I’m a relative newbie to the publishing business, and I admittedly don’t know much, but I thought it might be helpful to address some common misconceptions I’ve ran into about writing and the publishing business.

The first topic relates to an average author payout—a pretty crucial topic to consider if you want to be a writer. Recently, I had an author write me who had just gotten a contract with Samhain, and she was ecstatic. (No reason she shouldn’t be, Samhain is a great gig). However, when she asked me if it was conceivable to quit her full time job, I was a little stunned. At least she was asking, though, which is a good thing.

The general consensus is that authors make oodles of money, which is definitely a misconception. There are SOME authors who make oodles of money, but they are definitely at the upper tail of the bell curve. The bulk of authors consists of people who either make a respectable, if not huge living, and authors who make a nice supplemental income to other work. There are many, many more who might make enough to go to conferences and maybe pay the utility bill every month and that’s about it. They love it, though, and that’s what drives them. Brenda Hiatt has consistently kept up a survey of publisher payouts to authors, and while she can’t claim it’s entirely accurate of course, it would give an author hopeful some insight, at least. Check out Brenda’s site here.

Another thing to consider is that writing income is sporadic. The big, NY authors typically send royalty checks every six months. (A fact that makes both print and ebook authors gravitate toward royalty only paying publishers like Samhain—because they can expect to get a check every month). The larger publishers usually offer an advance, which is based on a guestimate by the publisher of how much your book will sell. If your book bombs, the publisher could potentially lose out. However, they have themselves padded pretty well. You won’t get royalties on your book until you go sell through your advance. A basic example with easy breakdown—let’s say you got an offer for 10K for a book. You might get 5K up front, 2.5K for your editor’s acceptance of the final manuscript and 2.5K upon publication. If you sell past 10K, you’ll start to get royalties every six months. That was sort of an easy example, with round numbers. Actually, book deals come in two-book, three-book, four-book format. So the payout is different for each publisher and in differing percentages, and may include pay ticks for acceptance of proposals for books as well as acceptance of manuscripts.

For royalty based publishers, such as Samhain or Ellora’s Cave, the format is different. Pay is based entirely on how many books an author sells in a given month. Sell 100 books, get paid X% of sales. It’s pretty straight forward. It gets a tad bit more complicated when you factor in sales at places like Amazon or Fictionwise, because then a cut goes to the online bookstore. The author typically ends up winning, however, because while their pay per book goes down, they sell many more books, so overall pay increases.

As many of you know, many authors have started self-publishing on sites like Amazon. In order to do this, they get a straight percentage, say 35%, of every book sold.

Well, that’s my quick and dirty about pay. I know I didn’t include everything, but hopefully I conveyed the general ideas.

Why write this little article? I thought it might be helpful to aspiring or new authors, but I also thought readers might also find it interesting.

Just a reminder that I’m giving away two Beth Kery books to two random new members to the Beth Kery yahoo chat group. You can join here or click under Beth’s Stuff, Beth Kery Yahoo Group.

Have a good weekend,

Beth