Writing as a Business and the Business of Writing
- David Salariya
- 8 hours ago
- 18 min read
The Business of Writing: How Aspiring Authors Became a Market
The author, illustrator and designer must not merely exist on the internet now, they must leave sufficiently labelled footprints - preferably in paint-splattered shoes - so that even a passing algorithm can see they were not an accidental inky stain on the carpet of publishing history.
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of scribbler.
There is the old-fashioned sort: ink-stained, sleep-deprived, underpaid, cold, unloved, occasionally brilliant, usually one envelope away from despair. This poor soul wrote because something inside had become intolerable unless written it down on paper. A story, a grievance, a ghost, a family secret, a debt, a deep wounds and a desperate desire to be read by somebody other than the cat.
Then there is the modern aspirant author, who is less likely to be found wrestling with a chapter than sitting politely in a webinar called Unlocking Your Author Journey. This soul is told to find a voice, build a platform, identify comparative titles, research the market, cultivate resilience, understand metadata, improve discoverability, develop a newsletter, polish a pitch, attend a festival, pay for a manuscript review, and - if still breathing - write the bloody book.
Scribblers
I confess a fondness for scribblers, the word itself has a raffish dignity,it suggests inky fingers, mischief in the margins, a refusal to sit neatly on the shelf. Scribblers also, in this case, a publishing history of its own. Scribblers was one of the imprints of my publishing company:The Salariya Book Company, an imprint name for picture books, playfulness, colour, curiosity and the serious business of making books for young readers without embalming them in educational straightjackets.
So to be clear, I would not mock the scribbler, without scribblers there would be no novels, poems, detective stories, school stories, memoirs, ghostly aunt in chapter seven, or appalling aristocratic family being Catholic and very possibly no decent children’s books at all.
The word scribbler - or more The Scribble Monsters led me into a trouble with Monster Energy about the use of the word "Monster" it's a story on it's own but similar YouTube video...so definitely do not start writing Monster Energy and the Beast Within or Draw Your Own Monster Energy Beast...
A Bustling Bazaar of Improvement.
Civilisation rests more than it cares to admit on people writing in rooms.
But now publishing has learned to monetise the tremble in the scribbler's hand.
Writing - once an act of nerve, observation, necessity and stubbornness - has become surrounded by a bustling bazaar of improvement. The aspiring writer is no longer simply expected to write. They need to be developed, mentored, assessed, platformed, workshopped, branded, strategised and gently invoiced. Somewhere along the line, the writer ceased to be the supplier of manuscripts and became a customer of the very world that might never publish them.
That is the subject before us: not writing itself, but the expanding business built around the hope of it.
When did the scribbler become the product?
When Did Authors Become Customers?
There was a time, not that long ago, when becoming a writer involved a desk, a typewriter, a wastepaper basket, perhaps a sour marriage, a cold room, and a postal address for a publisher. It was not a better time - it was often crueller, narrower, more class-bound, more dismissive of women, outsiders, regional voices and anyone without the correct accent or colour. But it had one clarifying feature: the writer wrote, the publisher published, and readers - we hoped - bought the book.
Now there is an entire economy wrapped around the first step, the contemporary aspiring writer is invited into a thicket of courses, manuscript assessments, editorial consultancies, mentoring schemes, retreats, webinars, festivals, one-to-one agent meetings, social media classes, self-publishing workshops, platform-building advice and “how to get published” masterclasses.
Some of these are valuable, some are run by excellent writers and editors who genuinely help people improve. Publishing no longer prints and sells books to readers, it also sells guidance, access, confidence and hope to writers.
That is the distinction worth making.
Writing as a business is what authors increasingly have to do in order to survive. The business of writing is what other people and companies sell to authors who want to survive, the two overlap, but they are not the same thing.
A recent Writers & Artists email from Bloomsbury offers a useful example of the system: a discounted manuscript review, an academic writing fellowship, paid online courses in fiction and children’s writing, low-cost events, a “Meet the Editor” session, a social media workshop, a self-publishing class. The prices range from a few pounds to several hundred. The tone is practical and encouraging, it is unmistakably selling becoming, not books, it is the dream of writing books.
