This week will be like A-level results week for authors, but with added economic jeopardy. For a good whack of the 100,000 writers and translators in the UK, finding out how many books they have sold in the run-up to Christmas will mean the difference between turning on the heating and sitting shivering through the January frost. Many in the latter camp will be forced to accept that life as a professional novelist, poet or dramatist is no longer sustainable. Time to close the book. The end.

Can it be so bad? Surely novelists aren’t really on the breadline? Well, given that the median income for professional writers fell from £12,330 in 2007 to £7,000 in 2022, you can see why most will be desperately hoping for a festive bump in earnings. A bohemian life in a freezing garret only sounds attractive to those who have never lived it.

In a country proud of its literary history, we’re at a tipping point when the number of books and plays written could soon collapse with the number of people who can afford to create them.

It’s strange that the role of the creative is viewed as vital to the wellbeing of society – even wartime armies have entertainment corps – but when authors turn out their pockets to demonstrate what “broke” really means, they are told that they must pursue their art for art’s sake, that the love of writing will sustain them. No one expresses the same sentiment to dentists.

This is the pervading view of governments, too: health professionals must be supported even to the point of direct employment because if there is a shortage, society suffers. But if the river of novels, films and poems slows to a trickle as authors give up, what’s the problem?

One real problem is that we need a churn of stories so that each generation can find its own. Society changes daily – demographically, technologically, psychologically – and we must reflect that. Jane Austen may still speak to us about romance, but not so much about race relations. Hence, Netflix’s Bridgerton.

There’s a macroeconomic case, too: our authors fill the crown’s coffers via revenues and tax from publishing, TV, film and theatre, simultaneously boosting our influence in the global arena. There’s no need to rehash the “we are the land of Shakespeare, Dickens and JK Rowling” slogan; instead, try the “we are the land of Shakespeare, Dickens and JK Rowling’s annualised and adjusted earnings” argument.

Yet successive governments have made things worse. The last one made a point of boosting the status of science and mathematics education by downgrading the arts. This has been a resounding success in terms of better results for the former, and departmental closures in the latter. The rationale given was that Britain has to compete on a global economic stage with technological powerhouses such as China and the US – which makes sense so long as you don’t have the first clue about just how much money the creative industries make for Britain (£125bn in 2022, employing 2.4 million people) and that our place in the world actually can rest on books and pop music more than on advanced manufacturing.

The Department for Education beating up English (or Welsh or Gaelic) literature in schools has no doubt been a major driver in the collapse of reading for pleasure among children. That’s why pouring resources back into starved creative arts departments would feed lifelong joy and inspire both the creators and consumers of these social products. It has to be a first step towards healing the wounds inflicted by previous policy.

Direct financial assistance is important, too. In the Republic of Ireland most income from writing and musical composition is tax-free – not because its government is staffed by Yeats-quoting aesthetes, but because it appreciates the hard-nosed business case. Writers and musicians spread a positive image of the country, attracting tourist euros and promoting soft power, which is far cheaper than the hard stuff: give a creative a tax break and bring in five times as much from American visitors. Something for the chancellor to mull while she glumly stares at the Treasury projections for 2025.

We authors have never been able to exist without a certain amount of patronage. The coming year will be an especially tough one for literary festivals after the investment firm Baillie Gifford was forced to stop funding several festivals by the campaign group Fossil Free Books.

The best thing for charity-minded companies would be to ignore such groups; then we can all return to supporting these vital events that introduce debut authors to debut readers and allow fans to meet their sheepish, dishevelled and tongue-tied idols. And, in the denouement, it’s the public who get the final say: they who buy the books, demand the policies, encourage the firms.

We want books written because they expand our inner lives. We need them written because they fuel industries that pay for our roads to be swept and our hospitals to be staffed, industries that preserve for Britain an international standing which successive governments have done much to shatter. Yet for books to exist, authors must exist. And that means schools, readers and politicians seeing and celebrating them as an asset for the future, not just a relic of the past.

• Gareth Rubin’s novel The Turnglass was a Guardian-Observer thriller of the year. The sequel, The Waterfall, will be published in September