20. Commissioning editor and mother on £44K
babies, spot UV and managers not knowing what their staff get paid . . .
Hello all
There is so much good stuff in this interview, a preamble is probably superfluous but here I go anyway.
I’ve been thinking lately about how female the arts sector is in general, not just publishing. Great, right? That means more women in (if not in charge of) that bit of the economy where we explore “what it means to be human” (please, no one ever say that again). But . . . what I have seen, in my ten plus years in publishing and friendships with many women in other creative industries – is a huge amount of frustration and sacrifice once children come along. Men make more money in most heterosexual couples, and this is compounded by the low pay, low transparency and poor job security offered by the creative sector. Basically, turn up at any publishing house/art museum/production company/theatre and you’ll find a highly educated woman who has killed herself trying to get ahead in these intensely competitive industries starting to lose the will a little once she has children. Squishing her hard-fought job into a three-day week. Feeling a sense of hopelessness when the nursery bill hits £2000 per month and trying to remember what the point is again. I remember being told by a HR person that if/when that happened to me – to hang in there. It’s worth the sacrifice for a few years because kids aren’t in childcare forever. When they go to school, childcare costs come down, meaning work is financially worthwhile again – and if you take a few years out, you might find the time out of the industry costs more than the actual nursery bill. It’s good advice, but still paints a pretty bleak picture. And it likely accounts for the fact that despite our business being overwhelming female, the C suite is ridiculously male.
I remain unconvinced that having female CEOs or MDs actually makes that much difference to the working conditions of the average female employee, so, controversially perhaps, I don’t care that much that we don’t have more of them. I care much more about the average working mother struggling to hold it all together, and I’d love if alongside the Gender Pay Gap discussion which tends to focus on getting women into leadership positions, we could also talk about how to make things better for her – that average woman, the backbone of the creative sector.
interview
How long have you worked in publishing and how much do you get paid?
I’ve worked in publishing for just over 11 years. I started on £21K, which was very competitive for the time, and now get paid around £44K.
Tell us a bit about what your job entails.
I acquire and publish fiction for a small trade imprint. Unsurprisingly, a huge amount of this is editorially focused – structural and line editing, copy writing, etc – but it also involves a lot of project management, team management and author relationship management. And reading, of course, although like many editors most of this has to take place in spare time.
How do you feel about the amount of money you earn?
I know that in the ‘great scheme of things’ this is a good salary, and when I was first given it, I was thrilled; it felt like I’d finally made it past the struggle years, living off soup and frozen vegetables and renting tiny box-rooms in house shares (often, in my experience, shared mostly with mice). However, come this summer I will have been at this level – give or take a bit of inflation increase – for four years, and so I have begun to feel frustrated not to see any increase or have much hope that one will come this year. I have been in the same position, on the same list, throughout this time, and thus have not been considered a candidate for a rise; in publishing, it often seems to be irrelevant what you contribute in terms of hours, revenue and loyalty: if there is not a clear space for you to move into, or if you don’t have leverage in the form of an offer elsewhere, it is very difficult to secure a pay rise in an existing position.
Do you own property?
Yes. Although, this is largely thanks to being lucky – I was given a small inheritance from my grandparents, and my partner makes more money than me, so we were able to secure a hefty mortgage. For the first 5 years of my career, saving felt impossible, and after that, any spare cash was generally used to pay off any debts accrued. Even now, 12 years after graduating, I am still paying back my student loan.
Do you have a pension?
Yes. Somewhere.
Have you made financial sacrifices for working in books? Do you think it’s been worth it?
Yes and no. Like a lot of people, working in publishing necessitated a move to London, and renting in London meant handing over up to three-quarters of my monthly paycheck on rent, bills and travel. This said, I loved living in London in my early 20s, and with friends who largely worked in the arts or who were finishing off their university studies, it felt like we were all slumming it together. We went to every book launch and private gallery event we could get through the door of, drank free wine, ate BYOB Vietnamese. I didn’t mind that I couldn’t afford holidays or that I wasn’t putting down savings for a deposit, because I was enjoying myself in an amazing city doing a job that I loved. I was very lucky.
Now, many of my peers have gone into industries where development and pay increases are steadier, and I’ve noticed a growing gap between us. It has definitely been exacerbated by starting a family. Each month I hand over 60% of my paycheck for childcare. I’m quite lucky that working from home at the moment saves me from handing over a further 15% on transport. If I was commuting, as I’d been expecting to, then yes, we would have had to make more financial sacrifices to allow me to continue my career in this industry.
In a way, I think my biggest sacrifices have come once already fairly established in the industry, and I doubt my experience is unique. I think a lot of people, women in particular, can be trapped at a company by their plans to start a family. Enhanced parental leave is very appealing to, if not a necessity for, lots of people. To qualify, you often have to have been in a company for at least a year. This is all fine and not unusual, and I absolutely don’t think that anyone deserves more money from their employer purely because they had a baby. However, if you work in an industry where often your only opportunity for progress is to move jobs, you may be cutting off your development chances by deciding to have a family or grow your family, because these plans necessitate you staying where you are. Or you may feel you need to put your plans on hold to be able to take an aggressive approach to development and get your career to where it needs to be. If salaries were fairer across levels, parents and future parents would have the opportunity to save and prepare to take more risks. And if progress was more encouraged from within, we’d also see better staff loyalty, with all the positives that come with it.
