How much do authors get paid for their books?

If a typical fiction book sells for $9.99 how much of that goes to the author? Is it typically a percentage of sales?

Does the type of book matter? For example a music teacher writes a book “Basic Guitar Workout (The Basic Series)”. If they self publish and sell it to their students (who may visit their training/lessons web site) they obviously get 100%. What would they get if a publisher like Music Sales America sold it for them?

It varies drastically depending on the reputation and clout of the author. First-time authors won’t get much, while established top authors will get a much larger cut.

I’ve published several books. On a few I was paid up-front to write them, and get no royalties. On another, I get a percentage of the official retail price. Frequently royalties to the author are 10%. In this case I split the royalties with the illustrator and so get only 5%. This is for copies sold in Costa Rica, where my publisher is based, and Panama. The publisher has given US and global rights to a US publisher, and I get an even smaller percentage of those sales. (It boils down to just 3%.)

O’Reilly (tech books) pays their authors 10% of what they make, which hovers around 50 - 60% of what the book costs in a store. You can get better royalty rates at most publishers if you sell many copies (10k - 20k +).

Since this is about books, let’s move it over to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Traditionally, authors were usually paid an advance (from $2000 on up) and a percentage of the cover price. For fiction, that was 6-8% for paperbacks and 10-15% for hardcovers. I don’t think it’s much different for nonfiction.

The advance for a first novel in paperback was usually around $2-4K. It was higher for hardcovers. If you had a good agent, you could even get a million dollar advance, but that is only rarely the case.

As you become more and more successful, the advance grows. A top selling author can easily get an advance of millions of dollars.

Note that the advance is counted against your royalties; you don’t get any additional royalties until the advance earns out (i.e., the royalties on actual sales is equal to the amount of the advance). The good news is that if the book doesn’t earn out, you don’t have to pay back any of the advance.

Ebooks are an entirely new world. Authors are paid on a percentage of the net, a system ripe for abuse (see how Hollywood handles it). The percentage can be far higher than the 12-15% standard – up to 50% and even more, but that’s 50% after the publisher takes his expenses, not off the top. If the cover price of a book is $20, and you get 10%, you get $2 for every copy sold, even if they’re sold at $10. For an ebook, if Amazon cuts the price, you only get a percentage of that price.

It’ll be interesting if some authors start self publishing. Create their own EPUB reader files and sell through their own web sites. That’s still a few years away to be practical.

Thank you for responding to my question. Quite interesting.

No, it happens every day.

A popular way to do this is deal directly with Amazon, but selling through your own website also happens. For paper books, too, but with those authors typically end up with a garage full of unsold copies.

Re million+ advances: sure, if you’re consistently pumping out bestsellers. It used to be that mid-list authors could make a decent living writing a book a year, but these days there’s very little between the large group of authors that sells a few thousand copies (write a book a month!) or fewer and the superstars.

There’s alot more self-publishing these days because the entry costs are so low.

Just to give you an idea of how self published authors get paid, I have four books, a collection of three of them (a mil sf trilogy) and a short story collection on Amazon for Kindle and for anything between 99 cents and 2.99 I get 35 %, while for anything priced at 2.99 or more I get 70%.
That can work out to some serious money if you’re halfway successful at marketing and are a prolific writer.

Yes. That’s enormously more efficient. That’s 70% of the price Amazon is charging, instead of the bookstore scheme where the bookstore takes 40% and then the publisher lets you have 10-20% of their cut.

This benefits both big and small authors. Big authors will make enormously more - if JK Rowling had self published to Amazon (and, realistically, I suspect that she would have done as well or better - there’s some self published authors on Amazon selling more copies on Amazon than the officially published stuff) she might have become a billionaire several years earlier.

As has been said, people have been doing this for years, if not over a decade at this point.

It turns out, the secret to being successful at it is to be the kind of author who’s successful in the traditional print world as well. Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross can do it, but most of the people who try aren’t even within artillery range of success.

What the electronic self-publishing world has done is to expand what the traditional self-publishing world has always done: Give everyday people access to works which would otherwise be filling up slush piles in publishing houses. That has been an unmitigated disaster, as any publisher will tell you; after all, absolutely nobody ever cared about Tristam Shandy, or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

If you don’t succeed self publishing, your book probably would have just accumulated rejection letters anyways.

A big reason for publishers - the advertising - is also rapidly dying because reader reviews (like Amazon’s and others) are inherently far more honest and informative than marketing made up to sell a book.

I predict the publishing houses are going to go the way of video rental stores. In another decade, I think, every major author will self publish and just pay editors for their services. Some editors might take a cut of the book’s revenues for authors who don’t have the money to pay them upfront.

