Please sir can I have some more

On making a living as a writer

(Zachary Kadolph, Unsplash)

Ever since I was little, I’ve known two things:

1/ I wanted to be a writer.

2/ I needed to make money from it.

I didn’t have rich parents, a childhood bedroom to return to or an infatuated billionaire intent on marrying me. Either writing had to make me money or I couldn’t do it.

This has led me to do almost every job that involves writing over the years – book reviews, obituaries, sketches, jokes, journalism, fiction, stand-up, theatre, TV.

Basically, every kind of writing I liked - and some I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, if it were all about the money, I would have done something completely different. Lawyer maybe. Or formidable madam of a city brothel (do those even still exist?). The money wasn’t sufficient but it was necessary. So, as a teenager, I set myself the task of working out how it was made.

The first piece of writing I exchanged for money was a short story published in a London literary magazine which I wrote aged 17 while working in the accounts department of a meat-packing factory. I’d found out about the existence of this magazine in a thing that used to exist and maybe still does called The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.

I wrote and sold the short story because I understood that was the sort of thing writers did and that I’d better do if I ever hoped to become one. I simply assumed that at some point if I was good enough this would turn into money – as it had done for others in the past. Writing has often provided a path for wily parvenus to slither their way into the upper classes and take free holidays in stately homes while silently sneering at their intellectually inferior social betters and I was hoping that would one day be me. I remember being very excited when the cheque arrived. I wanted to frame it but probably spent it on lager or socks.

By the time I graduated, I knew that the world I’d hoped to belong to was pretty much dead. You do not really make a living, or reputation, from publishing short stories anymore (at least not in the manner described in, say, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia about the writer Julian MacLaren-Ross rolling around Soho on a series of unfulfilled advances). Since then, I’ve mainly written for TV. Why? To paraphrase a screenwriter quoted in a recent essay, “TV is where the money is.”

Novel writing, non-fiction, most journalism, playwrighting – these won’t make you enough money to live off outside of a big lottery win-style success. TV writing is the one form of writing that still just about supports an independent middle class. For now.

Why?

Naughty, naughty (Wikimedia Commons)

The biggest revolution in how writing is distributed since the printing press has decimated all our assumptions about how creative careers work. Somewhere between the noughties and the pandemic everything changed, leaving many (including me) attempting to climb up ladders that no longer exist.

Royalties founded in copyright law have come a less reliable source of income as piracy proliferates. Original contracts may not have allowed for all the ways work is now used. What’s a “repeat” on a streamer, where an individual audience member can “repeat” a show as much as they like? National writers’ guilds are being defanged as the industry globalises and UK writers are being used to undercut US and European writers with stronger unions, while the multitude of broadcasters and platforms makes it harder to negotiate industry-wide minimums. The result: more work takes place outside the auspices of traditional broadcasting where union agreements do not apply.

To add to this, the multitude of outlets means the internet has fragmented the audience so that individual gatekeepers have less money at their disposal. Hence an increase in the number of offers to pay writers in the dubious currencies of exposure and prestige. At the same time, the platforms that are profitable under this new system are using the dust kicked up by these changes to renegotiate terms in their favour – as has happened during every other technological revolution since the dawn of time.

From the creator’s perspective, the bar to entry is lower so as well as smaller audiences and less money there’s now a huge amount of competition. The internet means fewer professions are wreathed in mystery. If you want a spot at an open mic, you don’t have to phone up a single eccentric before 8am on a Friday you can go on the web and fill in a form. How many words in the average novel? Google it. Or don’t and serialise it on Substack.

The impact on writers across industries is the same:

More TV projects in development, but less of them pay.

More writing courses, but books, if published, have fewer readers.

More people pitching articles to more outlets, but rates are lower.

More comics, fewer well-paid spots.

The potential audience is bigger but reaching them is more difficult because of a noisy market with many competing distractions. That is: more people have a chance to sit at the table, winning the game is harder.

Lots of people have written extensively about the effect of this on the creative industries:

“A lot of the regular circuit is a game of travelling to bumfuck-on-nowhere for about fifty pounds and, even when it rises to more than the train tickets, I sometimes walk back through the door of my (best friend’s parents’) house realising that the round trip has totalled about £7 in hourly wage.”

