Got my royalty cheque recently for my bestselling Conspiracy book, covering the second half of 2023. Good news: 18,000 new sales. Bad news: £1,832 royalties payable.

I’m not boasting, or moaning. I’m quoting these figures because most people have no idea how little money they could make from a bestseller. In all, my book has sold roughly 60,000 copies. But I’d have to write four or five of these a year, every year, to make even a modest income.

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I’m proud that a book I wrote in early 2022 is still selling strongly.

The idea that 18,000 new readers – enough people to fill Brentford’s ground for a Premier League game or Headingley for a test match – have picked up a copy is very gratifying. But at this rate, at a fraction over 10p per book, I’d need to sell a million, not tens of thousands, to make serious money.

Forget JK Rowling. Forget Richard Osman. To make that sort of wealth, you’d have to be a prominent – and, ideally, controversial – public figure.

You’d need to have film or television deals going for you, translation rights payments popping in from all corners of the world, good audiobook revenues, serialisation in mass circulation newspapers and huge sales online and in bookshops. (Waterstones, incidentally, seems to be stocking my book in just three of its fifty-odd London stores. I’ve been told there’s little demand for it.)

But we have come a long way from the days when writing a book that readers liked, reviewed positively and recommended to their friends was enough to cover your mortgage payments while you wrote the next one. Being an author has become a hobby for those who can afford to treat it as a sideline.

You probably know that most publishing contracts entitle the author to a percentage of the book’s cover price – 8 per cent, 10 per cent, maybe 12.5 per cent.

But this headline figure is largely irrelevant, because the one clause that really matters in your publishing contract these days is the one that talks about heavily discounted sales.

This unobtrusive provision, probably tucked away in Clause 5 (b) iv of the multi-page agreement with your publisher, will almost certainly explain that paperbacks sold at a discount of 54 per cent or more will attract royalties of 8 per cent of the net price received, not the cover price.

So if Amazon or the retailer demands a 55 per cent discount and pays a wholesale price of £4.05 for your £8.99 book, you, as the author, will get 32p per copy.  

And that is probably the best case scenario. Most of your sales will be on this kind of heavily discounted basis.

But there’s more bad news to follow. Real bestsellers come from books that sell everywhere. They’re in supermarkets. They’re in discount retailers like TheWorks.co.uk or even Poundland. Sales through these channels can be big, which is good for getting the word out and putting your ideas into people’s hands. But the income they bring in is tiny.

All of which probably helps to explain why ghostwriting is the career for me. I’ve been around a long time. I’m the oldest ghost in town and I’ve been writing books in my own name since 1981, but I’m not at all sure where my writing career would have gone if I hadn’t started doing this kind of work 15 years ago. It’s not ignominious. It’s not a compromise. I love the craft of writing and I love working with the astonishing range of people you meet in this job – from academics and athletes to bankers and business people, medics and magicians (and that’s just in the last three years).

I’m lucky. There’s always more than enough work, and the United Ghostwriters connection means I tend to get the high-value, high-interest projects. But unless there’s some sort of revolution in the publishing industry, I’m not sure where the authors of tomorrow will be coming from, or how they’ll be able to feed their families.  

Ian Shircore’s last book, before Conspiracy, was So Brightly at the Last: Clive James and the Passion for Poetry (Red Door Press).            

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