the-writers-manual:

tlbodine:

aimmyarrowshigh:

more-legit-gr8er-writing-tips:

jessicameats:

metteivieharrison:

This is pretty simple. Authors get paid when you buy their books. If you don’t buy their books, they don’t get paid. They get paid a percentage of the price you pay for their books. If you buy highly discounted books (from amazon or B&N or Scholastic book fairs), they get paid a lot less. If you borrow a book from the library, they got paid for that one time (in the US), but at least they got that. If you read a book from a pirated site, they don’t get paid.

The problem I see is that most people don’t understand this very simple equation. They think that authors get paid by publishers just to be authors. Hint: we don’t. Authors don’t get paid to do book tours. Unless people buy their books. Authors don’t get paid by the government to be authors. Authors don’t get paid by Hollywood for their books unless they get a pittance if they’re actually given an option (1% of authors get books optioned, 1% of those get made into movies). If an author gets a movie made, they still make very little of that money, except for if books are purchased. If an author wins an award, most of the time, they make no money from that directly, only if more books are sold.

Are you starting to understand what my point is here?

Yes, some authors make money on the side doing school visits for children. A lot of them don’t even make that, especially in Utah, where local publishers are using school visits as a promotional opportunity and have nearly eliminated the market for paid visits from authors who AREN’T trying to push books on kids. (Yes, I have strong feelings about this.)

Yes, these days authors make money sometimes by being youtube celebrities (I can count on one hand the number of authors doing this). Yes, authors sometimes make money through Patreon, though this is pretty new and we’re still figuring it out. Think about this for a minute. Authors have to hustle to make money because actually writing books doesn’t pay them very much. What? Yeah, even NYT best-selling authors are not making enough to pay mortgages sometimes.

Lots of authors are offered lots of opportunities to write for “promotion.” We do need to promote ourselves if we’re going to stay in the game and keep getting contracts for new books. But promotion is pennies. I’m not trying to complain about my chosen profession. This part of it sucks, but there are other wonderful parts, clearly, or I wouldn’t stay. But if you want to help me out and thank me for any of my writing you’ve gotten to read for free, it’s really simple. Buy one of my books. And while you’re at it, buy a book from another author you love.

If you can’t afford to buy the book, get it from the library. As OP states, at least then there’s one sale. And if it’s there on the shelves, people who haven’t heard of the author might pick it up, and mention it to someone, and spread the word of mouth about it. And if the book gets borrowed a lot, then the library is much more likely to buy the next book the author writes.

In the UK, there’s something called Public Lending Rights, where an author gets about 8 pence per borrow of their books (it’s a little more complicated than that, because they sample from a subset of libraries, but that’s the basic idea). So if a hundred people borrowed my book over the course of a year, I would get about £8. That may not sound like much, but that’s kinda the point OP is making.

Authors aren’t making a lot of money, so every little bit helps. Piracy doesn’t help at all.

Don’t fucking pirate books.

A publishing deal is nothing like a recording contract or being on a TV show/in a movie.

IF am author is paid an advance by the publisher – and that is getting rarer and rarer – it is basically “back payment” for 2+ years of work to write the book, and the average advance is $5000. For two years of full-time work – so that’s about $1.00/hr if you imagine it as payment for a 40-hour work week. AND AUTHORS DO NOT START TO EARN ROYALTIES UNTIL THEY’VE EARNED OUT THEIR ADVANCE. That means paying the publisher back in full for that advance money.

So really, authors make nothing until they’ve sold at least ~1000 books.

Most bestsellers sell roughly 5000 books. So to sell 1000 books and earn out the advance is extremely rare and extremely difficult. Most authors never sell enough copies to start earning royalties per sale, or else it takes 5+ years… and that’s IF despite low sales the publisher keeps your book in print at all. Most won’t.

If an author has not earned out their advance the first 6 months, most publishers stop printing that book, and the author never makes anything from what has already been sold because it goes to paying the publisher back for that advance.

Also when we say authors earn money for each book sale: it’s about $0.60 per book.

Yes, you’re paying $17.99+ for a hardcover or $8.99 for a paperback or ebook, but that is NOT how much the author gets. So if you imagine that an author DOES become a bestseller – let’s say they sell those 5000 copies and earn out their advance, so they get to make some money on the remaining 4000 books sold – that’s still only another $2400. It has likely been an additional 2-5 years at this point since they sold the book to a publisher.

So for 4-7 years of full time work, an average author makes MAYBE $7500. IF they are extremely successful and lucky.

That’s less than a dollar an hour for almost a decade of work.

Do not pirate books.

SOURCE: I work for a publisher.

And this right here is why so many authors have jumped ship to self-publishing – because Amazon offers insanely high royalties in comparison to traditional publishing.

The trade off of course is visibility. It’s still super hard to get your book into bookstores, libraries etc. Its well-nigh impossible to gain entry to the writers associations (SFWA, HWA, etc) without huge sales numbers, and that in turn bars you from the running for most awards.

So writers are left making the shitty choice between making money and being taken seriously.

It’s a brutal world out there for writers, and it gets worse and worse as consumers devalue books and expect to read unlimited content for free.

No writing advice. Just generating awareness!