Winner take all - lessons from writing

Charlie Stross has been writing a series of enlightening posts about the fiction industry. Today, after a volcano extended killer road trip, he unloads on the joys of being a professional writer ...

... I'd like to point you at this 2005 paper by the Author's License and Collecting Society, titled "What are Words Worth?, describing the findings of a study organized by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM)I, Bournemouth University. ..

...  restricting the survey to focus on main-income authors (those who earned over 50% of their income from writing) gave median earnings of £23,000 and mean earnings of £41,186.

... the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors' incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor— while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74...

... In addition to being a wildly unstable, lonely occupation with an insane income spread, there are other drawbacks to being a writer. Many American writers are forced to rely on a day job, or a spouse with a day job, for health insurance: health insurance for the self-employed is prohibitively expensive, especially for the self-employed poor. Those who don't have a job that provides healthcare, or a partner with family benefits, are never more than one accident away from bankruptcy. As the median age for publishing a first novel is around 34 because it takes a lot of life experience before you know enough to write something worth publishing, most authors are in the age range 34-70 — old enough that they're likely to develop chronic health conditions or need expensive treatments. (To be fair, it's not just authors who get the short end of this particular shitty stick: I suspect the US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks in general.)...

...So here's the truth about the writing lifestyle: it sucks. It is an unstable occupation for self-employed middle-aged entrepreneurs. Average age on entry is around 34, but you can't get health insurance (if you're American).... As a business, it's a dead-end: you can't generally expand by taking on employees, and the number of author start-ups where the founders have IPOd and cashed out can be counted on the fingers of a double-amputee's hands...

I've read Stross for years - in the small science fiction/fantasy world he's a modern giant. He is an extremely smart man and I believe that he works very hard. Although he's a relatively successful science fiction writer, if he wanted money he'd be working for Goldman Sachs.

Clearly Charles Stross has been cursed with the writer's obsession and he deserves our sympathies as well as our thanks. Maybe it was something he did in a past life.  I've put "The Revolution Business" on my Amazon cart today. It's the least I can do.

Beyond the dismal reality of the 21st century wordsmith, there are other noteworthy insights in the essay (read the entire work of course). I agree with Charlie that "US health insurance industry is actively suppressive of entrepreneurial start-up ventures by older folks"; I think that's going to change thanks to MY President.

Most significantly for the rest of us, we know fiction writing, like acting and sports, is a "winner take all" form of work. A small fraction of writers take home a vast majority of the earnings. In an interconnected world, where work can flow easily, it's conceivable this will become widespread among all knowledge workers. Really, you do want your babies to grow up to be cowboys.