Novelist in 1: Greek and Roman prose fiction

It is also one of the most financially unequal professions on this site. The UK's ALCS survey found a median income of about £7,000 for primary-occupation authors in 2022, down roughly 60 percent in real terms since 2006, while a handful of brand-name novelists earn millions a year. Most working novelists therefore keep a second occupation — teaching, journalism, medicine — and write in the hours around it, as Anthony Trollope did at his desk from 5:30 each morning before his Post Office job.

This page follows the trade from the Greek romances and Genji through serialization, the sixpenny paperback and the Kindle; how people actually become novelists today, with or without a creative-writing degree; the craft techniques practitioners genuinely pass on, from Trollope's quota to Nabokov's index cards; eight figures who defined the form across seven countries; and how much of the work large language models can realistically absorb — a sharper question for this profession than for most.

Do you need a degree to become a novelist? No. Novel-writing is one of the few skilled professions with no required credential anywhere in the world: no license, no exam, no mandatory degree. Creative-writing programs like Iowa's Writers' Workshop or the University of East Anglia's MA can compress the apprenticeship and supply contacts, but published novelists have come from medicine, law, insurance, the merchant navy and no formal education at all.