- Kate Cheka, Where is all the money in comedy?

“The old system was that traditional media – its budgets underwritten by advertising and physical media sales and direct audience response – would pay well. It would do regularly enough to leave you time after every pay cheque to make stuff on spec, develop new ideas and go out and find homes for them. That’s not happening now.”

- Joel Morris, Where do you get your ideas from?

“I have made a career out of being an author…But I am deeply saddened that the job I love has become inaccessible and unsustainable for others – and increasingly ruled by luck.”

- Joanne Harris, Horribly low pay is pushing out my fellow authors – and yes that really does matter

Aherm

This is backed up by the figures. In 2022, the ALCS found that controlled for inflation the median income of professional authors had declined from £17608 in 2006 to £7000 a year and fewer were receiving advances. Speaking at the Houses of Parliament, Louisa Jackson from Craic Comedy shared research that found 70 percent of stand-ups were earning less than pre-pandemic. The price of housing is of course an additional factor. When I started, buying was punitive but renting was still affordable. Now, neither are.

An increasing number of jobs across the creative industries pay in visibility or prestige – neither of which is exchangeable for gas or food. Personally speaking, TV writing is the only thing that pays my overheads for the time it takes to do it and even that is looking increasingly wobbly. The pandemic has led to a collapse in meat-and-potatoes writer-for-hire work. I can tell you that getting a series away – unless it was HUGE and sold around the world by a terrestrial broadcaster – would likely not change my financial situation for any significant amount of time. AI is likely to gobble up more of the low-hanging fruit (link writing, voiceovers), which keep writers working on longer-form projects afloat. The comedy writer Joel Morris has written extensively about the amount of work that has to be done for free in TV development – with the writer, the most economically vulnerable person in the transaction, taking on most of the upfront risk. As for journalism, the effort of pitching something like say this essay with tweaks to a legacy outlet, even assuming they would be interested, wouldn’t cover my costs and is something I’d only do for, you guessed it, exposure. Stand-up is in a similar position. There is no expectation from most comics of making a living on the circuit. It’s cash on top of a day job, or a means to an end (social media, a touring show, writing or acting work). Appearing on Live at the Apollo while giving you bragging rights, won’t keep you in jumpsuits for more than a few months and people mainly do it to clip it up and put on Instagram to sell tour tickets – where they still make money, at least for now. Likewise, writing books for many is not financially rewarding and often pursued to establish a brand to allow writers to make money from something else. The question then becomes: what is that thing?

Small boy contemplates joining the world’s most glamorous pyramid scheme (Pickpik)

The result is you now have working club comics of many decades experience returning to their day jobs, established TV writers taking their place (haha) and advances shrinking to the point that book authorship (except in a tiny minority of cases) is no longer a viable full-time career for all but the very lucky. You hear these stories from people on all points on the spectrum of success. These problems aren’t personal, they are structural.

Why does this matter?

Number one, self-interest. Obviously. Duh. I like my job.

Number two, this is a what’s happening to many parts of the labour market across the board, not just in arts and entertainment.

Number three, living in a country with a thriving artistic and particularly literary culture matters to me. Why? Dunno. Just does.

I don’t want to make any claims for art or literature instrumentally like it helps us be better people or think through paradoxes and conflicts in creative ways (I think it can do those things) but because I think it’s valuable in itself.

This is just obvious to me as soon as I watch the Cockney Bishop sketch or read the final lines of Rilke’s ‘The Grown Up’. If people don’t immediately get it then that’s fine, but I don’t really have an argument apart from pointing at things and going “look!”

And in order for that culture to exist in any robust form, people need to be paid enough to do deep work rather than being nudged into churning out disposable repetitive algorithmic slop (which has its place, don’t get me wrong). I’m just not sure the economic model that’s emerging is very good at doing that.

Online work often doesn’t pay enough to cover thinking time. And, as many of us are discovering, the audience, unchecked, often has even worst taste than the decision-makers of old and less inclination to put its hand in its pocket for something long-form or risky. It’s arguably easier to persuade one gatekeeper to take a punt on something singular and unproven than 100 or more individual gatekeepers unless you have pre-existing financial security and clout – which still often comes from traditional media.

