GOT A QUESTION ON LAST NIGHT’S POST…

An Honest Question…

So figured I would try to answer it here.

The question was how much of an advance would a writer need to get to make around 40K per year in traditional publishing when a $50,000 three book deal gets a writer between $4,700 and $9,000 plus per year.

Again, the comparison from last night was nothing but bookstore sales, no major licensing, which traditional publishers would keep most of it anyway, unlike indie writers who get to keep it all.

Well, the easy answer is just divide all that yearly amount from last night into $40,000 and then multiply it by $50,000 to get around a $350,000 to $400,000 three-book contract. Yeah, they are handing those out like candy these days in traditional publishing. Not. I know it happens, but so rarely I know it happens because it makes news.

You read about the million dollar deals as well, often 5 or 6 books, which keeps the money in the $40,000 per-year level after a large signing year. Sometimes even less if they divide the payments up into four per book and spread them out even farther.

And if they don’t sell up to some made-up expectation, or your editor moves on, or… or… or… the entire contract is cancelled and your career in traditional publishing under that name is over.

Almost no writer recovers from that.

I know of one writer who took a ten book deal spread out over eleven years for one million. That writer got a lot of milage when the news of that deal broke. No clue if it continued, but if it did, here is how the math worked.

$100,000 per book minus 15% agent fees, leaving about $85,000 per book. Divided by 4 payments (signing, accept proposal, turn-in, and publication. Maybe five per book if they added in a post-pub payment one year after publication.) So about $21,000 per payment if four payments. Some years the writer would get three payments ($63,000), some four ($84,000), depending.

That is one writer trapped for ten years in one contract writing ten books over that amount of time. Good money, sure, but there are thousands and thousands of indie writers making far more than that every year because we don’t have to stick with only book store sales.

The second half of the question I got was about royalties. Does a writer ever get royalties?

Basically no. I sold 106 books to traditional publishing and three of those books actually earned royalties. To this day I get about $6 every six months for the three. TOTAL!!!  One of those books has sold just over 1.7 million copies.

Granted I would have gotten royalties on seven other books, but the publisher on four of them was a crook, who just declared bankruptcy and kept publishing, screwing the writers. Got hit by a bus. I did not feel sad.

The other three the company published the books and just went out of business and after a few years dissolved their company. I at least got my advances.

So royalties? Nope. But my attitude was always get the biggest advance I could, write the book, chase the money (no agent or publisher ever willingly paid on time and agents tried to keep the money if you let them), and keep writing more books.

Traditional publishing in fiction these days is a dead game. It was bad thirty and forty years ago, but then it was the only game. Now indie publishing is the new world. Thank heavens.