That is the real shift.
The Old Formation of Writers
When we look back at many twentieth-century writers, what is striking is not how professionally trained they were, but how oddly formed they were.
This does not mean they were magically untaught, floating into literature on a cloud of inborn genius, scented notepaper and unpaid bills. Writers are always taught by something.
The question is: taught by what?
Twentieth Century Writers
Nancy Mitford
Nancy Mitford was not the product of a creative writing MA, she had little formal education. What she had was family, class, lashings of snobbery, language, cruelty, absurdity, private reading and the lethal social ear of someone raised in a world where brittle conversation was both entertainment and a weapon. Her novels were not workshopped into existence. They were distilled from family mythology, aristocratic eccentricity, emotional disappointment and social code.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was not trained as a novelist in the modern professional sense either. She did, however, have a formidable intellectual formation: access to her father’s library, Greek, Latin, German, history, essays, reviews, Bloomsbury conversation, and the painful knowledge that her brothers had access to institutions from which she was excluded. Her education was not absent, it was uneven, brilliant and gendered.
I once met the daughter of Leonard Woolf’s gardener Percy Bartholomew. Mollie remembered the day Virginia Woolf died. Her account was not literary at all, which is what made it so disturbing. Leonard, she said, found the letter when he went to switch on the wireless for the BBC one o’clock news - during the war, everyone lived by the wireless - and then rushed to the gardener’s house, where the family were at lunch, stones in the pocket of the fur coat, the fast moving river, the body not found for three weeks. The detail removes Woolf, for a moment, from the marble plinth of modernism and restores the human life around her: the radio, the lunch table, the letter, the shock travelling from one house to another. Writers become monuments afterwards. In life, they are people in rooms, leaving notes, missing meals, being misunderstood by those nearest to them.
Jilly Cooper
Jilly Cooper came by another route: journalism. Her gift was sharpened by observation, deadlines, gossip, social appetite and the comic theatre of class, sex, marriage, houses, horses and humiliation and copious Negroni. She understood that social life is not a polite gathering but a blood sport with cushions.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie trained as a dispenser and knew poisons, almost too perfect, as if destiny had arranged a job placement in murder. Christie’s genius did not come from a course in plotting. It came from practical knowledge, wartime work, puzzles, social observation, travel, servants, households, village hierarchies and the quiet terror of knowing that evil may sit very calmly beside the tea tray.
Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Fitzgerald arrived late, carrying scholarship, family memory, poverty. Her novels feel slight only to people who mistake delicacy for weakness. She had lived enough to know that whole lives can be ruined in half a sentence, and that the most devastating things often happen quietly, without assistance.
George Orwell
George Orwell trained himself through imperial service, journalism, destitution and isolation - or did he? (We'd need to ask aunt, Nellie Limouzin, of Avenue de Corbéra in the 12th arrondissement, he omitted Aunt Nellie in Down and Out in Paris and London.) He was made by Burma, Wigan, Paris, Spain, tuberculosis, boarding school, class guilt and the hard discipline of trying to see clearly.
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was formed by humiliation, work, debt, theatre, journalism and the streets. His father’s imprisonment for debt and his own childhood labour in a boot polish factory gave him more than subject matter; they gave him a lifelong emotional engine. Dickens did not emerge from a writing course. He emerged from shorthand, reporting, walking London, observing faces, voices, poverty, fraud, bureaucracy, performance and shame. His novels are not simply invented worlds, they are overheard worlds.
D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence came from the Nottinghamshire coalfields, the son of a miner and a mother with fierce educational ambitions. His formation was class tension, chapel culture, illness, teaching, sexual unease, landscape, industrial change and the intimate violence of family life. He did not need a seminar on “finding your voice”. His voice came from pressure: the pull between body and mind, pit village and aspiration, tenderness and rage.
