Authors Guild says median income for members has fallen 24% in five years, with piracy, Amazon and publishing economies contributing to slump in earnings

The earnings of more than half of American authors fell below the US federal poverty level last year, according to a survey from the Authors Guild.

Analysing responses from 1,674 authors in its first survey since 2009, the US organisation found that the median income from writing for an American author in 2014 was $8,000, down 24% from $10,500 six years ago. The majority (56%) of writers, it said, earned less from all of their writing-related activities than the $11,670 judged in 2014 to have been the minimum income needed by a one-person household in the US.

Earnings for full-time authors dropped 30% between 2009 and 2014, from $25,000 to $17,500, while the median income of part-time writers fell 38% over the period, from $7,250 to $4,500. Thirty-nine percent of respondents to the survey said their sole income came from writing.

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“We expected some decline in earnings because we kept hearing from authors that they were struggling to earn a living. But it was impossible to imagine how much of a drop to expect,” said Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger.

Last summer, an Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society’s survey of almost 2,500 working writers in the UK found that the median income of a professional author in 2013 was £11,000, down 29% on 2005. Said Rasenberger: “It gave us an inkling that our results would be as bad, and this survey finally proved they were equally dramatic here.” She attributed the plummet to “several factors related directly to Amazon’s role in the current publishing landscape”.

The Authors Guild has backed a group of high-profile authors, headed by Douglas Preston, which has been calling on the US justice department to investigate the online retailer. “First, we have an unhealthy marketplace for books today because of Amazon’s dominance of the US book market,” said Rasenberger. “Thousands of bookstores have closed because they can’t compete with Amazon. Many readers can only find books they want through Amazon.” She added: Amazon also has forced publishers to accept terms that they would not accept in a healthy, diverse marketplace. A publisher cannot survive without Amazon today, and Amazon takes advantage by forcing them to accept unfair terms.”

The publishers then “pass on the losses incurred as a result of Amazon’s tactics to its authors”, with most writers given a 25% royalty for ebooks, something which Rasenberger said had “no rational justification”, when costs for producing ebooks are “relatively low”.

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The Authors Guild executive director added that earnings for authors have also been dragged down by the general consolidation of publishing – which has forced the industry “to be more bottom-line driven” – and by piracy and “loss of respect for copyright law”, pointing to Google’s project to scan millions of books “without any respect for the authors’ copyright”, to which the Guild is mounting an ongoing legal appeal. “Google Books only allows ‘snippets’ of books to be read, but our survey may be one of the first pointing to related effects on potential earnings overall,” said Rasenberger.

Thirty-three percent of author reported self-publishing at least one book. Educational authors with traditional publishers, meanwhile, had the highest writing-related income in 2014, at $17,750, followed by traditionally published trade authors, at $10,250; self-published respondents earned $4,500. The biggest decline in income over the period was for traditionally published trade authors, at 28%; earnings for self-published authors were down 25%.

“The rise of indie authors and their fan bases may be taking sales away from traditional publishers,” said Rasenberger. “Self-publishing may be a good way forward for many authors, but by and large indie authors are not making much money yet.”

The survey also revealed that median income for male and female authors was “largely comparable” in 2014, with men earning a median of $8,250 and women $8,000. In 2009, male authors earned $12,250, compared to $10,500 for women.