Current Affairs

Authors everywhere are getting their royalty statements in the mail, sparking a lot of blog talk about money. Bestselling novelist Tess Gerritsen says you don’t need to look at an author’s royalty statement to figure out how much he’s probably making:

If you follow the announced deals in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY or the
online website PUBLISHERS MARKETPLACE, you’ll start to get an inkling
of what multi-published authors are getting. But you can also guess,
knowing typical royalty rates, what an author is probably worth in real
dollars. With major publishers, hardcover royalties tend to run around
12 – 15% and paperback royalties tend to be around 6- 10% of cover
price. So a writer who’s sold 25,000 hardcover copies has earned
$75,000 in royalties in hardcover sales alone, and his next book deal
should certainly reflect that. His next advance should be, at a bare
minimum, $75,000. (And we’re not even talking about paperback earnings
yet, which will be on top of that.) More likely, the next advance will
take into account continued growth, and will probably reach well into
six figures.

But once you get into the stratosphere of NYT-bestselling authors, the
numbers may no longer be anchored to real sales figures, but may soar
much much higher. From my own observations of the business, authors who
consistently place in the bottom third of the NYT list (Positions # 11
– 15) are worth at least a million dollars a book, North American
rights. We’re talking combined hard/soft deals here, since most
publishers now retain paperback rights. If you consistently place
#6-10, your deals go even higher, into multi-million dollar range. Once
your books consistently place in the top third, the deals become wildly
unpredictable, because now we’re talking Harry Potter and Dan Brown
territory. Eight-figure book deals are not out of the question.

Of course, what you get really depends on how good your agent is. Novelist Laurie King left this comment on my post about author Sara Donati’s royalty chat:

[A] typical royalty division (for regularly discounted books sold in the US
market) is along the lines of 10 percent for the author on the first
5000 books sold, 12 1/2 percent on the next 5000, and after that 15
percent. Or more if, as you say, your numbers mean you can dictate to
your publisher what you want. Then 7 1/2 percent on trade paperback, 10
percent on mass market.

There’s a lot of great inside-knowledge on the business of being a novelist from pros to be found on blogs lately, all of it pure gold for aspiring authors. Not so long ago, Alison Kent shared her latest royalty statement with the world. Now author Sara Donati explains  in simple terms how royalties and advances work.

I’m always surprised that many aspiring authors don’t understand how
the money works. A publisher offers you a contract, and an advance. The
amount of the advance doesn’t have to do with how good the novel is, or
how much they like it. A million dollars does not equal an A+. The
advance is their best guess on how many copies of the book they can
sell. No matter how much the acquiring editor loves your novel, the
publishing house does not want to overpay you. End of story.

Not exactly the end. She has a few more interesting observations to share in that post and in another one on the subject as well (UPDATE:  Sara made an error in her figures in her original post, which she has corrected and so have I:).

If you’re talking about a hardcover book, the author generally gets
10% on the first 1 to 25,000 copies sold, 12% on the next 25,000 and
15% on anything sold above 50,000 copies — after the advance is paid
out, of course. And these figures are negotiable. I would guess Stephen
King’s numbers are better.

For softcover, the range is much greater, usually someplace between
6% and 10% of the cover price, again with increases as the number of
sales climbs.

This probably is pretty sobering for those who are hoping to make a living writing fiction.