Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire
Cultural billionaires vs. actual billionaires
Imagine that in every business school students were told, in all seriousness, that they were in training for being a billionaire. Imagine it was heavily implied that the natural conclusion of their careers—what “making it” in business meant—was legit billionaire-status. Judged from the outside, such a situation would appear the enactment of a collective pathological delusion.
And yet an equivalent, at least of a kind, occurs every year in the arts, in writing, and in music. Functionally, at least. For when it comes to certain creative fields, while there are other tangential options than simply becoming very famous (like working for a non-profit, or teaching creative writing at a university) there is an incredibly steep, punishingly steep, impossibly steep, beyond-Pareto-distribution-steep curve wherein only a vanishingly small fraction of people make a living via their artistic efforts alone. Now, I wouldn’t want people to stop majoring in English Literature, Dance, or Fine Arts, just because of this—that’s not the point of an education. But youthful aspirants deserve to know that what makes the situation in many creative fields unusual is that only the very tippy top count as having “made it” in the most baseline practical sense of being able to do the thing for a living. This is different than almost any other field or career, where you can make a living without reaching the absolute peak of human accomplishment and accolade.
Occasionally, this asymmetry is thrown into stark relief, to great consternation and debate. A recent example of this was the viral article “No one buys books” by Substacker Elle Griffin (a previous guest on The Intrinsic Podcast) going through the unforgiving sales statistics of book publishing. Much of her post was a synthesis of a 700,000 word book, The Trial, which contains the court transcripts following the antitrust case that occurred when two of the biggest publishing companies tried to combine in 2022. Hidden in the transcripts are a lot of publishing industry secrets, said by the CEOs of the companies themselves, like:
It would be just a couple of books in every hundred are driving that degree of profit… twoish books account for the lion’s share of profitability.
— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US
Or:
Q. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four-year period?
A. My understanding is that it was about 50.
Q. 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year?
A. Yes.
—Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House.
In this, as Elle has pointed out before, the economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.
To truly understand the bleak reality requires a comparison. The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. And I think it’s arguable that becoming a cultural billionaire is just as rare as becoming an actual billionaire (under an admittedly broad calculation of equivalency).
Can we actually get some numbers to support this analogy of real billionaires to “cultural billionaires” who can merely make a living in some creative field—here, book publishing? Actually, yes. Even though it’s sketchy napkin math, a rough guesstimate is doable. Specifically, we can compare how many people earn a living wage through their book writing alone vs. how many billionaires there are (confining ourselves to America and the American publishing industry).