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh was shaped by school, Oxford, Catholic conversion, journalism, social climbing, cruelty, snobbery, travel and disillusion. Like Mitford, he had an ear for class performance and the comic brutality of manners. His novels often feel as if English society had been placed in a glass and then dropped on the floor.
Graham Greene
Graham Greene was formed by Catholic guilt, (Catholic guilt is certainly good for writing) depression, journalism, travel, espionage, colonial politics, cinema and moral ambiguity. He worked as a sub-editor and film critic, travelled through dangerous and compromised places, and understood that human beings rarely stand cleanly on one side of goodness or corruption. His novels are pressure chambers: politics outside, guilt inside, belief flickering like a faulty bulb.
P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse came out of boarding school, journalism, musical theatre, comic discipline and an almost supernatural ear for rhythm. His world may look weightless, but the sentences are engineered like clockwork. He was not “expressing himself” in the modern therapeutic sense. He was practising timing, structure, repetition, reversal and farce until prose behaved like music hall.
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad’s formation was stranger still: exile, ships, empire, languages, illness, loneliness and the shock of writing in English as an acquired language. Before he became a novelist, he had been a sailor in a world of trade routes, colonial encounters, danger and moral fog. His books carry that formation: not a neat literary apprenticeship, but displacement, sea air, imperial violence, foreignness and memory.
Keith Waterhouse
Keith Waterhouse came through local journalism, not literary training. He grew up in Leeds, left school young, worked in newspapers, and learned how people spoke, lied, boasted, complained and survived. Billy Liar is not a product of a campus workshop. It comes from provincial aspiration, boredom, fantasy, class mobility and the comic sadness of wanting to be elsewhere.
Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe, like Lawrence in another generation, was formed by working-class Nottingham, factory life, war service, illness and anger. One of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s, the authors hated the label. His writing came from labour, resentment, appetite and refusal. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has the force of someone writing from inside a social world, not from a distance of polite observation.
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl was formed by boarding school cruelty, RAF service, injury, intelligence work, advertising, storytelling and a deep, sometimes alarming understanding of children’s appetite for revenge. His books did not come from softness, they came from pain, mischief, grotesquerie, discipline and a clear sense that childhood is not innocent so much as powerless.
The point is not that formal teaching is useless, nor is it that writers of the past were noble savages of the sentence, wandering untutored through the shrubbery until a masterpiece fell out of them. The point is that writers were formed by pressure systems: families, newspapers, war, libraries, class codes, religion, loneliness, gossip, illness, exile, bureaucracy, money trouble, revenge.
And in publishing, the same truth applies, many of the people who made books were not trained through writing courses either. They came through art school, illustration, editorial work, design, research, printing, picture libraries, paste-up, production schedules and the brutal education of the deadline.
That is not lesser training, it is simply training with ink under its fingernails.
Savvy Writers, the Hacks Knew Things the Literary World Forgot
The hacks knew things the literary world forgot, the word “hack” (the word a shortening of "hackney," which originally referred to a horse kept for common hire or routine riding) is used contemptuously, but the commercial hack was frequently one of the best-trained writers in the room. The hack knew how to open a scene, end a chapter, hit a deadline, hold a reader and keep going when inspiration had taken the afternoon off. They understood that writing is not expression, it is delivery at speed. That is why old popular fiction can be energetic, it may be formulaic, melodramatic or snobbish, but it moves. The writer knew the reader had to be won again on every page and they were being paid by the wordcount.
Modern writing culture sometimes overthinks this, It can produce prose that is highly self-aware but underpowered, sensitive to discourse but deaf to pace, fluent in terminology but frightened of story. The danger of too much training is not incompetence,the danger is that a writer may begin to observe themselves writing before they have written anything worth observing.
The Rise of the Author as Customer
The real expansion of the business of writing came when several forces met.
Publishing became selective and consolidated, larger houses gobbled smaller ones. Imprints perhaps survived as names or erased, but the machinery behind them became more centralised, more data-conscious and more cautious. The number of people who wanted to be published did not shrink, but the slots that could be meaningfully supported did.
