Writers and authors
Also called Writer, Author, Content writer, Copywriter, Freelance writer
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 47,940 US writers and authors, with median pay of $76,910 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 54,010, in May 2022. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 5,600 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for writers and authors: ChatGPT (mass adoption, CNET scandal, BuzzFeed collapse), 2022 to 2023. The CNET scandal was the first major public disclosure that an established media brand had substituted AI for writers at scale.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (-0.3%).
AI exposure studies
- 80.8% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.038 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.038. BLS counted 43,590 of these jobs in May 2013 and 47,940 in May 2025. The count moved sharply in one step, May 2020 to May 2021, when BLS changed how it estimates these counts, so no change is derived here.
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Writers and authors: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-3043
Future History. "Writers and authors: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-3043.
@misc{futurehistory_27_3043, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Writers and authors: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/27-3043}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $74,938 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
The British Parliament passes the Statute of Anne, the world's first copyright law, granting authors a 14-year monopoly on their published works (renewable for 14 more if the author was still living). Before the Statute, publishers (not authors) owned the perpetual rights to any text once published; the author sold the manuscript outright. The Statute of Anne was the first legal recognition that writing was intellectual property that belonged to its creator.
The United States Copyright Act of 1790, modeled on the Statute of Anne, is signed into law by George Washington on May 31, 1790. It is one of the first Acts of Congress, covering books, maps, and charts for 14-year terms. Abraham Lincoln later named the printing press and copyright among "the three greatest improvements in the condition of mankind."
Mark Twain submits the manuscript of Life on the Mississippi to his publisher: the first book manuscript submitted in typewritten form. Twain was an early adopter and later investor in the Paige Composograph typesetting machine. The typewriter changed the author's physical relationship to writing: where longhand required the hand to lag behind the mind, typing permitted (near) real-time composition.
The Authors Guild is founded in New York as a professional advocacy organization for published authors. It remains the largest author organization in the United States, with membership ranging from novelists and nonfiction authors to journalists and screenwriters. In 2023, it became the lead plaintiff in the class-action copyright suit against OpenAI.
The Authors Guild's 2018 income survey (covering 2017 income) documents median author earnings falling to $6,080: a 42% decline from 2009's $10,500. The decline precedes the AI shock by years; digital publishing, Amazon's discounting pressure, and the collapse of advance structures drove it. Full-time authors' median total income from writing-related work was $20,300: barely above the federal poverty line for a family of three.
May 2 – September 27, 2023: The Writers Guild of America strikes for 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union's history. AI protections are a central demand from the first day. The final contract is the first collective bargaining agreement in any industry to regulate generative AI specifically: studios cannot use AI to write or rewrite literary material, cannot use AI to undermine writer credits, must disclose when any AI-generated material is given to a writer, and cannot claim AI output as "written material" under the minimum basic agreement. The WGA's chief negotiator described the AI terms as "the contract language that will protect writers for decades to come."
September 19, 2023: The Authors Guild files a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. Seventeen named authors include George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. The suit alleges that OpenAI used their copyrighted books as training data without permission, authorization, or compensation. Microsoft is added as a defendant in December 2023. Discovery is ongoing as of mid-2025.
A wave of AI content-licensing deals reshapes the relationship between publishers and AI companies. News Corp signs a five-year deal with OpenAI worth over $250 million (covering Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Barron's). Vox Media and The Atlantic sign separate deals. Reddit licenses its data to Google and OpenAI. These deals reveal a paradox: written content has never been more economically valuable to AI companies, even as the writers who produced that content face mass displacement. The per-word rate for human-written content that trains AI may exceed the per-word rate paid for writing that AI is replacing.
Will AI replace writers and authors? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for writers and authors
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is taking this onProduce SEO blog content at volume (keyword-targeted articles, FAQ pages, and programmatic content) using AI drafting pipelines in Jasper or Writer.com, then reviewing for E-E-A-T signals, factual accuracy, and human voice before publication.
