Longevity & Leaky Pipes - 1

Attrition rates in author careers and some data finangling

First a wee writing update from the drafting cave! I’m currently 45k words into A Monstrous Theatre and while I’m a little worried my plot is trying to streeeeetch itself out beyond my hoped for 90-95k total, I’m having a blast! I am loosely expecting edits back on The Salt Oracle by the start of November so I have a month of drafting time left before I will have to shelve it to crack on with edits. As a bunch of October is going to be away from the computer (in Spain, whoop), I’ll be happy if I can get to 50k with a good plan in place for the start of the second half.

Now. This post comes to you courtesy of a thread on Bluesky (originally posted on Twitter in 2023, I believe) where the author, Marshal Ryan Maresca, dug brilliantly into the publication data for his 2015 cohort of SFF debuts. Specifically he looked at how many books those 88 authors had published in the intervening 9 years, and this is the key post:

Essentially it comes down to this - 70% of those 88 authors have published 3 or fewer books. Less than 10% of the 88 have published more than 6 books. Those figures more or less (60% and 10% respectively) match data that Jane Friedman collated from the Fiction Database (which is genre agnostic) in around 2021 and that she talks about here.

This high rate of attrition is something that anyone who’s been around more than a few years will attest to. You watch so many of your fellow debuts quietly (or sometimes noisily) vanish over just the first few years of your careers, it’s startling.

It’s worth adding a caveat here. Publishing 6 books in 9 years is a pretty healthy publication rate, especially in trad SFF, where publishers often consider 18-24 months between titles a reasonable rate. And I don’t know what time scales Friedman was looking at, so some of this apparent attrition might instead simply be authors/publishing being slower than average.

To see if I could check that, I have just spent a couple of hours procrastinating on le interweb gathering my own very small, very incomplete dataset. I looked at the 80 authors listed on the evil Wikipedia as debuts in 2003-2004 - 20 yrs ago & counted up on Goodreads the number of novels/full length collections/novellas they have published in total over the last 20 years. (I excluded a couple who were primarily publishing in other languages and a playwrite)

[Big caveats here - HUGE ones in fact - Wiki is hardly the most reliable source and god alone knows how that subset of authors happened to end up on those lists, and 80 is an abysmal sample size. This sample also spanned all genres of fiction, and patterns may well differ between, say, Crime and YA and Literary. So take everything with a hefty mug full of salt, and if anyone has the energy please do a better job of this than me because I would love to see it!]

But for what it’s worth, the same stats for my sample were: 36% published 3 or fewer books, but 26% had made it to 10 books or more books. Which is not quite in line with the previous data. This might be because Wiki is more likely to record authors who’ve stuck it out for a while, and much more likely to record authors who’ve published a metric tonne - this sample does seem to be skewed by a handful of extremely prolific authors, a couple of whom appear to have switched over to self-publishing from trad. Which would make that 36% an underestimate and the 26% an overestimate. But also, the shorter timelines of the other samples may have missed out authors who were slower or who had a resurgence in their career. So my guess would be that the ‘truth’ lies somewhere between my sample data and the others.

I started, in a fit of enthusiasm, looking at differences between men and women, and between books that are obviously centring marginalised identities versus those that aren’t. These kinds of comparisons would be so revealing and useful, I think, but honestly my numbers are too small to carry any water. All I’ll say is that from my quick look, I would expect differences to emerge, and that’s an important thing to contemplate. Here, for example, is the breakdown by (binary, I’m afraid) gender:

Doing this digging did prompt a few more nuanced thoughts than my initial ARGHHHH feels that made me want to write this blog though. For example:

What is longevity anyway?

Because yes, some of these authors 20 years after debuting had published 30+ books, which sounds impressive right? It sounds like a solid, successful career. But most of those authors were writing in extremely niche, small press/self pub spaces where income is likely to be … not what you’d hope, for that output. On the other hand, one of those prolific authors is Cecelia Ahern, who is most definitely neither niche nor small press.

At the other end of the scale, most of the authors in that first 1-3 books bracket look like they published the books in their first contract, and then never re-contracted. But also in that bracket is Susannah Clarke. Sitting at 4 books in 20 years is Khaled Hosseini. No-one on this unholy planet would call either of those astounding writers unsuccessful or lacking longevity.

So what are we wanting when we talk about career longevity? Are we after a publishing schedule that requires a book every 9 months from us, or the financial security to publish once every 5 years for as long as we like? I think most of us are more concerned with stability than with absolute numbers of books per year, so getting hung up on these figures in isolation is perhaps not as helpful/depressing as I first thought.

Ideally…

…In a rose tinted unreality, I imagine most authors want simply to write at a sustainable pace for their personal circumstances, safe in the knowledge that a livable income and reliable publisher support is there for you as long as you produce the goods. Knowing what that translates into for each of us, in raw numbers of books published, is impossible from the outside so these longevity stats don’t tell us much about individual author security or satisfaction.

HOWEVER we know from other studies that authors aren’t super secure or satisfied with the publishing experience, so exceptions like Susannah Clarke do not remotely negate the worrying fact that a lot of authors fall by the wayside after a handful of books. And that most debut authors cannot expect to have the long publishing career they are probably hoping for.

So why is there so much attrition?

Obviously, this is simply my view from the circle seats, so I am theorising not pontificating. But some things that occur to me, and what we could do about them, are … coming up in a second post. The whole thing got loooong and rather than drown you now, I’ll post my theorising next week!

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Thank you for reading & supporting this blog. This is posting while I’m in Spain so I may not reply immediately (depending on weather, wifi and books), but know I will still love hearing from you.