Why is the publishing industry in trouble? For the same reason it’s always in trouble, the difference this time being that the trouble in question is pretty heavy-duty now, thanks to a global downturn that’s affecting many other industries as well.

Authors are seeing their advances slashed; this is no fun if you are an author (I am one, I know) but the cold, hard economics of advances aren’t always pretty. Let’s say an author gets a “six-figure” book deal (his or her agent will trumpet). OK, that’s £100,000. Let’s say this author is an historian; but he or she could be a novelist too.

Making books is hard work: he or she could easily spend five years researching and writing. Divide that figure by five and it looks slightly less grand; and yet, the likelihood that the book will “earn out” its advance is very small indeed. This is part of the problem.

Another part of the problem: remember that William Goldman’s famous rule of Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything”, applies to books as much as it does to movies.

Barry Cunningham runs Chicken House Publishing now and works with us here at The Times on The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition. But Cunningham used to work at Bloomsbury, and it was at Bloomsbury that he read a children’s book that many other publishers had turned down. He loved it, however, though he was able to offer its author only £1,500, remarking to her that no one ever makes any money out of children’s books. Now you’re going to guess the author I’m talking about, right?

Nobody knows anything. Dava Sobel’s Longitude: never meant to be a hit. Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong: same story. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin: ditto. Historians may turn themselves into historical novelists in the hope that historical novels will rocket to the top of the bestseller lists in a way that history books generally won’t: but there are no guarantees.

Authors and publishers have been squealing about hard times since the days of vellum: this isn’t about to change any time soon.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy