How Much Money Does an Author Make

How much money an author makes is a layered question and usually involves the author's agent who has negotiated the sale and served in many important capacities. The agent will receive/has earned a 15% cut.  To simplify the following information, I'll talk about the publisher and author, but please know that the agent is a very important part of the mix. 

When an author writes a book and sells it to a publisher, the publisher pays money in "advance" of the book's publication. That means that the publisher will pay the author a sum in advance of the actual publication date. Once the book is published and is sold at bookstores, the author begins earning royalties from each sale (typically 10% of the book's list price). Those royalties are tallied, and a royalties report is provided to the author every six months. Since the author already received the "advance" money, they will not get an additional check until their advance is earned out.  Let's break that down.  

A debut picture book author who is not a celebrity, not an influencer, and who does not have a

substantial platform might receive an advance of approximately $1,000 - $3000 from a small indie publisher; or they might receive somewhere between $5000 and even (super-wild without a platform) $50,000 from a traditional midsize or big five publishing house. The 10% royalties are split equally between the author and the illustrator (5% each).  Therefore, let's imagine that the author received an advance of $10,000, and the list price of that picture book is $18.99. Every time a normal copy of the book (not a book club copy, not an ebook, not an audiobook etc. because those have different royalty rates) is sold, the royalties are $1.89 (10% of 18.99). The ten percent is split between the author and the illustrator (5% each), therefore the author earns around ninety-five cents (.95) per copy sold.

That means that approximately 10,526 copies of the book will need to be sold to earn out the advance. After that, the author will receive royalty checks for any copies sold beyond the 10,526. Of course, I mentioned at the beginning that this is a layered conversation. World rights, book club sales (like Scholastic Book Club or Junior Library Guild), and other factors also help earn out the advance, but those are a conversation for another day.  

While you are here, I want to push the topic further. Discussing money often feels taboo. I don’t ask my neighbors how much they earn. But publishing is different. Transparency in publishing and those awkward money conversations can be very important.

This five-year-old article still feels relevant,  Publishers Weekly It featurs author L.L. McKinney and notes that she created the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe (around June of 2020) as “an outgrowth of conversations she’d had with friends about Black authors historically being underpaid.”  The conversation took off, and 

McKinney and author Tochi Onyebuchi (author of Riot Baby and Harmattan Season) created The Transparency Project.

To properly understand the background, various publishers’ responses, and what inspired more than 2,000 authors to share their pay on this public Google doc, check out the article in  Publishers Weekly.

To see the spreadsheet, go here.

 

Please check out books by L.L. McKinney such as A Blade so Black and A Dream So Dark . You can visit her website or your local bookstore!

Please check out books by Tochi Onyebuchi such as his upcoming, Racebook, “an original memoir in essays that interrogates how identities are shaped and informed in online spaces and how the relationship between race and the Internet has changed in his three decades online.” Or you can find a list and links to his publications here.