How writing a book became the ultimate career brag

Super Thursday is almost upon us. This year the biggest day in the publishing calendar will see the release of books from the likes of Boris Johnson, Sophie Kinsella, Ian Rankin and about 1,900 other authors. Yes, you read that correctly, on October 10, 1,900 new books will enter the world. This begs two questions, the most obvious being who’s going to read all these books? And second, who’s writing them all?

From celebrities who are pivoting their personal brands to TikTok comedians and Instagram cool girls, productivity hackers to peddlers of sexual or spiritual wellness (the girlbosses of the modern age), the one thing they all have in common is that they — delete as appropriate — have recently published a book, would love you to preorder their book, have just got a six-figure book deal (see The Bookseller announcement pinned on their Instagram profile), have a manuscript out on submission, are doing a writing course or reworking those tricky middle chapters, are asking you to “please sign up to my substack, each week I’ll be letting you go behind the scenes in my tiny writing shed”. Where once a podcast was the mark of a thriving personal brand, now anyone with the barest of platforms is becoming an author.

To be transparent, I say all this as a frustrated would-be author with all the unattractive bitterness and jealousy that entails. I’ve dreamt of writing a novel for as long as I can remember, have written the first 30,000 words of at least five bestsellers (ha!) and am even an alumna of the Faber novel-writing programme. Drawn in by the stats (tagline: “over 150 published authors and counting … will you be next?”), in 2022 I invested £4,000 and six months of my life in a bid to finally finish a manuscript. And while I met some wonderful fellow writers, I’m not sure I actually learnt much — which all too perfectly illustrates why the advice that most authors give to aspiring authors is “just do it”.

Perhaps as a testament to the fact that so many of us want to become authors nowadays, podcasts, writing courses and how-to newsletters have proliferated in recent years. Elizabeth Day’s new “podclass” series, How to Write a Book, is billed as a 12-week course that will help with everything from honing your idea to finding an agent (though, crucially, it won’t do the actual writing for you). Then there’s Hattie Crisell’s podcast, newsletter and soon-to-be-published book In Writing, which feature advice from novelists, journalists and screenwriters (lots of whom recommend just sitting down and getting on with it).

• Your guide to writing a bestseller — by hit podcaster Elizabeth Day

Writing a book is, of course, incredibly hard. It requires commitment and a capacity for deep thought and thus it has always been something of a status symbol — as one industry insider that I speak to puts it: “There’s no way that James Joyce didn’t think Ulysses would boost his personal brand.” For the bookseller Tilly Fitzgerald the difficulty seems to be part of the appeal, particularly in an age of quick-fire, ephemeral content. “Literature is perhaps taken more seriously than other cultural forms,” she says, arguing that a TV personality may well choose to author a book as a way to show a more intellectual side of their brand.

But it’s not only down to the medium itself — as with anything refracted through the lens of social media, becoming a published author is now aestheticised and fetishised to within an inch of its life. “Writing a book has always been impressive, that’s not new,” the literary agent Jemima Forrester says, “but the whole process is a lot more visible now. Writers are posting their Bookseller announcements, they’re doing cover reveals and creating unboxing videos for their proofs — it has become a whole ritual.” The Bookseller, the publishing-industry magazine, has always announced the deals being done between agents and publishing houses; until recently, however, its audience was largely made up of industry professionals. “The new authors who approach me now all know what The Bookseller is, which wasn’t the case a few years ago. Posting a screenshot of your announcement has become a rite of passage,” Forrester says.

Publishers have long sought to turn celebrities, with their ready-made fanbases, into authors as a way to ensure good sales, but according to Forrester: “For years now that hasn’t only meant actors or musicians, they’ve also been approaching influencers and content creators. So you’re getting more and more of these very visible people writing, talking about writing and posting their very chic, very curated literary lives. It all looks more glamorous and appealing.”

All of which might go some way to explaining why so many of us want to add “author” to our Instagram bios, despite the fact that it’s notoriously badly paid. Forrester, for instance, has done a few seven-figure deals “and that’s amazing — the authors went to bed one night and woke up millionaires the next day — but it’s rare,” she says. “More often publishing deals are a lot less than that.” At the end of 2022 the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) commissioned a study that found that the median income from writing in the UK was £7,000 a year.

As one publishing professional tells me: “It’s all smoke and mirrors. There are people out there who are being paid maybe £3,000 to write a book and they’re self-funding or getting into debt to pull it off. Others are definitely being bankrolled by their wealthy parents, otherwise I just don’t know how they make it work.” Another tells me about authors who borrow money from family to finance lavish book launch parties or pay for their own proofs to be produced: “They look good online and create some buzz about the book, but the publishers certainly aren’t footing those bills.”

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As Fitzgerald explains: “Given the sheer volume of books being published, it’s incredibly difficult for debut authors to cut through. In a shop people tend to go for names they recognise, so it makes sense that an author who has put so much work into their book will do what they can to market it. And this is all happening against a backdrop where marketing and publicity budgets are being slashed. The onus is being put on the writers themselves to promote their work.”

For the journalist Vicky Spratt becoming an author wasn’t an immediately appealing prospect. “I thought it looked badly paid and really tough,” she says. But after publishing Tenants, her searing exploration of the housing crisis, to huge acclaim, she says she has “noticed that I’m reaching a wider audience and it’s really gratifying in that respect because your work gets in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise see it. I’m genuinely proud of having committed some of the things that I’d seen over a decade travelling around the UK, reporting on what I think is one of the biggest social and economic problems we’ve got, to a book that people can refer to, rather than having to go through some online archive of articles that might disappear.”

Lauren Bravo is the author of two works of non-fiction and two novels, the most recent of which, Probably Nothing, was published to huge fanfare in July. She agrees with Spratt. “Part of the appeal of writing a book is that afterwards you’ve got this very real, solid legacy that everybody understands, and it does command a level of respect. Plus, there’s obviously that tiny hope that your book might be the thing that sends your career stratospheric. But it’s like buying a lottery ticket — the chances are it probably won’t go that way.”