If I decided to aggressively monetise this newsletter, for example, you’d probably make me write things like 10 Times I Shat My Pants or whatever which, don’t get me wrong, is enjoyable, but I want to do it on my terms on my timeline like Mariah Carey, which is why I write 4000-word essays about the labour market that you don’t want instead.

Me: fucking you off (Jake Herbert, my website)

Then there’s diversity. This is not just a question of fairness (although it is a question of that). But without pay, writing and performing becomes a vanity hobby for rich people. Some rich people are great at them, don’t get me wrong. But if they dominate it means you get certain world views and mileus overrepresented and that’s impoverishing for all of us. For example, I don’t think a creator from an extremely comfortable background could have delivered this (TC 01.50), come up with this, or written this. It’s not just about subject matter, it’s about a way of seeing. Your background affects how you view people, institutions, even your metaphysics. Without stable income, there is a danger that people without inherited wealth are filleted for their life story then tossed aside.

I am sceptical of attempts to address this solely through pressure and awareness-raising. Although efforts to improve diversity in TV have worked to a limited extent, socioeconomic background is trickier because it’s harder to pin down. What does it mean? Your granddad was a miner? Your parents said settee? You had free school meals? It’s nebulous and open to gaming.

Also, as the economy “““restructures”””””” compassion fatigue will set in and those who are hoarding whatever they’ve still got will become increasingly sensitive to claims they don’t deserve it rendering access that depends purely on goodwill fragile. I remember being in a meeting about 10 years ago when a man in his twenties who’d had a similar upbringing to me in some ways (let’s call it “eventful”) was explaining to the exec all the challenges involved in someone like him being in a room like that and she nodded and smiled very kindly and agreed that something had to be done and I thought to myself that boy is not getting invited back.

And he wasn’t.

The actors’ strike, New York, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

So what makes a difference? Money.

The show that gave me my break in comedy writing paid. I had to turn down many other opportunities before that (including a place on the Royal Court Young Writers’ Group in my early twenties, which still makes me wince) because they didn’t pay and/or took place at a time of day when I was working. Historically “social mobility” (said with all the usual reservations and scare quotes) happens when people are given money and opportunity over a sustained period. That’s it. You don’t get it from going aw and patting people on the head. There is a danger that financial pressure splinters the workforce into special interest groups each pleading their case before the faceless God of the algorithm instead of uniting to make it pay.

So how do we do that?

The arts (like most areas of political life) need a labour movement focused on the economy that exists not the one that’s falling away. This is unlikely to be immediately forthcoming. So strap yourselves in!

This isn’t an argument for abandoning traditional unions. I am a member of both Equity and the Writers’ Guild and probably will always be for as long as I’m am making money from this business. They are collecting information and thinking publicly about these issues and applying pressure to the extent they can. That said, I am realistic. Current-day unions are nationally-bounded and not as yet in negotiations with the zillions of new platforms that now distribute art. The internet has broken the traditional model. Is Instagram a broadcaster? What about YouTube? In the past they’ve argued they’re just communications infrastructure, but the provider of a phone line doesn’t connect you with a mass audience, doesn’t make more money from you the bigger that audience gets and doesn’t sell advertising off the back of it. Online platforms are much more similar to broadcasters than they are to utilities and claims to the contrary are attempts at the same sleight-of-hand that led ChatGPT to dismiss hoovering up copyrighted work as “fair use”.

Hope the man respectethe my grinde… (Luttrell Psalter, Creative Commons)

In his book Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis argues that the internet has collapsed the distinction between professional and amateur entertainers and made us all into something called “cloud serfs”, labouring in the fields of Facebook and TikTok to entertain each other while the corporations skim the profits. And he’s right. The consequence of that for the creative industries, especially post-pandemic, are now obvious to everyone involved.

Stand up? You better upload your clips online to get an audience for your live shows. But guess what? Fewer people are going to live shows because they’re watching stand-up for free on the internet.

Writer? Your book’s been pirated, summarised, mangled and then regurgitated by ChatGPT and you’re competing with millions of people writing for free on social media, all of whom are hoping to get book deals, which also won’t pay them.

TV? A million production companies are competing for the same slot at a broadcaster who’s got no money now because everyone’s on YouTube, hoping to get noticed by TV (or hit it big and retire at eighteen).

