In Response To… The BookCareers Salary Survey

Posted on June 6, 2009 in Uncategorized

Picture of £20 notes

The publication of the BookCareers salary survey last month got me, in the words of Carrie Bradshaw, ‘to thinking’. Everyone knows that publishing salaries are rubbish, but unless you have lots of incredibly candid friends who also work within the industry, it can be difficult to know where you stand in relation to everyone else out there. Enter Suzanne Collier and BookCareers to give us a clearer picture.

Based on responses from 550 publishers, the salary survey is pretty illuminating. The average salary within the industry is £24,871. So far, so familiar. Ok, so it’s pretty low compared to most other industries I know of – I suppose it’s possible that this is because many of the respondents would have been first-, second- or third-jobbers, still on low enough salaries to be annoyed about it, and therefore tempted to vent their feelings. However, I’m surmising here. This may well not be the case.

On to more worrying news though. As an assistant editor with aspirations to commission one day, I was pretty dismayed to see that the average salary for my job has actually decreased slightly, falling to £18,925 from £18,945 in 2004. Commissioning editors averaged at £26,450, compared to £27,436 in 2004. (I was quite surprised by this – I had expected commissioning editors’ wages to be higher, given their, in my humble opinion, pretty central role in providing the core material for the whole of the rest of the publishing process.) In fact, taking inflation into account, salaries across the board are now lower in real terms than they were in 2004. Not what you want to hear in the middle of a recession.

Lower down the ranks, salaries seem to be fairly evenly matched across different areas of the industry, with a slight bias towards editorial, but production, rights and sales managers earn noticeably more than marketing managers. If you’re in it for the money, aim for Publisher, with an average salary of £42,188. Click here for salaries by job title in full – food for thought.

Predictably, men typically seem to earn more than women (over three grand on average), though, as BookCareers point out, ‘82.9% of respondents were female, 17.1% male. Although across the board the sample ratio of male v female was low and should be used with caution, we found in the majority of instances men were receiving higher salaries than their female colleagues.’ Still galling news in an industry famously dominated by women.

So is there any good news? Well, looking at the salaries by age area of the survey, if you can stick it out until you’re 36 or over, things might start to look up, and those over 51 can hope for a perfectly respectable salary of £38,968. This confirms what I have long suspected – that publishing is a waiting game, with rewards coming to those who are prepared to grit their teeth and hold on until their peers have got fed up and moved on.

These salaries are still nothing in comparison to other industries, such as banking, advertising, and even teaching. It’s not much fun for us young publishers to see friends galloping ahead in terms of salary despite the fact that we are, we hope, equally as intelligent, competent and driven. Another oft-debated issue is, of course, the fact that the industry is not particularly diverse, and these levels of salaries definitely aren’t helping matters.

Thus far I’ve moaned quite a bit, but there must be some good things about publishing, surely? Once we get over the disappointment of the realization that publishing isn’t all glamorous launch parties and lounging about reading undiscovered literary masterpieces, enough of us are still passionate enough about it to put up with low salaries. In my opinion, it’s worth it. After all, I can still afford to feed myself and put a roof over my head. I love my job really and I can’t imagine doing anything else – I imagine many of us would say the same.

And it could be worse. Plenty of people struggle by on lower salaries than this – it’s when we look at our wages in comparison to similar industries that they really don’t look too appealing. And at least we’ve got Suzanne Collier fighting our corner.