I know, I know. Every contract is different. But in general terms roughly how much per hardback does somebody like Eric Flint or John Ringo make? Pennies? Quarters? What’s the general royalty on paperbacks? Does anybody have any experience with what the royalty rates are for ebooks? What sort of advances are being given these days? Did George R.R. Martin have to give his back when ADwD was delayed so long?
Can some of our resident authors weigh in? RealityChuck?
I have a friend who has four or five mid list SF/Fantasy novels currently in print. IF he’d live in a hovel, eat rice and beans, and never need medical insurance, his wife would no longer have to support him.
Jane Yolen once said “twelve novels in print is a living” - unless you are a best selling novelist or get movie deals - Dan Brown needed one.
This Cracked article may be of some help. Specifically:
It’s probably somewhat pessimistic, but a little pessimism is generally useful to keep people with dreams of being the next Stephen King grounded.
I’m sure I’m not at all typical. I have one book out there. After a decade on the shelves, I have almost made back my advance. I’m so close I can taste it. But, in fact, I’m still not in the black. My biggest score as an author was a single payment for an article nearly twenty years ago. But it wouldn’t even cover a single month’s mortgage payment for me.
My advice is “don’t quit your day job.”
Oh, I wasn’t planning on being an author any time soon. My professional writing is limited to reviewing history textbooks for publishers pre-publication and stuff like that. The question just popped into my head when I was looking at a bookcase in the bedroom and counted 17 John Ringo books on it.
Sci-fi author John Scalzi blogs about this sort of thing from time to time. This post from 2004 roughly describes the sorts of advances a genre-fiction novelist can look forward to. In this one, from 2005, he describes the likelihood of earning out the advance on his first fairly successful novel. And more recently, this post from last year breaks down his sources of income, as a (now) successful novelist.
Scalzi’s never given specific dollar figures, but generally he describes a modest but comfortable income. It’s enough for a comfortable middle class existence, in Ohio, along with his spouse’s income. Early in his career the money mostly came from corporate copywriting type gigs, and later he’s replaced that with novel writing.
I don’t know about authors, but for musicians an advance is, as the word implies, an advance on future royalties, and will be paid back out of those royalties. So, every artist has to pay back the advance. The details of how much is paid back as a proportion of the royalties they earn will depend on the contract. An advance is not a salary or retainer.
Obviously, what an author makes depends on the author. But let’s start with a first-time author.
For paperback, the author gets an advance of $3000-5000 (roughly – there are outliers). Royalty rates start at 6% of the cover price and increase to 8% if the book sells a set number of copies (rarely reached on a first novel).
For hardcover/trade paper, the advance is in the neighborhood of $8000-$12000; royalty rates are higher – starting at 10% of the cover price and going up (SFWA’s model contract says it goes to 12.5% if the book sells over 5000 copies, and to 15% if the book sells over 7500 copies – but publishers don’t have to offer these terms).
The advance is subtracted from any royalties due, but the author gets to keep the full advance even if the book flops (as long as it was delivered when required by the contract, though publishers hardly ever ask back for the advance even then. In addition, the publisher counts a reserve against returns – money set aside for books that will be returned. This is subtracted from the royalties owed.
Note that even these numbers include a wide variety of ranges. Back in the 80s, Star Trek paperback novels were only paying a 2% royalty rate, with a standard advance. However, the Star Trek name guaranteed far more sales than the author’s, so you could make far more money with 2% than with 6%.
I’m not as familiar with eBook royalties; there is no standard yet and they can range from 15% of the cover price to far higher (though the higher the percent, the less likely you get an advance).
Authors can make a living once they have several books in print; the royalties from the older books plus advances for new ones can pay the bills. If you develop a track record, you can get larger advances, since publishers know your books can sell. Eric Flint, for instance, makes a far bigger advance than a beginning author (though his royalty rate will remain the same.
Another issue is that, even if you have several books in print, you’re only paid twice a year when the royalty statements come out. You need to manage your money carefully.
Publishers have been trying to standardize e-book royalties at 25%. Authors are trying to negotiate more. There are a couple of different models for e-book royalty calculations, but whatever is true now will change over the next few years as the parties battle over terms.
Advances for books are almost never returned. It’s so rare that it makes news in the field whenever it happens. The exceptions always turn out to be some weird set of circumstances, maybe a celebrity who never got around to meeting with the ghostwriter or a writer who has effectively stopped writing. Maybe if the author left the firm and was suing them. Nobody would ever ask for an advance back if the author was still making them money.
Advances are good mostly because publishers have ways to delay paying royalties. Advances put the money in the author’s pocket earlier. Royalties are almost unbelievably scummy. Take a book published in October. The publisher doesn’t have to report royalties until after the standard January-June period of the next year. By contract they have to issue the royalty within 90 days, but that universally means that they interpret that as having a free 90 days until they get around to calculating it. So that first royalty payment is made the next October. That is the best case scenario, not the worst case scenario. I’ve had them come in December.
A few years back at an sf convention I sat in a conversation in which the Big Names were trying to name everyone in the field making more than $100,000 a year - besides them. It wasn’t all that long a list.
Here’s a educated guess for a recent John Ringo book, Eye of the Storm.
Hardback: $26.00 - Ringo $3.90
Mass market paperback: $7.99 - Ringo $0.64
Audible audio edition: $21.95 - Ringo $10.98
That last one sounds great, but the expectations for those editions are 500 copies.
