Philip Pullman calls for authors to get fairer share of publisher profits

Philip Pullman has called on publishers to stop damaging “the ecology of the book world” and start giving authors a fairer share of the money their books earn.

Speaking in his capacity as president of the Society of Authors, the His Dark Materials author hit out at the fact that while profit margins in publishing are rising, the money authors are paid is going down.

“To allow corporate profits to be so high at a time when author earnings are markedly falling is, apart from anything else, shockingly bad husbandry. It’s perfectly possible to make a good profit and pay a fair return to all of those on whose work, after all, everything else depends. But that’s not happening at the moment,” said Pullman. “I like every individual editor, designer, marketing and publicity person I deal with; but I don’t like what publishers, corporately, are doing to the ecology of the book world. It’s damaging, and it should change.”

Pullman’s comments came in an article for the Bookseller magazine by Society of Authors chief executive Nicola Solomon, in which Solomon described how major publishers such as Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House are reporting profit margins of around 16%, while authors – who, according to a 2016 European commission report have a typical annual income of just £12,500 – were taking home around 3% of publisher turnover in 2016, according to her calculations.

“Once everyone in the publishing house was paid, publishers’ shareholders received up to three times the amount paid to authors. And authors still had to pay their own expenses and agents,” wrote Solomon, acknowledging that while “publishers may contest these numbers … we cannot break down these figures between publishers because they do not publish authors’ share”.

Source: theguardian