News that the average earnings of self-employed writers have slumped to ￡7,000 in the UK might seem par for the course in the context of a pandemic followed by a cost of living crisis. However, the 38% drop in median earnings since 2018 continues a 16-year downward trend, with the number of authors who earn all their income from writing more than halving since 2006, from 40% to 19%. This phenomenon is not unique to the UK, with similar trends reported in Australia, Canada, the EU and the US, according to the authors of a new report.

The survey, commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), is not going to set alarm bells ringing like the low pay of nurses or ambulance drivers. These are people in a network of industries, across publishing and the media, that have always rewarded the successful few at the expense of the aspiring many. The full significance of the drop becomes clear when you burrow down into where the authors live and how they manage to survive on such low earnings. Nearly half are based in London and the south of England, and many rely on financial support from partners or family (where they do so, their household earnings average ￡50,000). One in five primarily support themselves through academic work.

Where does this leave a young writer toiling away in a bedsit somewhere in the Tees Valley? Among the writers surveyed, only 3% live in the north-east of England, falling to 1% cent of those whose writing occupies more than half of their working time. The Booker-winning novelist Pat Barker was one such author back in 1982 when her first novel, Union Street, was finally published, after being rejected many times for offering too bleak a portrait of working-class women who, like her, hailed from the industrial north-east.

Even now that Ms Barker has moved her fictional gaze on to the classical world, her novels thrum with the “toughness, irreverence, humour and bitterness” that she hears in women’s voices around her. Fiction would be very much poorer without such playful applications of lived insights from underrepresented communities. So it is worrying to hear that writers from minority ethnic backgrounds are particularly losing out, with the fall in publishers’ advances – the money that heats the writer’s garret – a key concern.

Two years ago, writers around the world attempted to reveal the disadvantage suffered by black authors by sharing their earnings on Twitter. The former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman was among those who were shocked by the disparities that emerged. Reports on #publishingpaidme bore out one revelation of the ALCS survey: 47% of earnings go to 10% of writers, so for the vast majority, a career in writing relies on “intrinsic motivation”. In other words, it is a vocation, admittedly with big potential rewards, but also with a big risk of penury and exploitation. “If we give up, nothing changes. Our stories are worth telling and need telling,” wrote Ms Blackman, in a tweet that neatly summed up the conundrum: to evolve, literature most needs those who are rewarded least.