Produce SEO blog content at volume (keyword-targeted articles, FAQ pages, and programmatic content) using AI drafting pipelines in Jasper or Writer.com, then reviewing for E-E-A-T signals, factual accuracy, and human voice before publication.[7],[6]
Volume SEO content is the most displaced segment of writing work: freelance rates for standard blog posts dropped sharply between 2022 and 2025 as AI flooded the market. Survive by owning E-E-A-T signals: your byline expertise, cited sources, and editorial judgment are what Google's Helpful Content system now rewards over word count.
AI is taking this onGenerate first-draft marketing copy (product descriptions, email campaigns, landing page headlines, and ad variations) using Jasper or Copy.ai, then edit for brand voice, accuracy, and regulatory compliance before delivery to clients.
Generate first-draft marketing copy (product descriptions, email campaigns, landing page headlines, and ad variations) using Jasper or Copy.ai, then edit for brand voice, accuracy, and regulatory compliance before delivery to clients.[8],[9],[6]
Generic first-draft copy is now nearly fully automated at scale. Your defensibility here is brand voice enforcement and fact-checking: clients pay for accuracy and consistency, not word count. Learn to operate AI writing platforms as a production lead who reviews and calibrates, not a line-drafter.
AI is sitting alongside you hereEdit and fact-check AI-generated content drafts, reviewing LLM output from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for hallucinated citations, inaccurate statistics, trademark issues, and tone mismatches before client or publication delivery.
Edit and fact-check AI-generated content drafts, reviewing LLM output from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for hallucinated citations, inaccurate statistics, trademark issues, and tone mismatches before client or publication delivery.[5],[1]
AI-editing is now a distinct and growing role: the ability to efficiently catch LLM hallucinations, enforce house style, and calibrate voice is increasingly what clients want from a human writer. Develop a systematic fact-verification workflow and become expert in the failure modes of the specific LLMs your clients use.
Where writers and authors go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Marketing Managers
- US median pay
- $166,790 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +6.9%
- Editors
- US median pay
- $77,920 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -1.1%
- Technical Writers
- US median pay
- $90,390 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +0.8%
What each move takes
Marketing Managers
Content writers who understand audience psychology, messaging strategy, and channel distribution already possess the core intuitions of Marketing Managers: what they lack is budget ownership, team management, and paid channel expertise. With AI automating content production, Marketing Managers increasingly need people who can brief AI tools well and evaluate output quality, which is exactly what a strong writer brings. This pivot typically requires a few years in a content strategist or content marketing manager role as a bridge step.
How has the work of writers and authors changed since 1440?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Printing press: movable type (Gutenberg, c. 1440)
Gutenberg's press transformed writing from a craft of patronage and manuscript duplication into a commercial activity. An author who could place a text with a printer could reach thousands of readers across Europe. Before the press, no author could earn a living from sales; after it, the economics of publishing gradually emerged. The first copyright law (Statute of Anne, 1709) was a direct consequence: without a way to reproduce identical copies, there was nothing to protect.
Effect on the workThe press eliminated the medieval manuscript copyist as a profession: a cohort that had numbered in the thousands across European monasteries and commercial scriptoria. It simultaneously created the author-as-commercial-professional, though that identity would take two centuries to fully crystallize.
Sholes & Glidden typewriter: Remington (1873)
The Sholes & Glidden typewriter, sold to E. Remington & Sons in 1873 and marketed from 1874, gave writers their first mechanical leverage over physical composition. Mark Twain submitted the first typewritten book manuscript to a publisher: Life on the Mississippi (1883). The typewriter doubled or tripled a writer's daily word output, standardized manuscript format, and made carbon-paper duplication possible. It is also the machine that created the modern secretary: a parallel occupational transformation tracked in SOC 43-6014.
Effect on the workThe typewriter did not replace writers; it made them more productive and expanded the category. Newspaper and magazine journalism, fueled by industrial-scale printing and cheap paper, created a mass-market writing economy that employed tens of thousands by 1900.
Electric typewriter (IBM Selectric, 1961)
The IBM Selectric (1961), with its ball element that replaced the clattering typebar basket, became the dominant professional writing machine for two decades. Its correction tape (1973) and later self-correction features reduced the retyping penalty for errors. Journalists, novelists, and screenwriters wrote their most celebrated work on Selectrics. Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Larry McMurtry all typed on variants of the electric machine.