It’s simple economics. If advertising no longer has much value, because reader reviews are more honest (yes, the Amazon review system can be gamed, but that system can also be improved further), and if major authors self publish and they net 60% of the book’s sales (10% or so in costs and editor fees), instead of getting chicken feed and rejection letters from the publishing houses…

You do know that people have been making that same prediction for a couple of decades, right?

I’m curious if any self published books ever made it to the best seller list? It would be an awesome story if so. I have my doubts though.

I’m also wondering, if a self publisher had a book that really took off, could the small publisher even keep up, if there was real demand? It would be crushing to be that author, only to discover they maybe couldn’t, were that the case.

Like 50 Shades of Gray, you mean?

Fifty Shades of Grey.

Also Wool, though possibly the mass-published editions didn’t have stellar sales because Hugh Howey had already made millions of dollars by that point.

One argument that I don’t buy is that self-publishing will ruin some sort of gatekeeping standard for quality of books. I’ve seen what small and indie presses publish, and a lot of it is unmitigated garbage, right down to spelling and punctuation. Given that a lot of those places won’t even help the author promote the book, and you end up with a lot of disgruntled authors who were originally happy to be “published” but who sell a hundred copies in the first year. No wonder they flock to self-publishing, where they at least get to keep 70% of the royalties off those hundred copies.

Hmmm, I wasn’t aware FSof G, was originally fan fiction, or based on another work either. But then it was never my cup of tea, nor Twilight for that matter. Thanks for pointing this out to me.

I’ve been doing some reading about it now, which is pretty interesting even if the novel lacked appeal, for me.

But, correct me if I’m wrong, this wasn’t a best seller, or making millions, UNTIL it was taken on by a traditional publisher, placing it into mainstream book stores.

Definitely an interesting example of what’s possible with today’s new medias though. Stories of famous works being initially turned down by numerous publishers have always been plentiful, of course.

Wrong. In most cases, if you succeed at self-publishing, you would have succeeded at traditional publishing, too.

Wow. When people can buy good Amazon reviews how are they trustworthy? Amazon reviews have absolutely no effect on a book – no one trusts them. And how do you get people to your Amazon page to even read the reviews without publicity and advertising?

Utter nonsense.

This is based on the false assumption that people take Amazon reviews seriously. And also on the assumption that readers can even *find *the book on Amazon. There are millions of books available – how do you get readers to find yours and read the reviews?

Major authors won’t self publish. It’s too much work marketing; Stephen King tried it and gave up. In fact, if you paid attention to the business, you’ll note that the successful self-published authors get the most of their success after a major publisher takes them on.

Take a look at 50 Shades – its real success began after Vintage Press took it on. It’s nothing new that a self-published book sells well, but it’s always after a commercial publisher takes them on. When Amazon announced it was their best selling title, it was after it was republished by Vintage Press. And one book does not make a trend.

Estimates are that more than 200,000 self-published titles were issued last year. That’s a million just in this decade (2010-2014). That means any book or author you have actually heard about is atypical.

Can anything be said about the whole? Surprisingly little. Certain genres or types of self-published books are helped by vibrant online communities. Romances, YA, cozy mysteries, fantasy, maybe military sf. Books that function well as series, IOW. That’s only a tiny fraction of all books. Literary fiction struggles, although that’s always been true. (Some for literary sf.) Nonfiction is especially hurt. All the things that help series books work against the singleton nature of nonfiction. And nonfiction used to be the much larger, better selling, and more profitable half of mainstream publishing. You can’t damage half a field and argue about how well it’s doing.

And the ebook field seems to change so rapidly that conclusions are hard to come by and often contradictory. Geek Wire reports that Nielsen BookScan found an increase in paper book sales. Pew Internet Research found that a larger percentage of adults read both paper books and ebooks in 2014. Random House says that the huge rise in ebook sales from genre books has slowed and that nonfiction made an unexpected uptick. And the huge rise in competition is slowing down those early adopters who rode the crest of the early decade upsurge.

Getting a book into bookstores continues to have an advantage for most authors of most types of books. You can’t buy what you don’t see. A few authors certainly benefit from self-publishing. They are the tip of the iceberg, with that vast majority of 90+% underwater.

My thesis is that the ebook world as a whole is the slush pile, so to compare this to the other side of the issue it would be interesting to know how big slush piles were at the major publishing houses over the same period. Does anyone, anywhere collect that data?

I’m not asking for a cite, per se, merely pointing up how difficult it likely is to figure out the expected value of a good manuscript if you go the traditional route compared to self-publishing an ebook. I suspect it’s negative either way, assuming you value your time at your state’s minimum wage.