Publishers Weekly released its annual survey of salaries in the publishing industry and the news isn’t comforting, if you think publishing is path to riches. The average raise this year was 3.3 percent, the lowest during the five years of data reported in the article.
That figure masks the real condition of the market, since 35 percent of publishing employees got no raise and 35 percent more got less than three percent in added compensation. Only 19 percent of publishing employees got raises of more than five percent during 2008.
The bitterest pill for this ostensibly egalitarian industry is that women still make a third less than men overall.
Lots of interesting details on break-downs of salary by region, raises by role, and so forth at the Publishers Weekly site.
A permanent link will be in the Industry Stats pages of BooksAhead.com should you want to find this data again quickly.