Literary agents
Literary agents became gatekeepers, writers now had to learn how to write synopses, perfect covering letters, identify comparative titles and understand the difference between an idea, a proposal, a manuscript and a market position.
Creative writing
Creative writing entered universities on a large scale The First Program, the formal university "workshop" setting started in 1936 with the founding of the legendary Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. This became the blueprint for creative writing degrees worldwide.
The United Kingdom followed in around 1970 when writers Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson founded the country's first Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Ian McEwan was famously the first group of students, for two decades it was almost a curiosity, but from the 1990s onward it exploded, partly because universities discovered these programmes are popular, cheap to run (you need a published author, a seminar room and not much else), and align perfectly with the marketisation of higher education and the rise of "the creative industries" as a policy darling. A writing degree is a relatively low-cost, high-margin product for a university, so there's an institutional incentive that has nothing to do with whether graduates ever publish.
This gave writing seriousness and community, it also gave writing fees, modules and assessment criteria. A university course cannot simply say: “You may or may not become a novelist; nobody knows.” It has to describe skills, employability and transferable value.
Self-publishing transformed the author’s responsibilities, the self-published writer is not just a writer; they are also publisher, art director, production manager, metadata editor, pricing strategist, marketer and publicist, this created a legitimate need for practical education - and a new army of services selling solutions.
The commercial layer the Faber Academies, Curtis Brown Creatives, Penguin Random House schemes, Arvon courses, the festival masterclasses, the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook ecosystem.
Here the economics are worth being blunt about, for a publisher or literary agency, running courses is a revenue stream that is decoupled from the risk of publishing. A book is a gamble: most lose money, a few subsidise the rest. A course is paid up front, by the student, regardless of outcome. The agency keeps the fee whether or not a single graduate ever signs a publishing contract. There's a genuine "talent funnel" rationale too - an agency does occasionally scout from its own courses - but realistically that applies to a sliver of students, and everyone doing the course knows it.
Finally, social media made visibility feel compulsory, the writer now has to cultivate not only a manuscript but a self. The result is a strange inversion: writing has become harder to make a living from, while the commercial ecosystem around writing has become more elaborate.
The Economics Are Not Encouraging
This is where the romance of writing meets the cold gaps in the floorboards. A 2022 survey by CREATe and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society found a highly unequal profession, with the top ten per cent of authors earning roughly half of all author income. The Guardian reported that median annual author earnings had fallen to around £7,000, down from £12,330 in 2006. Applications to the Royal Literary Fund’s hardship grants had risen sharply. These are not figures from a thriving profession. They describe a prestige occupation with fragile economics.
This matters because it changes how we read the explosion of writing courses and services. If writing were reliably lucrative, paying for training would be an ordinary investment. But there is no guaranteed ladder, no standard salary or predictable return. The market is emotional, reputational, unequal and partly irrational.
So the ethical question becomes sharper: what exactly is being sold? Craft, community, confidence? Professional knowledge, access? Or the illusion of a pathway where no reliable pathway exists?
Often, it is a mixture.
Hobby or Publication?
This is the question that should be asked more often, do people enrol because they want to publish a book. The language of many courses is publication-adjacent: “work towards publication”, “meet industry professionals”, “develop your manuscript”. That does not promise publication, but it positions publication as the horizon.
Others enrol because writing gives shape to life: community, discipline, self-expression, intellectual stimulation, retirement purpose, recovery after grief. For these writers, publication may be a fantasy, a bonus, or not the point at all.
The problem is that course marketing often benefits from not separating these motives too clearly. The aspiring writer may be buying one thing emotionally and receiving another practically.
A good writing course might honestly say: you will write more, read better, receive useful feedback, understand your weaknesses, meet other writers, and possibly finish work that would otherwise remain unfinished. You may understand publishing better and discover that publication is not the only measure of value.
A dubious course implies: this is how you get in.
