French trade embroiled in row over report on author earnings

France’s authors are up in arms over a study conducted for the French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’Edition, SNE), which says authors earn an average of 25% of a publisher’s net sales and publishers keep 18% after direct costs.

The study aimed to “contribute to a better understanding of the economic realities of publishers, and to document the sharing of value between authors and publishers,” the SNE said in a statement.

Half of the retail price of books, which is set by publishers under the fixed price Lang law of 1981, is split evenly between booksellers and distributors, while the other half is shared between publishers and authors, the SNE said. 

The study, conducted by management consultants KPMG, was based on the 2022 accounts of the leading SNE members, including Hachette Livre, Editis, Madrigall (owner of Gallimard and Flammarion), Media Participations (owner of Seuil), Albin Michel and Actes Sud. The study calculates the royalties paid to authors and the provisions for advances paid to authors that are not covered by sales. 

Together the publishers generated retail prices before tax of €1.1bn (£942m), which represented 29.2% of the market of the five editorial sectors involved, which in turn represented 68.5% of the total book market in France. The five sectors were general literature, art and coffee table, children’s, practical and graphic books. Manga, textbooks, dictionaries and maps were excluded, as were small and medium-sized publishers.

Authors’ societies have welcomed the SNE’s initiative, but have slammed the study’s conclusions and methodology.

The French Permanent Council of Writers (Conseil Permanent des Ecrivains, CPE), which is the umbrella organisation of 15 organisations claiming to represent tens of thousands of book authors and illustrators, said in a statement that it could not accept that authors are remunerated satisfactorily. The study’s focus on large publishing groups and exclusion of manga, textbooks and distribution are “a major bias". The figures are based on all authors, who are not all paid the same. For example, 200 authors earning the same would each receive 0.12% of sales, it added.

Authors’ precarity is growing, while book industry finances are “stable, and in relatively good health, particularly for children’s titles,” it said. A study on that sector, funded by the government, “has never seen the light of day because publishers did not fill in the questionnaire". The macro-economic approach of the study “deserves to exist,” but does not reflect the reality of individual authors,” the CPE added.

“The study suffers from numerous confusions and approximations,” the League of Professional Authors said in a statement. In copyright, it “seems to include” pay to series directors, advances to translators and the purchase of foreign rights. It takes no account of authors’ overheads and social security contributions, and publishers “seem to forget that a sizeable part of their earnings comes from distribution". But the league welcomes the fact that the SNE has “finally agreed to open a dialogue on the sharing of value” with authors.

“The criticisms stem party from a misunderstanding of our initiative,” says Renaud Lefebvre, SNE executive director. “Our study is not intended to take account of authors’ individual situations,” he told The Bookseller. It is an economic study on the sharing of value, based on accounts data that cannot be contested, and aims to quantify the average value created by publishing a book after deduction of strictly necessary costs, he added.

There is very little documentation on the economic reality of publishing, says Lefebvre. “This effort to clarify was indispensable for measuring the major balances. None of the objections to the methodology call into question the solidity of the data. For example, a strong representation of small publishers, whose profitability is notoriously less (than that of bigger houses), would have reduced the average value kept by the publisher,” he added.