I am curious about how much money the average author would make on the sale of a book. Let’s say he is a mid to slightly upper selling author similar to Wilbur Smith. If the hardback costs $25.00 how much is his rake off the top? Does he get a buck two buck, 50 cents,etc.?
I’m not talking about guys like Tom Clancy or Stephen King. They are obviously in a very strong position when it comes to negotiating but they are not indicative of the norm. Let’s say a book sells 1-3 million. How much rake?
I’m writing a novel myself and am also curious.
Plus, how much is made on the paperback sales? I’m paying about $8 each for those right now, so how much is the author getting?
Finally! A chance to plug my book 
“The Voice of The Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine” (Routledge, 2002) was most CERTAINLY NOT a best-seller. At this point in time, I have no idea how many books were actually sold, but the first royalty check was for c. $1,800 … enough for me to buy a top-of-the-line Mac computer. And double that amount, because the royalties were split 50-50 with my ex, the other co-editor. I occasionally still get a royalty check, but the amounts have dwindled considerably 
The book DID win an Award of Special Recognition (ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Awards), in the “Popular Books” category. Go figure.
Yes, it’s available from Amazon.
Royalty rates are complicated, and vary because of lots of factors. And they can be negotiated, not just by mega-authors by but agents and authors with clout.
But. Roughly and generally speaking, hardback royalties start at 10% of cover price. After the books sells a certain number of copies, that royalty bumps up to 12.5%, and then after more sales peaks at 15%.
Mass market paperbacks have lower royalties, usually 7.5-10%.
The highest percentage usually kicks in after a relatively low number of copies sold, maybe 25,000, so big sellers get a good return for almost all sales.
The OP is off by an order of magnitude, BTW. There probably aren’t ten authors in the world who sell 1-3 million copies of a hardback. 100,000 will get you onto any bestsellers list.
As one example, the total royalties on a book I am writing on Panama will be 10% of retail sales, which I will split with the illustrator 50-50. Assuming a sale price of $30, I would thus get $1.50 a book.
Of course if you sell too many Harry Potter books then the other authors throw a fit and make the NY Times put your books on a new children’s best seller list.
The response about splits with editors, publishers, or illustrators is interesting. I assume there is considerable illustration in that book, Colibri? And if it was just cover art, it would be less of a split?
If some artists do some artwork for a novel (such as cover art, a character conception for chapters, accompanying artwork, Web art, promotional art, etc.) and I want to pay them based on my income (royalties, splits, commissions, however you term it) how do we best determine a fair amount?
How many new books do you think even sell 25,000?
I think most first time authors are stunned at how few copies of their book get sold. If you don’t already have a big following (popular website, tv/radio gig, or some other source of celebrity), you’ll have to work your ass off to sell 5000.
Yeah, half the book is illustrations. We are illustrating over 850 species; since there are multiple illustrations of some there are more than 1000 separate illustrations.
However, we are reusing a lot of illustrations the same artist did for a book on Costa Rican birds with a different author. As far as I know, he got 5% for that book. So it’s possible that he’s getting the same amount for less work. On the other hand, I’m not really sure that the publisher is actually giving him the full 5%; he could be getting less for that reason.
Based on guesses about how many copies we might sell, I figure I might end up earning a bit less per hour I that I put into it than my day job pays. On the other hand, it will probably keep selling for a while so I may end up making more over the long run.
One other aspect: I get 5% as royalties for sales within the publisher’s territory, which is Central America. They will probably license the book to a US publisher for distribution in the US market. On that deal I will get 20% of what they get paid; but of course the US publisher will pay them a fraction of what they get on sales they make themselves.
As far as I know, cover artists and artists who just provide a few illustrations in a book would not be paid royalties, but instead would be paid up-front a one-time payment. I would think artists would only receive royalties if the art comprised a pretty substantial percentage of the work.
Practically freakin’ nothing, speaking from my limited personal experience.
If I sell a few more copies, I’ll break even. No joke.
Break even? Does this mean you are self publishing?
