Mediapart has gained access to a wide-ranging study into the financial situation of authors in France conducted by a complimentary pension fund for authors, the IRCEC, and which involved data concerning 117, 237 authors who subscribed to the fund between 1995 and 2013. At first glance, the results, not yet published, suggest that writers have a comfortable lifestyle. In 2013, the average annual income was 37, 559 euros, with a strong disparity between men and women. Male authors that year earned an average 46 239 euros, while female authors averaged 29,114 euros.
But Marie Sellier, head of the Société des gens de lettres, a body founded in the 19th century which defends authors’ rights, points to a different story. “You cannot imagine the number of known and recognised writers who seek help from our social affairs commission, such is the catastrophic economic situation they are in,” she told Mediapart.
When analyzing the evolution of writers’ incomes since 1995, and taking into account inflation, their earnings show a steady fall. The IRCEC study observed that the fall in revenue is mirrored by most artistic professions, in what it called “an evolution profile close to that of independent professionals”. But while the trend is a broad one, it is playwrights and authors who have seen their income fall the most. As the sociologist Bernard Lahire observed in his 2006 study La Condition littéraire, writers lead “a double life”, and it is a minority who live entirely from their works.
“In France, practically no author can earn a living,” commented Franco-American author Jonathan Littell, who in 2006 won the prestigious Goncourt literary prize for his work, The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes). “The whole book chain lives from books, except the writer.”
According to the fund that manages the system of social security payments and rights for authors, the AGESSA, the number of its affiliated members - those who earn more than 8,449 euros per year from copyright fees – has grown 66% since 1996, and 36% since 2005. This suggests that while authors are poorer, they are greater in number, something that Marie Sellier recognizes to be “a paradox”. She cautions however that many of the affiliated members may well be earning a living from another activity.
Of the 421 million copies of books that were distributed last year in France, almost a quarter were novels, the others being mostly practical works such as recipe books, gardening and tourism guides. Poetry and plays represented just 0.5% of the total.
'Publishers have become a little mad'
While the number of writers appears to be increasing - according to an old saying, half of France writes and the other half don’t read - it is also because of a change in strategy by the publishing industry, beginning in the 1990s, whereby the number of book titles published increases every year, which Marie Sellier says is sclearly “overproduction”.
According to figures from the French national publishers’ federation, in 1995 there were 300 million copies printed of 42,997 titles. In 2014, almost 20 years later, there were 421 million copies printed of 98,306 titles. That represents a 114% jump in 19 years of the number of titles published, while the number of books printed rose by 40%.
The trend is particularly apparent in the category of first novels. “Between 1995 and 2008, the number of first novels published per year was multiplied by five, whereas the production of novels in its entirety was multiplied by 1.5,” note Bertrand Legendre and Corinne Abensour in their 2012 book Entrer en literature.
The fall in readership led the publishing industry to counter the trend by offering a wider variety of works, and any regular customer of bookshops in France has witnessed the increasing rhythm at which new titles are stacked on shelves. But the resulting drop in sales per title has served to diminish an author’s income.
“In my domain, that of books about the sea, there were 30 authors and four major publishers 30 years ago,” said Dominique Le Brun, vice-president of the Société des gens de lettres. “Now there are a dozen [major publishers] and around ten small publishing houses.” Le Brun says that publishers have become “a little mad” in their approach. He cited the example of a well-known author whose publisher, after the initial success of her book just published, asked her to produce another within 18 months.
Marie Sellier said it was “impossible” to halt the overproduction of the industry, given that no author will refuse a publisher’s offer to present a new book. Indeed, neither publisher nor author is motivated to voluntarily and individually limit their production.
The future appears a bleak one for authors, and the worst may be on the yet to come with the development of digital publishing. “The dematerialization is an enormous problem and no-one today sees how authors will be able to earn a living if the publishing economy moves massively to digital,” warned Dominique Le Brun.
Authors in Franc earn 10% of a printed book’s sale price (that is, once the book begins selling beyond a pre-agreed number), while authors of children’s books earn half that. In the digital industry, the best deals provide an author with 17% of the sale price - which is much lower than a printed work (and which costs the publisher much less to produce). Meanwhile, problems with illegal downloading are growing. “In the weeks that followed the release of my last book, Kinderzimmer, I counted between 300 and 400 pirate copies, and then I stopped counting,” said French writer Valentine Goby.
The development of digital works offered for loan by libraries, and especially digital versions of newly-released books, is set to reduce the small income writers currently receive from loans of printed books. “There is currently no legal framework,” said Goby, who argues that there is an urgent need to introduce a limit to the number of loans per digital book file, coupled with a local geographical limit to the numbers lent.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.