How Much Could I Make as a Writer?
I get this question all the time from people who want to write and publish books, and it’s a fair question. The problem is that the publishing industry is often extremely opaque when it comes to money, and the amount of money you can make varies tremendously: are you writing a novel or memoir? Are you a first-time author? What genre is your book?
But good news: I’ve got the data! Yep, I’ve got numbers. Today, I’m going to break down how much you can make as a writer so you know what to expect.
First, what does it mean to “sell” a book, and what’s an advance?
Before I get into the weeds of selling a book, it’s important to know what I mean by “selling” your book.
When people tell you what their book “sold for,” what they mean is, what the size of their advance was.
An advance is money that you’re paid or guaranteed upon the sale of your book to a publisher. It’s called an advance because it’s an advance on your royalties—this money will come out of money that your book earns once it hits the shelves.
The nice thing, however, about an advance, is that if your book doesn’t sell as well as hoped and therefore your royalties don’t cover your advance, you still get to keep it. The advance is yours no matter what happens. Since many books don’t make a profit, especially for first time authors, this is a very good thing for you as the writer.
But while many authors make money beyond their advances when their book sells, in the data I’m sharing here, I'm just talking about advances so that we can reliably estimate guaranteed income.
Again, this money is an advance on your royalties, but you won’t ever have to pay it back (assuming you actually write and deliver the book, i.e. fulfill your obligation under the contract).
One other quick thing I want you to know before we get into numbers—how much does my agent make when I sell my book?
You almost certainly will need a literary agent to sell to a publisher, so there really isn’t a way around this—but also, great agents more than earn their commission!
Agents take care of the hard parts so you can write, and they negotiate on your behalf.
In the United States, it’s standard for literary agents to make 15% commission on your domestic sales and 20% on your foreign sales.
For example, if you get offered a $90,000 advance (which is usually split into 3 separate payments), this means that those 3 payouts would actually be reduced by 15%—so each would be $25,500.
So let’s get to it—HOW MUCH CAN YOU MAKE ALREADY?
For a long time, I really struggled to answer that question. I know what I’ve made on my books. And I know what friends have made—everywhere from $5,000 to $450,000 for their first books. But these are just anecdotes.
When I googled this question, I found highly suspicious estimates—there were huge ranges. Sources weren’t cited. If anything, these opinions seemed like those of well-meaning people making complete guesses.
So I wrote up a survey in 2021 and started circulating it. By the end of the first day, I had almost 100 responses and had learned of a campaign in 2020 to collect this data that I had not even been aware of.
The campaign was called #Publishingpaidme, and it was created by author LL McKinney, a young adult novelist who, in June of 2020, created the hashtag #publishingpaidme to draw attention to disparities in what authors are paid. This movement led to the creation of a spreadsheet that anyone can find—it’s public—where thousands of authors reported, anonymously or otherwise, the size of their book advances.
This data is incredibly valuable, because it is a much larger sample size than I ever could have collected by myself. So the numbers I’m going to share with you today are based both on data pulled from the open source #publishingpaidme spreadsheet and from the data I collected myself.
Altogether, the total number of responses included in this data is 1,469 authors who shared what they made on their book advances.
Here are the average advances for books sold between 2016 and 2021.
The average Adult fiction advance was $65,908
Memoir was $90,686
Young Adult was $50,718
And Middle Grade was $35,406
But wait! You might be thinking:
These are just averages.
Are the really big sales pulling these numbers way up, like the million dollar advances?
Here is a breakdown of percentiles so you can see what you’re likely to make regardless of these big outliers:
Over $1,000: > 99%
Over $10,000: > 78%
Over $25,000: > 51%
Over $50,000: > 28% (about a third)
Over $75,000: > 18% (about 1 in 5)
Over $100,000: > 12% (about 1 in 8)
So that’s pretty great, I think? Right? Most people make over $25,000 and 1 in 8 people who sell their books have advances of over $100,000.
I honestly was really surprised by this in a good way.
It means it’s quite possible to make…quite good money on your book.
Remember: personal friends of mine have sold their books for $5,000 and $450,000.
So there’s quite a range here. Anything is possible.
The person whose book sold for $5K was no less talented or brilliant than the person whose book sold for $450K.
It was all about commercial sales potential. Publishers thought my friend’s memoir could be huge, and they all clamored to buy it form her. It went to auction, so houses were bidding against each other and upping the price. That’s how these big advances often come into being: if more than one publisher sees potential for big sales, it can grow quickly.
Last but not least, I’m sometimes asked—how much will I make per book sold?
In other words, once you sell enough books that your advance is paid off, how much will you be making per book? How big will that check be?
It depends a lot on what format of your book has sold: hardback? Paperback? Digital? Audio?
The standard publishing contract will give you different royalty rates based on all of these different formats. Those rates in my contracts range from 7.5 % for trade paperback to 15% of hard covers after I’ve sold 10,000 copies.
That’s the simple version. Point is: read your contract.
Ready to write your book?
If you made it this far, I’m guessing that you are writing a book, or want to write a book.
If so, I want to talk to you.
When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help talented writers write their dream books. I love it. I live for it.
Because before I published my novels, I first had to figure out how to write one. It wasn't easy because none of the writing classes I was taking showed me how to actually write a novel. Not until I had a newborn and only a couple of hours a day to write did I come up with a process.
The process worked. I wrote my entire novel during my 8-week maternity leave. Now, I teach it in my program the Book Incubator and it works for dozens of other writers.
If you're curious to know more, I have a free video walking you through my exact process for writing a book. You can get it by clicking below and answering two questions to apply to the program. You get the video whether you join or not—no pressure to enroll.
Just click below to tell me a little bit about you and your book—you can fill out a form online. I’m so excited to hear from you!
