The economic, social and professional situation of the Italian writer in the digital world.
Research into the economic and social condition of the writer in digital reality documents how writers are becoming poorer and poorer. “Only” 37.8% of writers play the role of full-time writers, without this being able to produce sufficient income for their maintenance, and 32.6% describe their work as “author” even though 97.7% of the sample like the job of writing.
In the digital world, 96.5% of the respondents are not able to sustain themselves economically with the earnings from their work as writers alone. The result is a first strong critical element to consider: it is no longer possible to feed the confusion between book sales data, reading index in Italy and the earnings of writers.
This means that it is completely anachronistic to think that the more books are sold, the higher the percentages of reading and the more writers earn. This is no longer the case or, perhaps, it has never been the case: the methods of publishing, distributing and marketing books, of reading practices and devices and of sharing books through digital, real and networked platforms have changed.
READ THE REPORT (In Italian):
www.bdsystem.it/condizione_economica_scrittori_italiani.pdf