If you dream of giving up your day job, write erotica

If you read one book this week

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams (Vintage Classics) R180

A welcome reissue of a lost 1960 classic, it is a Western tale in which a Harvard academic joins a Colorado buffalo hunt. Brilliant but brutal, it's so relentlessly free of sentimentality. It's like Cormac McCarthy before there was a Cormac McCarthy.

The issue

More than 9200 authors took part in the 2014 Digital Book World and Writer's Digest Author Survey. The results suggest a hard world out there: Close on 54% of traditionally published and some 77% of self-published authors earn less than $1000 a year (about R10850). Very few respondents - 1.3% of traditionally published, 0.7% of self-published and 5.7% of "hybrid" (both traditionally published and self-published) writers - earned more than $100000 a year.

Only a minority of respondents - less than a quarter - claimed that making money was "extremely important". Which is odd, given that almost 60% of those who took part said it was "extremely important" to "publish a book that people will buy".

The dream of quitting the day job to pursue writing full time is a reality for a fraction of the writers.

On the other hand, dabbling in erotica pays dividends. In the clearest example yet of a Fifty Shades "knock-on" effect, US publisher St Martin's Press last week agreed to pay what the New York Times, with characteristic restraint, referred to as an "eye-popping eight-figure advance" to romance novelist Sylvia Day for her next two novels, a series called Blacklist. (Darker, dare we say, than grey?)

Random House, publisher of the EL James Fifty Shades trilogy, posted record profits last year and awarded each of its employees in the US, even warehouse workers, a Christmas bonus of $5000. That, you could argue, is more than five times what most writers earn in a year.

Crash course

Norway's Jo Nesbø, whose fictional cop Harry Hole is regularly confronted with the depths to which humanity can sink, has been commissioned to rewrite Macbeth for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. It makes perfect sense. As Nesbø put it: "A thriller about the struggle for power, set both in a gloomy, stormy crime noir-like setting and in a dark, paranoid human mind. A main character who has the moral code and the corrupted mind, the personal strength and the emotional weakness, the ambition and the doubts to go either way. No, it does not feel too far from home."

The bottom line

"We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is - and the definition isn't right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes." - David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co)