The National Careers Service puts a librarian's average annual wage at £19,500 per year and says the job would be perfect "if you are organised, like working with people, and are enthusiastic about the value of information and knowledge".

The same organisation lists the average wage and hours of a writer as "variable" and advises that "you’ll need to come up with ideas that appeal to your audience and sell well. You will also need to work well on your own and have the resilience to deal with critics, publishers and employers who will have opinions on your work".

Meanwhile, changes in funding for university research means that full-time, permanent positions in academia are increasingly hard to come by.

All three jobs suit people who are able to work well on their own and have an aptitude for processing lots of diverse information in a short period of time.

JK Rowling, one of the UK's most successful and prolific writers, says that aspiring authors should prepare themselves for the fact that a good story takes time to formulate.

"You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is," she says. "It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with."

See more writing tips here.

What do you think? Do these survey results ring true for you? And if not, what kind of job appeals most to you, and why? Let us know in the comments section below

Photos: Rex Features

Nation of bookworms; authors, librarian and academic are the UK's three most desirable jobs