How much will I make from writing a book?
You will read in the press stories of authors earning telephone number advances. This is not the norm, and a recent survey pointed to the very low annual income most authors receive. What’s going on, and how do publishers work out what to pay their authors?
You will read in the press stories of authors earning telephone number advances. This is not the norm, and a recent survey pointed to the very low annual income most authors receive. How do publishers work out what to pay their authors?
Investing in a new book, particularly one that may only be partly complete, and by a new author, is a risk for a publisher. While an agent’s job is to make the risk seem lower and the author well worth the investment, an editor needs to persuade their team that your book will make them money. So before offering they will calculate how many sales in a year your book might achieve (by talking to their colleagues in home sales, international sales and rights) at what retail price, and therefore what their income might be bearing in mind their production cost (which are increasing currently) and the discounts they give to different retail customers. Your advance is a percentage of this based on your royalties, and average publisher royalties tend to fall within certain established parameters.
Your advance – which will be paid in tranches - is basically a down payment. So once your royalty account (made up of income from book sales in print, digital and audio, and rights sales eg extract or translation) exceeds this original amount, your advance will be said to have ‘earned out’. Publishers usually send royalty statements every six months with payments due, and your agent will check these reflect the terms or the original deal that was done and any translation deals we know about. The massive deals that you might hear of, and we’ve done a few of these, tend to be for very high profile ‘flagship’ authors and are usually achieved at auction. Some may never earn out.
How long it takes to earn out depends on how many copies the publisher sells at which discount levels and to which customers and how successful their rights team are at selling translation rights and other subsidiary rights. If we have retained language rights for you then you will receive this income whether or not your advance has earned out. There’s also your agent’s commission, although this is tax-deductible.
There are of course other less obviously quantifiable benefits to writing a book – the publicity and exposure you will receive for your work, the bounce to your business and standing in your field (if these are important to you), the dissemination of your ideas beyond your immediate social media reach. Books lead to new opportunities, more book deals, workshops, columns, podcasts, brand collaborations, speaking gigs, friendships.
Nevertheless we are engaged in a constant fight for decent terms for our authors. It can take 6 months to a year to write a book, often alongside their day job, and we believe authors should be recompensed fairly to take this into account.