The difference is enormous.
The Gender of the Gate
For many women, writing was never just a profession. It was one of the few socially respectable ways to turn observation into power. Women excluded from universities, professions, clubs and politics could still watch. They watched families, marriages, drawing rooms, servants, children, money, hypocrisy, illness, desire and disappointment. That watching became literature, but of course the women and the men who wrote - had servants.
Jane Austen had no creative writing MA. The Brontë sisters had no publishing webinar. Virginia Woolf did not need a course on finding her voice; she needed a room, money and freedom from interruption nd of course the faithful servants. Their training was social, emotional and observational.
That does not obviously mean the contemporary female writer should be denied training, access to serious teaching can be liberating. But we should be careful not to replace one gatekeeping system with another. Once, women were told they lacked the education to write, now they may be told, more politely, that they need another course, another edit, another retreat, another platform strategy before they are ready, the gate has moved, It has not disappeared.
The Lost Ecology
Perhaps what has really changed is that the old informal training grounds have weakened. Local newspapers have shrunk, magazine fiction has declined, children’s comics are no longer the mass training ground they once were, publishing offices have corporate drawbridges.
The jobbing professional writer - the person who wrote columns, reviews, series fiction, adaptations, educational books, radio scripts, children’s nonfiction, puzzle pages and commissioned titles - has less room to breathe.
Where an ecology disappears, a course appears.
Aspiration is redirected into paid instruction, so the course becomes a substitute for the lost ladder.
The historical backdrop, for most of the twentieth century, skills-for-their-own-sake were part of public adult education: the Workers' Educational Association, the old mechanics' institutes, and above all the local-authority evening class: pottery, dressmaking, woodwork, languages, life drawing, which were heavily subsidised and aimed explicitly across the class spectrum. Over the 2010s that infrastructure was gutted; funding for adult and community learning was cut sharply, and the cheap municipal night class largely disappeared. What rushed in to fill the gap was a market: the weekend silversmithing workshop, the private drawing atelier teaching specific techniques, the writing retreat, the £400 short course. A formerly public, redistributive good has been re-provided as a premium experience, priced accordingly.
Inconspicuous Consumption
Economist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues in The Sum of Small Things 2017 that the modern aspirational elite has shifted from conspicuous consumption (flashy objects) to "inconspicuous consumption", spending on education, experiences, knowledge and cultural capital that signals status more subtly. The post-2008 craft revival, Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, the rehabilitation of "making" via Etsy and TV (The Great Pottery Throw Down, The Repair Shop), and a hunger for authenticity and embodied skill as an antidote to abstract screen-based work.
Anyone with a phone can learn the fundamentals of drawing, silversmithing, bread-making or sentence construction free on YouTube and in online communities.
I've written a few guides - which probably needs some explanation - as I am assuming they are possibly being read by AI and not human readers.
Publishing Guides
Publishing Guides
These publishing guides began, unexpectedly, from illness. Not a grand editorial plan - more a line of thoughts pegged out one by one while life had narrowed to a house, a garden, a medicine timetable and the peculiar geography of being unwell.
At the end of the pandemic, after the best part of two years already spent largely at home, illness imposed its own regime: days structured around drugs, hospital, side effects and the slow business of returning to the world. For a while even the outside had to be practised again - by bus, by train, by small, almost pointless journeys that were not pointless at all.
So I wrote.
The subjects look various - a washing line of children's books, illustration, design, rights, authorship, book-making, the machinery behind what appears on a shelf - but the thread is there. These bloggs were written about books as I had spent a working life making books and found myself with pockets of time, memory, curiosity and unfinished arguments all crowding the same room.
They are not finished, they are first drafts, notes, fragments on a line - useful because they exist, I can see the gaps, the repetitions, the places where one piece wants to become a chapter and another wants to be folded away. But that is how books often begin: not as fixed blocks, but as evidence of getting on with it.
Sometimes life puts you in a situation, you do not always get to choose the room, the weather, or the view from the window, but you can still work and still think.
