Even bestselling authors are under threat from dwindling incomes
Ellen Perrson-Hagger’s piece (‘It was a deflating experience’: the novelists who nearly gave up, 14 October) has raised a wry smile among many.
Almost all novelists, including former bestselling authors and prize-winners, now face a daily struggle to maintain income and confidence. Fiction, especially literary fiction, has always been akin to gathering samphire, but we find ourselves squeezed both by the high prices that publishers insist on (which bestsellers get discounted by up to 50%) and also by the fashion for Irish writers who have already enjoyed a level of Arts Council support in their own country that we in Britain can only marvel at.
Those of us below the “golden generation” of the 1980s will simply not survive if this continues. Nobody can live on the average earnings of £7,000 a year quoted in the 2022 Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society report.
It’s good to publicise just how desperate life has become, but there are plenty of novelists who don’t just “nearly give up”. They give up, and our culture is the poorer for it.
Amanda Craig
London
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