The end of the 'career author'

And why it's the start of something better

And Just Like That..who is making their sole income from being an author anymore?

Over the past few months, my author group chats have taken on a slightly funereal vibe. Friends are getting dropped by their agents. Novels go out on submission and then… nothing. Editors are being laid off. And people keep muttering the same dread-filled phrase:

Is this the end of the career author? The writer who lives entirely off book deals and royalties, the dream so many of us were raised to believe in.

On paper, the evidence seems pretty damning. Advances are, for many, shrinking or staying static, at best. Mid-list support seems to be dissolving. Books are being tossed into an overcrowded market where even brilliant ones vanish without a ripple. No wonder even well-established writers are scrambling to patch together income from multiple sources. One celebrated writer pal of mine has started dog-sitting between deadlines. Others are teaching, editing, freelancing, doing anything they can to stay afloat.

Worse than the instability of all this is the shame.
So many writers assume it’s their fault. That their book wasn’t good enough. That they somehow failed.

But it’s not their fault.

The truth is that the desire to make a full-time living solely from writing books has always been a gamble, far riskier than most of us are willing to admit.

I often look back to the very beginning of my career, when I was a senior executive at a national magazine and handed in my notice the same week my debut novel Daddy’s Girls shot into the top ten. I’m staggered now that it never occurred to me that my original two-book deal might be the only one I ever got. In my mind, I had ‘become an author.’ That was it. End of discussion.

I’d swallowed the myth, the glossy, seductive and flattering idea that being a full-time author was a stable identity rather than a crap-shoot at best.

But when you look at it clearly, dispassionately, the old model - write a book, collect advance and royalties, repeat, is massively precarious. It places enormous pressure on every project to succeed. One wobble and the whole thing can collapse.

I’ve been in this business long enough (over twenty years now) to have heard many, many stories about books underperforming or derailing for reasons entirely outside the author’s control.

A supply-chain hiccup that meant a book reached the shops weeks after its launch date.
The barcode error that resulted in hundreds of sales not registering.

Publishing is a machine with a lot of moving parts.
All it takes is one rusty cog, a logistics problem, perhaps your genre falling temporarily out of fashion, an editor going on leave, or a black swan event - and everything can be thrown off.

I learnt this myself at what should have been the peak of my writing career. My novels were hitting the Sunday Times bestseller list off part-week sales and my latest release (and to this day, one of my best books,) received a huge push: posters at Waterloo Station, major retail support, (at considerable cost to my publisher). You’d think that would guarantee success.

Great visibility at London’s Waterloo Station, but the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy was coming!

Except… that was the exact month the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy exploded.

Hundreds of thousands of women were going into bookshops and buying all three EL James books at once. And that meant the rest of the women’s fiction market took a battering. Looking back, my sales never truly recovered from that summer.

And yet, even after that, it somehow didn’t fully hit me how unpredictable the industry could be - or that perhaps, I shouldn’t have all my eggs in one traditional publishing basket. Not until Covid.

In 2020, my new novel was pushed back twice because of pandemic scheduling chaos. With no money coming in (because authors are paid on delivery and publication,) I realised I had to do something drastic.

So I self-published a romantic comedy drama The Singles Table I had in my bottom drawer.

And it was one of the best career moves I’ve ever made.

Diversifying my writing income wasn’t just practical - it was empowering.

Suddenly I wasn’t only an author; I was a publisher. I was back in the wider world, going to industry events, contacting journalist friends, asking for PR, pitching interviews, reconnecting with people who’d known me from my magazine days. And in doing so, other doors began to open. Editors asked me to write features. I launched my Substack. I began hosting retreats. I started a small publishing company. I remembered that I actually enjoy being part of the creative world, not sitting in my study, anxiously awaiting publication dates.

But an odd thing also started happening.

Some people began treating me with suspicion or pity when they learnt I wasn’t ‘just writing books’ anymore. As though having multiple income streams somehow meant I had failed at the One True Author Path.

Which is funny, because for most of history, writers have been generally multi-hyphenates.

Dickens wasn’t just Dickens. He was a journalist, a performer, an editor, a publisher - practically a Victorian content creator.
Austen had family support.
Melville worked a day job.
Twain lectured endlessly.
Woolf ran a publishing house.
And for years, Ian Fleming wrote his Bond novels whilst working at The Sunday Times, taking three months off each year to write in Jamaica, his journalism directly feeding his storylines.

Fleming at work at Goldeneye, his Jamaican home

But then between the 1960s and the early 2000s, something unusual happened: the full-time ‘career author’ was everywhere. Publishing was flush in this era. Mass-market paperbacks became big business as books, especially commercial fiction, became a mainstream, affordable treat. TV wasn’t yet competing for every scrap of attention. Bookshops were thriving. Supermarkets started buying and selling novels in large quantities. Publishers had bigger margins and took more risks.

It was the age of mega-deals, huge advances, long lunches, glossy author photos, and multi-book contracts that didn’t just pay the mortgage but paid it off. A time when a writer could, with a straight face, describe being an author as a solid, stable profession. Many writers really did live entirely off their novels. A lucky few even made fortunes.

But that golden era was just that - a moment. A blip. A historically unusual spike in the long, wobbly line of author economics. The conditions that made it possible simply don’t really exist anymore. The industry reshaped itself faster than the mythology surrounding it, meaning many writers kept clinging to the old idea, the full-time author who earns a living from novels alone, long after the scaffolding had dissolved.

Because things ARE different now.

Attention is fragmented.
Retail is unpredictable.
Reading competes with scrolling, streaming, gaming.
Publishers take fewer risks.
Editors feel safer commissioning celebrity books.
Algorithms drive discovery more than posters at train stations.
A single viral BookTok can outmuscle a year of curated marketing, yet no-one really understands how to make that viral magic happen.

This is the new reality of 21st-century publishing and it’s time we rewired our expectations.

But here’s the good news:

We are not witnessing the death of the full-time author.
We are witnessing the death of a myth, and the rebirth of a new, more resilient, more expansive kind of writer.

Instead of betting our entire livelihoods on one book every year - which, when you say it out loud, is an absolutely bonkers business model - you can, and should, build something sturdier:

A portfolio career.
Multiple revenue streams.
Multiple creative outlets.
Multiple ways to reach readers.

Maybe the ‘career author’ is fading.
But the writer?
The writer is evolving.

And honestly? That evolution is good for us.

Yes, it’s busier and much harder work.
But it’s less lonely.
Less precarious.
More connected.
More creative.
More alive.

Perhaps an agent or editor has knocked you back, maybe your sales have tanked, but you are still a writer.

And we are just returning to the older, truer shape of authorship, only now with better tools, broader reach, and more control than any generation before us.

So whether you’re searching for your first book deal, celebrating your fifth, or wondering why your tenth wasn’t renewed… it’s time to look at the industry with new eyes and new expectations.

The multi-hyphenate writer isn’t Plan B.
It’s the old normal turned the new normal.
And it might just be the most empowering model we’ve ever had.

Enjoy the week

Tasmina x