I would like to make a last-minute plea with Rachael Reeves for writers.
By Sally Gardner – multimillion seller UK author.
The UK publishing sector, books and journals and all the worlds they hold, contributed eleven billion to the UK economy and supported eighty four thousand jobs. The UK book publishing industry alone is estimated to have an annual revenue of around £6.9 Bn for 2024 to 2025
Yet writers have never been more in need of help from the The Royal Literary Fund. Applications have risen dramatically. Making a living as a writer is becoming harder. Advances are shrinking, royalties are uncertain, living standards are falling. Yes, there are still the six figure deals that distract us from the truth, but they are rare, and they mask the reality most writers face.
Let us take a £50K advance, which on the surface appears mighty generous. You receive twenty thousand upfront. Your agent takes between ten and twenty percent of the overall £50K , a standard professional commission, and that percentage is applied to each payment as it comes in. Then you must write the book. That may take two or three years. When you hand it in and it is approved, you receive a further £10K , and the same percentage is applied again. You are told the book will be published in May, but it slips to November. The next payment arrives only on publication, so a delay of 3 or 6 months lands directly on your bills.
After that, you wait for the paperback for the final instalment, which is a movable feast. It may appear the following year, or the year after, depending on how the market shifts and how the publisher chooses to position it. If you are like me, severely dyslexic, you may lose another twelve percent to a private editor.
The book receives favourable reviews. It does reasonably well. Yet it fails to hit the best seller list and might not earn back its advance. The next time you negotiate a contract, you are offered twenty thousand. If that does not earn out, you are offered £10K . It is easy to say this is down to the writer, but it is not. It is the result of many forces, one of which is the sheer instability of the industry. There is no steady ground on which a writer can build a living. Matters have only grown more difficult with Amazon, and with the accelerating pressure of the market itself.
All of this creates a narrowing corridor in which writers must somehow continue to walk. The profession is treated as if it were a hobby, a private indulgence, something done in spare hours. Yet the entire industry depends on the people who sit at their desks day after day, shaping stories out of uncertainty. Without them, there is nothing to sell, nothing to market, nothing to debate at festivals, nothing to stack on tables at Christmas.
And still, we behave as if writers can live on air. Many authors now piece together a living from whatever they can find, teaching a little, reviewing when asked. Others slip quietly out of the profession, not from lack of talent, but because the sums no longer make sense. We are losing voices. Each one takes with them a book that will never be written, a story that will never be heard.
At the same time, writers are expected to be publicists, performers, commentators, and salespeople, all while earning less than they did twenty years ago. The work itself becomes squeezed between demands that have nothing to do with writing. This is an industry that relies on the fragile labour of imagination yet refuses to build a structure strong enough to support the people who provide it.
And if we continue down this path, the cost will be far greater than the loss of individual careers. It will ultimately cost us our freedom of speech. Writing will slip into the hands of only those who can afford to do it. The voices that survive will be those supported by private means, while the rest are pushed aside by simple economics. The silence will not fall loudly. It will arrive gradually, as books grow narrower in scope and less varied in experience.
We need to find the courage to change this. What we need is a proper salary scheme that does not rely solely on the roulette of advances and royalties. A structure that acknowledges writing as work, not chance. A system that allows writers to plan a life, rather than wager one. Across Europe, writers benefit from structured public support that treats creative labour as essential cultural infrastructure, not a gamble. Finland offers multi-month grants of €8,000–€16,000 to give writers uninterrupted time to work; Germany’s Künstlersozialkasse provides health, pension and social-insurance access for self-employed authors; and Berlin offers annual scholarships of up to €24,000 paid monthly. Norway and Sweden invest heavily in translation and export schemes, ensuring their writers earn not only at home but in global markets, while more than 30 countries operate Public Lending Right systems that meaningfully compensate authors for library use. By contrast, the UK distributes £6.54 million across roughly 22,000 registered writers — an average of under £300 a year — a symbolic gesture rather than a sustainable income stream. These international models show what is possible when a nation recognises writing as a public good.
The UK’s writing community — the foundation of an £11 billion publishing sector supporting 84,000 jobs — deserves no less. A British scheme that combines predictable income support, access to social protections, strengthened PLR payments, and meaningful translation/export funding would give writers the stability to build sustainable careers rather than survive on shrinking advances and delayed royalties. Other countries have already demonstrated that when you give writers time, security and dignity, the cultural return is immense. Now is the moment for the UK to match that ambition — and for Rachel Reeves to back a structure that allows writers to keep writing
We could do the same.
If we want stories to thrive, we must give their makers room to breathe. We must recognise this crisis as it is, not as we wish it to be. Writers need stability, time, fair pay, and the basic dignity of being able to live on the work they create. Without that, we are not nurturing an industry. We are slowly dismantling one.
A nation that neglects its writers forgets its own voice, and slowly loses its identity.