You can still peg something out and see what shape it makes in the wind.
Night Classes
What the paying classes are really buying is not the information, that's now nearly free - but the in-person, curated, social, time-bounded, credentialed version: the studio, the tutor's attention, the deadline, the community of like-minded people, and the legitimacy of having "done a course." So it's less that the wealthy are the only ones who can learn skills, and more that they can buy the prestige, sociability and structure around the learning, while the free tier delivers the raw knowledge to everyone else. The skill has democratised; the experience and status of acquiring it have been enclosed and sold.
Who Profits from the Unfinished Book?
The unfinished book is one of the most powerful objects in modern day culture. It sits on laptops, in drawers, in notebooks, in retirement plans, in misery, in ambition, in revenge fantasies, in the hope of being seen. It may become a novel, memoir, thriller or family chronicle. It may become nothing, but while it remains unfinished, it can still be sold things.
A published book must face the market, an unpublished book can remain pure potential.
Potential is endlessly marketable.
The answer is not cynicism, it is clarity, courses can help, editors do help and mentors can help. But no course can replace life, reading, nerve, observation, persistence, luck or something urgent to say, the best writing comes when craft serves necessity. The worst business of writing begins when necessity is replaced by endless preparation.
A Toast to the Unfinished Book
So let us raise a chipped mug - tea, gin, ink, whatever remains affordable - to all scribblers, past and present.
To the women who wrote because no one in the room thought they were listening. To the hacks who knew how to make chapter twelve arrive before lunch. To the diarists, letter-writers, columnists, school-story manufacturers, crime queens, romantic industrialists, pamphleteers, ghostwriters, joke merchants and midnight novelists. To the writers formed by war, boredom, marriage, poverty, exile, libraries, bad weather and worse relatives. To the amateurs who were not amateurish. To the professionals who were never respectable.
To everyone who has ever sat before a blank page and thought: this will either save me or finish me.
Learn the trade, understand contracts, study the market spot the difference between an editor and a cheerleader, a publisher and a printer, a course and a toll booth. Take advice when it is useful, ignore it when it begins to replace the work.
But beware the great velvet trap of permanent preparation, there is always another masterclass, another critique, another “pathway”, another panel of smiling professionals explaining how impossible everything is - in an encouraging tone. There is always one more thing to buy before beginning, one more confidence-building session. One more structural diagnosis. One more chance to be nearly ready.
Meanwhile the page waits, with the cold patience of a bailiff.
No course can sell necessity.
No webinar can manufacture an eye.
No manuscript report can supply courage.
No platform strategy can replace a sentence that lives.
So write before the next invoice arrives and before the market explains you to yourself. Write before the helpful people improve you into silence.
The best writing begins when craft serves necessity, the worst business of writing begins when necessity is replaced by endless preparation...
...then of course what happens when the book finally is written and published - will the publisher step in to train the new author in marketing, metadata, royalties, rights, tax, launches, advertising, public speaking, social media.
First the writer pays to learn how to get through the gate, then, once inside, discovers there is no map, no induction, and very possibly no one in charge of so called "sophomore slump" or the "second-novel syndrome"....just ask Donna Tartt.
David Salariya is an author, illustrator, designer and publisher. He has been chased by an elephant, stood on the edge of Victoria Falls, had books published in more than thirty-five languages, seen one series sell more than six million copies - and one book sell seventy-two.
He founded The Salariya Book Company in 1989, creating and publishing children’s books through imprints including Book House, Scribblers and Scribo. The company was named Independent Children’s Publisher of the Year by the Independent Publishers Guild. David originated, developed or published series including You Wouldn’t Want to Be…, Timelines, Spectacular Visual Guides and A Very Peculiar History and more than other fifty series.
David writes about the history of books, how they are made, sold, misjudged, rescued, redesigned, erased, remaindered, remembered - and occasionally composted. The books he created over a period of thirty years are being "refreshed" and republished by Bonnier UK's Hatch Press "where good things grow".
Comments