Addendum to The Contribution of the Publishing Industry the UK Economy

This note is an addendum to the report The Contribution of the Publishing Industry to the UK Economy, written by Frontier Economics for the Publishers Association and published in December 2017. It corrects a figure quoted in the report which was labelled as the total amount authors received in 2016 from advances, royalties and income from secondary licensing and rights. The figure originally quoted (£161m) does not in fact include the advances publishers pay to authors and, as such, a more accurate figure would be roughly £350m.

In the report, we noted that the publishing industry invested £545m in 2016. Of this figure, £168m was invested by publishers in physical assets (across book and journal publishing) and £377m in copyrighted artistic originals (an intangible asset). Corresponding to this investment by publishers in artistic originals is the ‘authors share’ of investment, at £161m. This note explains the origins of these numbers, and corrects a labelling error made in the report and the annex.

The intangible investment numbers above are based on work that Dr Peter Goodridge published in 2014, which has since been adopted as part of the official measurement of the UK National Accounts. It is also similar to the OECD’s methodology of measuring investment in intangible assets. Goodridge set out to improve the UK’s method for measuring investment in artistic originals across most of the creative industries (Film, TV, Radio, Music and Books), but here we focus on his method and data as it relates to book publishing.

We have interpreted Goodridge’s calculations based on subsequent correspondence with him and updated his results to reflect the subsequent growth of the sector as estimated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).