Everywhere you look, online platforms are hoovering up creative work and audiences, making money from both, and not paying anyone that much (except Jake Paul). Instagram and YouTube make tens of billions in ad revenue a year, dwarfing traditional broadcasters (Instagram earned $32.4 billion in ad revenue in 2021, Paramount about $9 billion, Channel 4 around £1bn). Global ad revenue from social media was predicted to outstrip traditional outlets in 2025, according to The Guardian.

Of course it’s never been easy to make a living from writing, nor should it be necessarily. No-one’s obliged to fix your toilet, keep your car running or run the legal system on your behalf so you can sweetly savour the joys of self-expression. But if someone else is making money out of it, you should be too. This work clearly does have value because someone is profiting – just not, on the whole, the people who create it.

Looking back, the introduction of a new medium (printing press, cinema, TV) has aways led to distributors attempting to hoard the profits at the expense of their workers. Early Hollywood kept uncredited actors on low weekly wages. The early publishing and recorded music industries withheld royalties. This is then followed by a fightback (the formation of the Writers’ Guild, for example, or authors lobbying for copyright law) as workers try and get a fair deal. We are currently at the bit in between.

So what’s next?

Varoufakis argues we need an international decentralised labour movement that, by strategically withdrawing both unpaid labour and custom, can put pressure on platforms to introduce fair terms. Anonymous for artists, basically.

I don’t know what the answer is. And if I ever make millions, I reserve the right to hoard it like a paranoid goblin deep in the earth’s core, my only activity sniffing my delicious money like a big pile of rose petals.

But I know that whatever the answer is, it has to be:

1) International (how can a national body alone effectively take on YouTube or address the undercutting of union minimums by overseas writers?)

2) Bring together different kinds of creative workers. Authors and influencers must unite.

3) Forensically pursue the question of exactly how much money these platforms are making and from what.

There’s no future in a medium that immiserates the creative industries it depends on and no moral defence of it if it permanently lowers the quality of our collective life.

So that’s the future bit. How do we survive in the meantime?

Most obviously, people like me, who grew up at the very end of the old system, have to learn to play the game that actually exists and not the old one they read about in a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. As Barrett Swanson wrote in a very funny article in Harper’s about living in a hype house our disgust for influencers disguises the reality: we’re all influencers now. Self-promotion, reposting praise, the pursuit of constant visibility are all behaviours I dislike but like many others have learned to engage in for one reason: they work. I can tell you people are more likely to pay or read you if you specifically tell them to do it. I hate that about you people. I really do.

Visibility pays off because in a networked world two of the most valuable things you now own are a) your audience and b) your brand. Traditional gatekeepers (or more accurately, these days, amplifiers) increasingly expect creators to come to them with a pre-existing audience and extensive proof of concept – more of a “collab” model and less of a patronage one – and that applies across the board from sketch comedy to authorship. Your audience is what’s valuable – it sells books, tickets, TV shows, advertising. Creators have to invest in themselves before anyone will match that stake. Like, share, subscribe.

For all these reasons, working in the creative industries right now feels like rolling around in a tumble dryer. Writers, artists and performers are forced to mount a multichannel PR onslaught for a very uncertain return. The result is that the arts are increasingly places for people with a) rich partners, b) rich parents or c) stubborn maniacs (hello). During the week I started writing this I: finished the first draft of two commissioned TV scripts, redrafted a solo show, performed three gigs (lower than average) one of two of which involved a four-hour round trip, wrote new material, did a couple of days gag-writing for radio broadcast, and turned out 8000 words of an as-yet-untitled spec project. I also rewrote my website and did some online PR. Oh and slept.

Writing for a living in 2026 is not for the faint of heart.

However, whatever happens, I still know two things:

1/ I want to be a writer.

2/ I need to make money from it.

I didn’t keep the check I made from that short story. But I did keep the letter, with its lovely perforated edge. It told me that someone, somewhere thought my story was good enough to put beer in my glass and food on my plate. It gave me time to write the next one and a hope that I could one day work full-time as a writer. It gave me my life.

Maybe they should just have sent me a thumbs-up though the post? But I just don’t think it would have hit the same way.