Changing times …

… The rise and fall of the literary bloke - New Statesman. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I believe this book would have had more, not less, appeal to the general serious reader if some of the carousing had been cut in favour of further discussion of the ways in which the economic structures of publishing have changed, and not in favour of the writer. In 2018 the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society found that authors’ real incomes had dropped 42 per cent since 2005; according to figures from 2016 from the Publishers Association, authors received just 3 per cent of publisher turnover in a market worth £5.1bn; that same year, profits for major publishers headed towards the 13 per cent mark. Things are unlikely to have improved in the intervening half-decade.