Word processor: WordStar (1978), WordPerfect (1980), Microsoft Word (1983/1989)
WordStar (1978) was the first widely adopted word-processing software for personal computers; WordPerfect (1980) dominated the legal and professional market through the late 1980s; Microsoft Word launched on the Macintosh in 1983 and on Windows in 1989. Word processing separated editing from retyping for the first time in the profession's history: a writer could revise a paragraph without retyping the page. Spell check arrived in the early 1980s (added to WordStar 1982, Word 1985). The rewrite cycle compressed from days to minutes.
Effect on the workWord processing eliminated professional typists as a distinct role for authors and journalists (previously, many writers dictated or wrote longhand and had their work typed by a separate typist). The same technology that destroyed SOC 43-6014 typing-pool roles was adopted by writers as a tool rather than a threat: one of the clearest examples of professional boundary determining which side of a technological wave you land on.
Online publishing: Salon (1995), Slate (1996), Blogger (1999), WordPress (2003)
Salon.com (1995) and Slate (1996) were the first internet-native publications that paid professional rates for web-only journalism. Blogger (1999, acquired by Google 2003) and WordPress (2003) removed the publication barrier entirely: any writer could self-publish to a global audience at zero cost. The early blogging era created the first generation of writers who built audiences directly without publishers. By 2003, Technorati was tracking about a hundred thousand blogs.
Content mills: Demand Media (2006), Examiner, Associated Content
Demand Media (founded 2006) pioneered "content farming", generating article titles algorithmically from keyword-search data, then paying freelancers a few dollars per article to fill them. By 2009, Demand's eHow property was publishing one million items per month (equivalent to four English-language Wikipedias annually). When Demand went public in 2011, it briefly exceeded the New York Times Company in market capitalization. The model compressed professional writing rates toward minimum wage, training both publishers and readers to expect content to be cheap: a psychology that made AI substitution feel like a natural continuation fifteen years later.
Effect on the workContent mills employed tens of thousands of freelance writers but at rates that undermined professional market norms. Google's Panda algorithm update (February 2011) penalized thin content, eventually collapsing the model, but not before it had permanently altered writer rate expectations in the digital-media market.
Grammarly + writing assistant tools (2009, mainstream by 2015)
Grammarly was founded in 2009 by three Ukrainian developers who sold their prior plagiarism-detection startup (MyDropBox) to Blackboard in 2008. Grammarly's freemium launch in 2015 drove it to about a million daily users. Grammarly gave every writer a real-time editorial co-pilot for grammar, clarity, and style: the first tool that partially automated a previously human editorial function. In April 2023, Grammarly launched a generative AI layer built on GPT-3.
Effect on the workGrammarly reduced but did not eliminate demand for copy-editors and proofreaders, as it handles mechanical errors but not structural or factual issues. Its main labor effect was raising the baseline quality of all writing, compressing the gap between trained and untrained writers on the lower tier of the quality distribution.
Substack (2017): the direct-to-reader subscription model
Substack launched October 16, 2017, with a mission to allow writers to earn subscription revenue directly from readers, bypassing publishers and advertisers. The founding inspiration was Ben Thompson's Stratechery newsletter. By 2024, Substack reported tens of millions of active subscriptions and millions of paid subscribers. Substack did not replace writing as a profession; it created a new economic pathway for writers, direct-to-reader subscription, that bypassed the institutional publication bottleneck. Simultaneously, it concentrated readership and revenue on the top tier of recognized writers.
GPT-2 + GPT-3: first LLMs capable of publishable prose
OpenAI announced GPT-2 on February 14, 2019, and initially withheld the full 1.5-billion-parameter model, citing fears of misuse for misinformation: the first time an AI lab acknowledged a language model could be misused by writers at scale. GPT-3 launched via API in June 2020. Both models could produce short-form content (product descriptions, blog introductions, SEO articles) that was genuinely difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Demand Media's content-farming model, had it survived to 2020, would have been immediately automated.
Effect on the workGPT-3 enabled the first wave of AI-assisted content tools: Jasper (founded 2021), Copy.ai, and Writesonic. These tools did not immediately displace professional writers but did begin automating the entry-level SEO-content tier that content mills had previously occupied.
