Don't Quit Your Day Job - The Authors Guild Publishes The Results of Their Largest Survey Ever of Author Income, and The Numbers are Modest (and Down)

With more than 5,100 authors participating (and multiple organizations—including SCBWI—getting their members to take part), this survey has six major takeaways that you can read here.

One of the big ones is that annual mean author income from books alone is just under $2,600!

A slide from the Authors Guild new survey of author income

The numbers, and report, are sobering information, well-worth reading, and useful—writing for kids and teens is certainly a "dream job," and at the same time it's important to have realistic expectations of what a career as a writer means financially.

Of course, there are those in the highest income ranks who are making $150,000 - $300,000 a year, but for the rest of us, well, look at the numbers:

$6,080 is the mean annual income of all published writers in 2017 (traditionally published, self-published, and hybrid published) from both book and writing-related income. For those of us in that vast majority, we need a day job/additional stream of income to make things work!

There's lots more to read in the report - do so here.

And Still, Illustrate and Write On,
Lee