That last one surprised me by how high it was, compared to the others. Out of curiosity, I looked the book up on Audible.com. The “Regular price” is $24.95; the “Member price” is $17.46 or 1 credit. Is the amount that Ringo receives depending on what/how someone pays? (And no, Ringo doesn’t narrate his own book; I assume that if he had, he’d earn extra for that. A certain amount per copy sold, or a lump sum?)
My book deal was $1 per copy, split between me and my co-author. Given that except for a lucky few, guidebooks sell maybe 10-20k copies, it was not a lot of money. Especially since the weasels didn’t pay out the full amount. That was in 1987.
Note, a couple of guidebook writers manage to get 2-3 in print, and do revisions every 2 years and make an ok living. That said, guidebook writing is a lot more work and a lot less exotic as one might think. You end up spending too much time in crappy places, and not enough in the nice places…
Please note that the deal is different at Amazon for Kindle books. They give authors a 70% cut of the sale price.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/185994-higher-royalty-rights-drive-amazon-s-kindle-sales
There seems to a whole new trend of authors who publish exclusively in e-book format and have no connection to traditional dead tree type publishing.
http://www.novelr.com/2011/02/27/rich-indie-writer
The table seems to show that there people making a pretty good living just writing e-books.
I’m not sure if the Amazon listing is part of the ACX system or not. Mostly, though, the deal is a come-on to authors to get them to sign with a certain system.
I don’t believe an author gets more to narrate one own’s book. More likely it’s an expense not deducted from royalties.
It’s 70% for books list price at $2.99 or more. Books below that are at 30%.
There are hundreds of thousands of authors who are publishing exclusively electronically. You haven’t heard of them and never will, except for the tiny handful of exceptions who will become “man bites dog” news articles, like Hocking. Who, BTW, has signed with a traditional mainstream publisher for her next series.
Many of those hundreds of thousands aren’t getting 70% royalties either, because with nothing else to distinguish them they have begun to compete on price, with the inevitable race to the bottom.
Some people will of course become successful in this new world. And some people will of course win multi-million dollar lotteries over the next year. It would be an interesting bet which group is larger.
Considering the fact that Amazon started offering the 70% deal last year, I find it interesting that anybody is already making a living writing for Kindle.
Of course the hard part is for new writers to get people’s attention. I’ve noticed that Eric Flint’s 1632 anthologies have exposed me to a lot of authors I never heard of before.
I my own self am curious as to how many aspiring or active writers frequenting these boards are members of local, regional or even national/international writing organizations, such as Romance Writers of America. If you are now or have been a member of such an organization in the past, did such membership benefit you in any way? Constructive criticism? Positive (or otherwise) feedback? Helpful advice?
As a long-time, entirely undisciplined writer with no regular work habit (which is, by definition, at odds with one’s self-identification as “writer”), I have attended my first day-long workshop recently, followed up by a group meeting or two. The group’s members seem friendly enough, but with no material of my own to present, my judgement of this organization’s usefulness is rather limited. Ultimately, I recognize I and I alone, through my own efforts large and small, sporadic or persistent, will determine if I will fail or succeed as a writer, or if I will ever actually join the ranks of “real” writers (not necessarily published, just those writers who write because their art demands it of them).
I believe the biggest nugget of wisdom I’ve gleaned so far is (paraphrased), “If you don’t write, and every day, then you’re not putting in the effort to be a writer. All else follows that.”
Having said that the burden of writing success is on my own shoulders, I reiterate my earlier question(s): does joining a writing group/organization help? Is doing so better than working in a vacuum, or does the feedback and/or advice dilute one’s vision of the original story?
a couple of days ago, i put out a collection of short stories on smashwords at $0.99. I have sold one copy (my friend bought it). I get $0.51 out of that. I immediately quit my job and am sitting back with my feet up, my arms behind my head, and am now awaiting the jingle of coins flowing through my letterbox.
Each major writers group has its own culture. The Romance Writers prosper by encouraging wannabe writers and devote most of it resources to “how-to”, including their magazine, their annual conference, and their regional chapter set-up. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is similar.
Other groups, including the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America, and the Authors Guild, pretty much require members to be selling professionals before they join. (There are exceptions, usually for professionals in the field who aren’t writers.) They concentrate their efforts on writer advocacy - challenging contract provisions, working on copyright law, battling publishers who don’t pay. They aren’t set up to help you with your fiction.
They can help with networking, information about the field, and the business of writing, though.
Group members ask all the time, many quote loudly and rudely, what they are getting out of membership. That’s really a question that can’t be answered except by the individual. I’m sure it’s true that the existence of major writers groups is better for all writers than if they didn’t exist. I’ve been a member of several major groups over the years. It’s hard to say how membership has specifically helped me. Some people have been helped tremendously.
I’m also been part of numerous writers workshops, which sound more like what you’re looking for. They are only as good as the individuals in them. A group like RWA makes finding them easier, but that has nothing to do with the concept.
I once read a British “How to Write” handbook. It emphasised that the average writer makes less than the median wage, and that most have a primary occupation that pays their bills.
There’s a self-published Amazon Kindle writer named John Locke, I’ve purchased a couple of his books.
His “hook” is that he sells the books for cheap…either .99 or 1.99 IIRC. The ones I read were enjoyable in the “hit man with a heart of gold” genre.
Apparently he sold a million books in 5 months.
What happens if you’re an unpublished author who’s already written a complete novel. You send it to a publisher and they decide it’s worth publishing. Do they pay you an advance at that point or does your book just go automatically to royalties based on the actual sales?