Sudowrite (2021): first AI tool built specifically for fiction writers
Sudowrite launched in 2021, founded by writers Amit Gupta and James Yu, with backing from Medium and Twitter founders. Unlike the SEO-content tools built on GPT-3, Sudowrite was designed for long-form fiction, generating scene expansions, dialogue, character voice, and plot brainstorming. Its investors included the directors of Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean's Twelve. Sudowrite's existence was a leading indicator: if fiction was automatable, the "creativity is the moat" argument that distinguished literary writing from commodity content was on borrowed time.
ChatGPT (Nov 30, 2022): mass adoption, CNET scandal, BuzzFeed collapse
ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. Within six weeks, Futurism (January 11, 2023) revealed that CNET had been secretly publishing AI-written financial articles since November 2022 under the byline "CNET Money Staff." More than half the articles required corrections: some "substantial," per CNET's editor-in-chief. Wikipedia subsequently downgraded CNET from "generally reliable" to unreliable. On April 20, 2023, BuzzFeed News shut down, laying off more than a hundred people; BuzzFeed had announced in January 2023 that AI would help create content. On November 27, 2023, Futurism revealed that Sports Illustrated had published product-review articles under fake AI-generated bylines (including "Drew Ortiz," whose profile photo came from an AI-portrait-generation service).
Effect on the workThe CNET scandal was the first major public disclosure that an established media brand had substituted AI for writers at scale. BuzzFeed News's closure, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom, was read across the industry as a signal that AI was not the cause but rather the final straw on a business model already broken by digital advertising. The Sports Illustrated scandal demonstrated that the substitution had reached the point where fabricated author identities were easier than paying human writers.
Claude + GPT-4: long-form AI writing at publishable quality; WGA wins AI protections
By mid-2023, Claude (Anthropic) and GPT-4 (OpenAI) could produce long-form writing (reported journalism, narrative nonfiction, short fiction, scripts) that required substantial editorial expertise to distinguish from human-authored work. In the Anthropic Economic Index January 2026 report, Arts, Design and Entertainment tasks made up 11% of sampled Claude.ai conversations (against 6% of first-party API transcripts), and the report says the writing tasks there were primarily copyediting and the writing and refinement of fictional pieces. The WGA strike (May 2 – September 27, 2023) was the first labor action in any industry to win specific AI protections: AI cannot be used to write or rewrite literary material, cannot undermine writer credit, and studios must disclose when AI-generated material is given to a writer.
Effect on the workThe Authors Guild filed a class-action suit against OpenAI (September 19, 2023) with several named authors including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and David Baldacci. The New York Times filed separately against OpenAI and Microsoft (December 27, 2023), alleging billions of dollars in damages from unauthorized use of published articles as training data. By 2024, a wave of content-licensing deals (Vox Media, The Atlantic, Reddit) signaled that content had value as AI training data even as the underlying profession contracted.
See the same long-arc view for your own profession.
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Browse all rolesWriters and Authors employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Canada (NOC 51111)
- Employment, 2020
- 21,690, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 51111 Authors and writers (except technical), Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
- Median pay, 2020
- C$51,200, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 51111 Authors and writers (except technical), Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 26 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 5,600 | n/a | Decennial Census 1900 Researched context | Report |
| 1940 | 22,000 | n/a | Decennial Census 1940 Researched context | Report |
| 1980 | 36,000 | n/a | Est., BLS Monthly Labor Review Researched context | Report |
| 2003 | 43,740 | $42,330 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 42,780 | $44,350 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 43,020 | $46,420 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 43,260 | $48,640 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 44,310 | $50,660 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 44,170 | $53,070 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 43,390 | $53,900 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 40,980 | $55,420 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 40,930 | $55,870 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 41,990 | $55,940 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 43,590 | $57,750 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 43,500 | $58,850 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 43,380 | $60,250 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 44,690 | $61,240 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 45,300 | $61,820 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 45,210 | $62,170 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 45,860 | $63,200 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 44,240 | $67,120 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 49,410 | $69,510 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 54,010 | $73,150 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 49,450 | $73,690 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 47,800 | $72,270 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 47,940 | $76,910 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |