Novelist in 1740: Pamela and the novel-reading craze — Section 770: Pamela and the novel-reading

The maker of book-length fiction, from Murasaki Shikibu's Heian court to the Kindle's self-publishing flood — a trade with no license, no ladder and no retirement age. A novelist writes book-length fiction, and has done so for far longer than English has had a word for it. Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at Japan's Heian court, completed The Tale of Genji around 1010 — fifty-four chapters of psychologically exact fiction, six centuries before Cervantes published Don Quixote in Madrid in 1605. The trade she founded still has no license, no governing body and no required degree: anyone may begin, which is exactly why finishing is what distinguishes.

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.