deliver we run the risk of writing as a profession becoming the preserve of the privileged. As long as the value of writers remains underappreciated, and unrealised, we also face haemorrhaging creatives from our future talent pipeline. Research conducted by the CREATe Centre revealed that there has already been a rapid decline in the percentage of full-time professional authors from 40% of those surveyed in 2006, to 28% in 2018, and 19% in 2022. 

Another consequence of making writing a career option only for the rich is that the vital experiences and opinions of the majority of the population will go unrepresented. This runs the risk of accentuating existing divides both within society and between cultures. In the UK, the 2016 Brexit referendum brought a dawning realisation that 49% of the general public felt very differently to the other 51%. Yet their narrative was less reported in the media, less present in popular culture, and relatively invisible in writing up to that point. 

Despite organisations like ALCS offering education and support for writers in navigating the business of literature, the creative labour of writing is fast becoming undervalued both economically and socially. Writers’ salaries are not matched by publishers’ profits, and there are structural issues relating to the ways in which writing is distributed, shared and consumed today. Authors are rarely experienced in navigating publishing contracts, advances or pay outs, and the new murky speculative world of franchising, translation and adaptation rights. This can mean that when a deal comes along it is often snatched up – because something is better than nothing? – and this ultimately underdelivers on the long-term value and afterlife of literature. 

Like global sporting super stars, the distinct names and personalities of our highest profile authors are brands capable of leveraging significant sales and income. But the vast majority of writers who operate in the normal ‘lower leagues’ of success experience a very different story. The cold hard fact is that the majority of writing is not destined to make a prize list, will not sell in the tens of thousands, end up as a lucrative TV adaptation, cinematic experience, video game or franchised product. Across the world, literature operates in a relatively small ecosystem of production compared to the vast markets of its consumption. As a result of this narrow source base, writers and literature professionals often struggle to earn a living commensurate with their skill, expertise, and education. 

How Can We Make Literature Pay Better?

Inaccessible and unsustainable, poorly paid and undervalued, the role of the writer is becoming an increasingly unattractive profession in the twenty-first century. So how can we make literature pay better? 

Investing in new talent and developing the professional structures and skillsets to support a vibrant literary economy will pay dividends further down the creative industry pipeline, delivering new productions, products and experiences and underpinning the soft power of nations. At a production level, this means new approaches to IP and copyright, pre-emptive boundary setting around developments like AI and content licensing, and new industry recognition of the role of the writer in an age of digitised content creation. 

This involves collaborating outside of traditional literature industries into the third and private sector, as well as enhancing education in the business of writing. When we talk about money and literature, we also need to talk about supply and demand. If the market is saturated with supply, can we ever push up earnings? Is there a fundamental contradiction between expanding access, and growing income? At the heart of this is a simple question: how do we do business as well as we do art? 

Passion alone does not pay the bills and it is not enough to say that writers are compensated by loving what they do. By focussing less on passion for words and ideas, as well as on business acumen and sales, writers can help themselves become better positioned to leverage the greatest possible multiplicity of values from their creative output. As global literature professionals, we should be asking ourselves how we can work together to develop resilient and financially sustainable careers for writers that accommodate the challenges and opportunities of new contemporary contexts like AI and digital literature. 

If writing is devalued by our innate familiarity with it, then perhaps it is time for us to look again at the profession and at the value of the writer as a social as well as economic figure and ask what the world would look like without a range of writers and narratives in it. The extinction of diversity in the literary profession is no longer a far-off threat; it is an imminent reality. Unless decisive action is taken, we run the risk of pricing out an entire generation of talent. This will not only be a huge loss to our cultural production, but it will also mean that our creative industries – one of the top three growth areas in the UK – have their supply chain terminated. 

Turning to AI to solve the problem posed by the devaluation of writing is not the answer: mass language systems are only as good as the content underpinning them; content that is written by authors, journalists, scriptwriters, and many other relatively invisible literary professionals. Instead, we solve this by working together with the aligned creative sectors that rely on writing to reframe its relevance and revivify its value for society and the economy today. 

By shining a spotlight on the economic and social role of the writer, we can make a better case for investment, offer a clearer framework for appreciating the value of writing as being as much about pounds and pence as it is hearts and minds. By getting it right in writing, we have the potential to create a level playing field on which our top authors – like our top sports stars – can shine and gain recognition and reward on a global stage. 

Katy Shaw is Professor of 21st-century writing and publishing at Northumbria University, UK and Director of the UKRI/AHRC Creative Communities programme. Her research interests include diversity and inclusion in the creative industries (the subject of her 2022 TED talk) and the redistribution of the creative industries from the capital to the regions and nations as part of the ‘levelling up agenda’. She is the author of the 2021 APPG Inquiry report ‘The Case for Culture’ that set out policy recommendations, many of which have since been adopted by UK government, on how to rebuild rebalance and recover cultural production post-covid. She sits as a commissioner on the LGA Culture Commission and the Gordon Brown Union Commission. Her policy consultancy focuses on R&D, innovation and the role of HEIs and further education in cultural partnership working. As Professor of writing she is the author of five monographs, four edited collections as well as journal articles and essays on contemporary British literature and is the author of the British Council ‘Write Now: Teaching 21st-century Literature Globally’ report. She can be found on X/Twitter @profkatyshaw 

The International Literature Exchange is a partnership project by National Centre for Writing and British Council, supported by Arts Council England.