We are now putting out a call for questions for our 2020 Salary Survey.
This will be the 24th anniversary of our very first Salary Survey, which has grown from looking at salaries and job security into becoming a survey of around 56 questions, looking at education, employment trends, digital skills and training data. We survey all areas of UK & Ireland book and journal publishing, including eBook/digital publishers and Literary Agents, covering full and part time permanent and fixed term contract employees (including maternity cover). The hashtag is #bookcareers.
In the last Salary Survey we added in a number of new questions, including asking about the length and cost of commuting, whether someone had a student loan, and the reasons why people stayed in their job as opposed to why they want to leave. Some of these questions were generated by a call for questions such as this.
Questions to retire or modify?
We also make decisions on which questions to retire or modify, to ensure that the survey reflects current social trends.
In the last survey the question about marital status was retired and the question regarding gender was modified to include a ‘prefer not to say’ option.
We are also looking as to how we may incorporate those who are employees (not freelance) in key publishing roles for outsourcing companies, where they are working on books for well known publishing houses in what would be classed a ‘key publishing role’ such as Editing or Marketing. It is a complex situation as we do not wish to dilute the validity of the overall survey, so if you have a view on this we will be grateful to hear from you.
A summary of Salary Survey questions is below. If you’d like to make any suggestions or comments additions please contact us by 30th November 2019. You are also welcome to register your email address to be notified when the survey goes live.
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Age
- Disability
- Length of time in publishing
- Length of time in current job
- Employment Status
- Location
- Length and cost of commute
- Formal education
- Student Loan
- Masters in Publishing
- Career before Publishing
- Union Membership
- Within which sector/category do you personally work
- Which formats do you work with
- During a working week what percentage of your time is spent on digital products?
- Job Title
- Job Skills
- Grade of job
- How did you find your current job
- Current salary
- Bonus or commission
- Is this salary your sole source of income?
- Honestly, do you think you are underpaid for the work that you do?
- Date of last salary review /percentage increase
- Company benefits
- Hours of work
- Overtime
- Size of company
- Redundancies
- Rate company as a place to work
- Rate publishing as an industry to work
- Benefit of working in publishing
- Morale of staff
- Training
- Do you intend to stay in your current job?
- Promotion prospects
- Stress/Bullying
- Additional comments