None of which answered the ops question of how much per book an author gets.
True, but irrelevant to the OP who asked “Let’s say he is a mid to slightly upper selling author similar to Wilbur Smith.”
And let me anticipate the next comment to say that these numbers only apply to major mainstream publishers. Self-published or PoD books are averaging about 100 sales.
In most areas of publishing, excludng special cases like Colibri’s and children’s book and the like, the cover artist and interior artist get a flat fee upfront. They would not be entitled to any share of royalties. I certainly wouldn’t do so for any book I self-published. How much of a fee? That’s like asking how much is a house? Any price, depending upon circumstances.
For books aimed at a scholarly or academic audience, it’s often even less. For many of these books, the market consists of a couple of hundred professors in your own field, plus perhaps a thousand or so libraries. If your book becomes well-known, and starts to get assigned to grad students, you’ll sell a few more copies, and if it’s easy enough to read that it gets assigned to undergrads, you might do a bit better still. But it’s still not going to be in the tens of thousands.
Not long before he died, in 2003, i was talking with a historian named John Higham, who was an emeritus professor at my grad school. In 1955, he published a book called Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, which is widely considered a pathbreaking book in the study of American nativism, nationalism, and reactions to immigration. Over half a century later, it’s still essential reading for anyone working in the field, it was republished at least three times, and has been constantly on sale for over 50 years.
Higham told me that, in that period, the book has probably sold somewhere over 100,000 copies. That’s staggering success for an academic book, but it didn’t exactly come all at once. It probably sold a couple of thousand copies a year consistently over all that time, with some peak years when it was republished.
I have other academic friends who doubt that their books have sold more than 2,000 copies, and most of those were to libraries.
Fair enough, but I wanted to amplify your point about how many copies of the average book sell. I don’t know Wilbur Smith well enough to guess at his sales, but I’d wager a new book from him sells much closer to 25,000 copies than a million, and maybe not even that high.
I bet 99%+ of all authors wish they had Wilbur Smith’s sales!
From his UK publisher’s site:
“Wilbur Smith is the bestselling author of twenty-nine novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books are now translated into twenty-six languages and have sold over eighty million copies”
I know that’s a lot of titles, spread over a lot of languages, so maybe his profile is lower in the US than it is here, but a quick look on Amazon says that Rivergod (published 16 years ago) had an initial American printrun of 150,000!
I cannot give a definitive answer, because I have no idea how things work through the publishing industry. This anecdote will give you some idea though:
A friend published a children’s book. I told him I would buy a copy in support. He told me to give him a dime and he’d give me one of his free copies.
The implication to me was, he gets less than a dime a book.
I had a friend who wrote children’s books. He would sell a limited number to his friends at his cost, which was considerably less than cover, but still well over half.
I saw an author (I can’t remember who off the top of my head) who was selling autographed copies of his book for $1 less than cover price. He said he orders them at his cost, signs them, and sells them at a very small markup.
I don’t think that an author’s cost on a book is the same as an author’s profit on a sale of his book through normal channels.
Also remember, if you pay $8 for a paperback book at Amazon or Borders for a book, they earn profit first. I wonder what their cut is from that? From the remainder, how much goes to who, that contributed? You got publshing houses, editors, artists, people who make deals, etc.
The standard practice is that bookstores pay half the cover price.
And generally, authors can buy their own books at the same price.
Authors get their cut off the top. If the book has a cover price of $25 and they get a 10% royalty, he gets $2.50 (even if a bookstore decides to sell it for less). His agent gets 15% of that, of course. But that $2.50 per copy is firm.
The only kicker is reserve against returns; the publisher withholds some money for returned book. Publishers sometimes fudge these figures, but their books can be audited much more easily than movie producers. Over the long term, however, the accounting is usually correct.
Authors can buy a their book at wholesale. This gives them a bigger profit per book – but they have to pay the money up front and they only make an actual profit if they sell enough books to cover the cost of buying the books. In that case, the publisher, etc. still gets their usual cut – the author is just cutting out the money paid to the bookstore.