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Being a writer is no walk in the park. But if there's one thing that writers know how to do, it is how to make things work. For some prose writers in the UK, they're making things work by moving into a different industry altogether: video games. 

A new feature from The Guardian examined the growing number of novelists in the UK who have embarked on careers in video game writing as a way to supplement their publishing income. The Guardian cites a 2022 report from the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society that stated that pro authors in the UK earn an average of just £7,000 a year from writing, down from £10,497 a year in 2018, which was already down from £12,330 a year in 2007. That's a 43% drop, not accounting for inflation. Adjusting for inflation, £12,330 from 2007 is worth £18,347.07 in 2022 British pounds! Yikes. 

The Guardian spoke with romance writer Mallory Marlowe, whose book Love and Other Conspiracies became an instant USA Today bestseller when it came out in 2024. Marlowe's day job as a video game writer provides the financial stability that publishing doesn't. “Thankfully, I have a consistent paycheck coming in,” Marlowe said, “which is an advantage because the payment structures in publishing aren’t exactly sustainable.”

Still, the video game industry has its own quirks. Writer Joe Dunthorne (author of Submarine, which was adapted into a great coming of age movie by Richard Ayoade) "did a huge amount of work on a big-budget video game that got cancelled without ever being publicly announced." So while more and more British writers are making ends meet by hoping over to video games, who's to say that we'll ever see their work?

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.