An interesting article from an author explaining the realities of payment and earning from your book writing - even when you are a successful author with a number of books on the shelves. Jeaniene Frost details at length the myth to the realities - a good job of managing a potential authors expectations.
I have seen a couple of these articles (from American authors, naturally. Would a British author be persuaded to talk about the nitty gritty realities of payment, Royalties and the advance?). I’ll have to try and search for those other articles - but they did all talk about the same thing - don’t expect too much - the advance is just that, an advance against future sales - and that the author receives between 6 - 10% (typically 7.5% of soft back sales).
One of the reasons to starting this blog was to explore the different business models available to selling your book online - and also to consider whether an author could be paid a set amount per book - to do away with the percentage game (which becomes ludicrous when a book is sold for £3-50 and an author can expect about 26p?).
A set fee of, say £1 per book would mean that an author could become a full time writer with a first successful book. This will be looked into in more detail - as I hunt out sales figures for a moderately successful first-time author (I’m guessing they’re around 40,000 books on the initial print run). This would mean a well selling author could concentrate more time on writing their second effort.
Anyhoo - worth a ponder.
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