The Cost of Doing Business
The 2023 PW Publishing Industry Salary Survey
Heinlein didn’t say much that was worth repeating but he did say TANSTAAFL (“there ain’t so such thing as a free lunch”). Heinlein didn’t invent TANSTAAFL, because everything he came up with himself was stupid. He just borrowed it, built The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress around it—Moon is the least objectionable Heinlein novel I have read, by the way—and popularized it for that generation of readers. The idea is that you’re paying one way or another; if a business offers you a free lunch, they’re getting paid for that lunch somehow. Like “free” cocktails in a casino. They’re actually super expensive.
Most of the people I know, even the ones I think of as being “rich,” work for a living, as in, they exchange their labor for money. Other than people who are legitimately retired from work, I know very few people who are independently wealthy and just kind of heck around doing fun stuff. I think I only know one person like that, actually. The people I know who don’t work are retired, or still in school/training, or unable to work because of a disability—but I can only think of one person I know who doesn’t work and doesn’t have to—never has—because they just don’t need money or health insurance.
I suspect people like that know tons of other people like that. They are probably hanging out in a huge mansion together talking about how they don’t know anyone who works and has to work to live. Like maybe they know some people who work for funsies. I’m in a middle-class echo chamber.
I was reading over Publishers Weekly’s Industry Salary Survey 2023 article, which came out in November and so is not exactly news, but I’m just now getting to it so it’s news to me. The survey data were collected in 2023 and report on respondents’ experiences in 2022, so there’s typical lag.
The takeaways I found interesting are:
Salaries remain low, with pay being the top complaint among respondents who reported low job satisfaction.
Most respondents (9 out of 10) reported that their company has a remote work policy in place.
Twenty percent of respondents didn’t receive a pay raise in 2022; the median raise for those who did receive one was 3.4 percent.
Women in management roles out-earn men in management roles by about 9 percent (based on median salary).
However, men in all other surveyed job functions out-earn women by significantly larger margins (29 percent in rights; 20 percent in sales/marketing; 18 percent in editorial; and 23 percent in operations/production).
In spite of women comprising 77 percent of respondents.
But men reported being in their careers in the industry significantly longer (21 years) than women (10 years).
Industry still overwhelmingly white (81 percent).
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation calculator—which looks at the buying power differential caused by inflation. Buying power decreased by about 7 percent due to inflation from January 2021 to January 2022—that is, the buying power of $1.00 in January 2021 was equivalent to the buying power of $1.07 in January 2022. This tells me it’s getting more expensive to work in publishing year over year.
In a perfect world—or perhaps a perfect economy; actually, no. In a fair and just economy—a person who stays in their job and performs well would earn at least as much in any given year than they earned in the previous year in terms of actual buying power. So if somebody made $50,000 in 2021, and the inflation rate from 2021 to 2022 was 7 percent, that person would have to make $53,500 in 2022 to maintain the same buying power in 2022 as they had in 2021.
Another interesting insight I picked up from a Publishers Weekly article on starting salaries in publishing is that the median starting salary for employees of the major publishing companies located in New York City was $47,583 as of April 1, 2023, which was up from $35,583 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which outstrips inflation just a little bit ($35,583 in January 2020 is about equivalent to $44,744 in January 2023).
I don’t think there are many industries that are raising salaries at the same speed as inflation is eroding employees’ buying power. Tech salaries decreased in 2023 and physician salary growth lagged behind inflation. You know who’s making more money in 2023 than they used to? Lawyers. Good for them, honestly. They put up with a lot of stereotypes about being slimeballs.
Publishing is not alone in the erosion of the compensation packages; however, the starting salaries in publishing are much lower than for many other careers. In the industries that support the publication of creative work—like the film industry, fashion industry, music industry, and so on—there’s often an expectation that you got into this line of work because you’re passionate about the work, and not because you necessarily want to make a lot of money. I mean, there are definitely examples of people working in these industries making a lot of money, and when you start a career in publishing you hear all about those awesome, high-paying jobs that you can maybe score for yourself one day in the far future after you put in all your dues. But starting out, the pay is absurdly low.
How much money do you need to make to afford a studio apartment in New York City, where the entry-level publishing employees are making $47,583? $142,000.
Circling back to TANSTAAFL. If someone can afford to have a publishing industry job that doesn’t pay the bills only because someone else financially supports them—like a higher-earning family member or spouse—there’s a hidden cost that’s not being accounted. This cost is the discrimination that keeps everyone who doesn’t have that luxury out of the publishing business. That’s why the industry stays so white and femme year after year—because these are the workers who are likelier to benefit from generational wealth accumulation and may be likelier to be married to a high-earning spouse.
Just anecdotally, early in my career (like twenty years ago) I worked with many women who were in their mid-to-late-career phase—my-mother’s-age women—who confided in me that they took on these jobs after their kids were in school and they didn’t need to stay home homemaking anymore, but that their husband was the breadwinner. That’s how they were able to afford to work for these salaries.
Now it’s twenty years later and I’m the my-younger-coworkers’-mothers’-age mid-to-late career colleague, and I think about it a lot. The reason I moved away from doing the type of publishing work I enjoyed most (producing trade books) and into what I do now (publishing operations management) is so I could afford to get divorced and live alone. If I hadn’t started my career at a time when I was financially subsidized by a much-higher-earning spouse, I probably would not be in this career. I would have had to do something else, just to make ends meet.
Earlyish in my career I hired a lot of entry-level publishing associates because I managed a team of junior staff. Some of the jobs I hired them away from that paid more than the job I hired them into included:
Starbucks shift supervisor
Restaurant server
Teaching assistant (special education)
The three people I’m thinking of who held those jobs before coming to work in publishing all had a few things in common, which is that they were young white women with male partners/spouses who earned enough money for the household to absorb the pay cut.
Another thing I think about a lot is how influence trickles down in the publishing industry. Probably other industries too but I only know this one. Literary agent entry-level salaries are sometimes zero. Like zero dollars. No money until you start selling manuscripts to editors and earning commissions. Who is the person who can afford to work an unpaid internship and then go on to work unpaid until commissions start rolling in?
Who is the person who can afford to work for $47,583 a year in New York City? Whoever they are—overwhelmingly, “whoever she is”—they’re the person who will work their way up to sit at the head of the publishing committee and decide what the imprint signs and what they don’t. Whose books do these brokers choose to publish? And who is excluded?
There’s really no point to this essay except to say that as long as publishing salaries lag behind salaries in other industries and fail to keep up with inflation, the industry is going to continue having this problem.
Every year I see these survey results and industry reports come out and they’re like,
Hey friends our salaries still suck across the board oh and also on an unrelated note the industry is still staffed almost exclusively by white women even though we’re making a huge effort to be more inclusive. Isn’t this weird? We appointed DEI committees and everything.
No industry can be inclusive while the salary scale attracts privileged candidates only, and that by design.
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Preach it. Great post.