Salary Survey 2020 – Call for Questions

Sep 6, 2019

salary pay slipWe 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.

  1. Gender
  2. Ethnicity
  3. Age
  4. Disability
  5. Length of time in publishing
  6. Length of time in current job
  7. Employment Status
  8. Location
  9. Length and cost of commute
  10. Formal education
  11. Student Loan
  12. Masters in Publishing
  13. Career before Publishing
  14. Union Membership
  15. Within which sector/category do you personally work
  16. Which formats do you work with
  17. During a working week what percentage of your time is spent on digital products?
  18. Job Title
  19. Job Skills
  20. Grade of job
  21. How did you find your current job
  22. Current salary
  23. Bonus or commission
  24. Is this salary your sole source of income?
  25. Honestly, do you think you are underpaid for the work that you do?
  26. Date of last salary review /percentage increase
  27. Company benefits
  28. Hours of work
  29. Overtime
  30. Size of company
  31. Redundancies
  32. Rate company as a place to work
  33. Rate publishing as an industry to work
  34. Benefit of working in publishing
  35. Morale of staff
  36. Training
  37. Do you intend to stay in your current job?
  38. Promotion prospects
  39. Stress/Bullying
  40. Additional comments