What would you change about the industry, to make it fairer, if you had the power to do so?
As already mentioned, publishing definitely works in a dead-man’s-shoes framework, and I can see why: not many imprints need two editorial directors, two publishers, etc. However, there are other ways to nurture talent and give space to grow, especially within big publishers, and it just hasn’t been my experience that businesses care about staff development and retention. Instead, this is an industry where the best – and sometimes only – way to get a substantial pay increase is to move elsewhere. Meanwhile, we consistently see roles being filled by ambitious candidates from competitor publishers rather than given to existing talent within the business. This is a hugely frustrating cycle that breeds competitiveness between peers and ultimately doesn’t serve the teams or the authors on a list.
Do you think money is wisely spent and invested in the business?
At times, yes: it’s been encouraging to see more publishers invest in reaching out to diverse talent pools, and opening offices outside of London; we’re finally seeing a small increase on entry level salaries; and it feels like there’s been a shift away from the huge advance model (with some exceptions of course) as publishers recognise the power of midlist books and spread their bets and their budgets more evenly across their catalogue.
At other times, very much no. If you are an editorial assistant, living from paycheck to paycheck and relying on your credit card, it’s galling if not heartbreaking to see huge amounts spent on lavish parties or extravagant lunches. For an industry that seems to penny pinch in every other area (‘does this jacket really need spot UV?’) the publishing obsession with sparkling wine and canapes is quite mind blowing!
Any other comments?
I suppose the only thing I’d add to give context to the above is that I do really love my job. My partner works in Fintech – he earns well over twice my base salary and gets a yearly bonus on top of that. But every day is a slog, he gets no satisfaction from his work, it just pays the bills. Overall, I think I’m lucky to work in an industry where I have the opportunity to make a decent living doing something that gives me a lot of satisfaction. Also, free books.
I really hope that I can carry on working in in-house publishing, but I’m not sure if this future will be possible for me. We would like to have a second baby and would prefer not to have a big age gap. However, if I can’t secure a pay rise before then, we won’t be able to afford to have two children in childcare. I may need to choose between having a baby when it feels right or returning to a job that I love. Again, I can’t stress enough that I don’t think parents should get more money for being parents. But I do think that loyal hardworking staff should be recompensed for their commitment and the revenue they bring in, without having to make threats to leave. Sadly, this has not been my experience.
Publishing salaries at the bottom have not budged much in ten years, despite industry growth. Why do you think that is?
As mentioned above, it does feel like we’re starting to see a bit of change on this. The salaries are still low, but when I started I knew peers on £17K, or even less. The issue publishing has that is very hard to shake up is that it’s extremely bottom heavy, particularly in big publishers. The junior staff make up a huge proportion of the business, and putting the salaries of everyone in these lower paid jobs up would take a lot of reworking – that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it!
Why does the average author make so little money?
Good question! I think there are a lot of factors, really. Competition is one of them. There are so many books being published all the time that only the biggest authors can rely on a steady income from their backlist. Then there’s the issue of value – even just ten years ago, RRP had much more clout. Now, with the cost of ebooks being, often, 99p or even less, authors have to shift serious numbers to make decent royalties. I remember asking my mum, an avid reader, why she wouldn’t pay more for an ebook: she said it should be cheaper because they didn’t have to pay for the paper, etc. When I explained to her that the average cost per unit of a paperback is tiny, often around 12 pence, and that ebooks, until very recently, had VAT applied, she was really shocked . . . and she still only buys 99p ebooks. Meanwhile, we have an advance model that hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 10+ years. In reality, in publishing deals that look more like a partnership, where the author earns higher royalties in lieu of an advance, the returns can be much better for them.
Do you think there is problem with salary transparency in publishing? Is it something that others at high levels take seriously?
Yes, I do, but I also think the problem is so systemic it will be almost impossible to change from within. To put it into perspective, I have recently hired for a role and was not told by HR what the salary band would be. Last year I had to ask a direct report what they were earning because it wasn’t transparent to me, their manager. I don’t think senior management do advocate for this change, at the moment, but I have hope that we will see change driven from colleagues and peers, who are starting to talk more openly about it – and through channels like this, of course!
What would it take for things to change? By that I mean (for example): a starting salary of £30,000 rising to £40-£50K over five-ten years based on meeting clearly established targets?
Honestly, I don’t know. I think one of the other key issues in publishing is workload. There is so much to do, it requires a lot of bodies. I don’t know a single person in this industry that doesn’t do their reading in their spare time, work evenings, work weekends. If you pay more for entry level jobs, you can afford fewer heads. Ultimately, I think there needs to be a shift away from scatter-gun publishing, to more curated small lists, so that workloads are manageable and staff are remunerated fairly for the work they do. How you do that and run a successful publishing business in this market, I have no idea! And of course, smaller salaries for the very top of the ladder, but who with the power to instigate real change is going to advocate for that?
Do you think more competitive remuneration and salary transparency would have a positive impact on diversity in the business?
Yes, definitely. Publishing – with its barriers to entry and low starting wage – isn’t exactly an attractive career unless you are fortunate enough to know you can survive, in London, on little money. For most people that means having some form of safety net in the form of wealthy parents.
Big thanks to this week’s interviewee!
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So from this, I take it that they are on 44 + 88 a year, so a household income of 132k a year. And they can't afford a second child? Where is the money going? The husband alone is pulling in 5k a month take home pay. This really doesn't read the way the author intends it to.