Authors remuneration

The novelist didn't realize how fervently society wants to turn us into calculators - every action has a payment or a fee - until she had her first child. Here she reckons with motherhood's ticking meter: every minute with her kids is work lost, and each minute writing subtracts from precious, un-price-able joy.

Sixty-seven percent of professional writers earned £10,000 or less in 2018, a Royal Society of LiteratureThis British site may seem rather formal (stated aim ‘to sustain and encourage all that is perceived as best whether traditional or experimental in English letters, and to strive for a Catholic appreciation of literature’), but has a lively series of lectures and discussions involving distinguished authors. Also administers literary prizes. http://www.rslit.org/index1.html poll of more than 2,000 authors has found, with a room of one's own still viewed as the most important requirement for a writing career 90 years on from Virginia Woolf's seminal essay.

Amazon has called the conclusions of a recent report into US author earnings flawed, after the Authors Guild suggested that the retail giant's dominance could be partly responsible for the "a crisis of epic proportions" affecting writers in the US.  Read more

Authors' organisations have revealed an "ever-increasing" demand on financial hardship grants, with new applications to the Royal Literary Fund

Old-established British organisation which is using substantial new funds from writers' estates for excellent new scheme offering grants to published writers, who act as 'fellows' helping to improve students' writing in higher education institutions. The fellows each have a page and contact details on the website. www.rlf.org.uk

Reliably, every year or so, you'll see headlines about new research that claims author incomes are on the decline. The most recent is from the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), a British nonprofit run by writers for writers. (Download the report here).  Read more