Although writing for writing’s sake is an admirable ambition, getting paid for your work is also an amazing feeling — but how do authors get paid? When does writing a book become profitable? How do the methods of publishing and the amount of books sold change how you are paid? Let's figure out how much writing book will make you!
First, there are several ways to go about writing books and getting published, but for the sake of this article, we'll focus on the main two: traditional publishing and self publishing. Traditional publishing earnings come from book advances and royalties, and the publishing process they go through changes when and how you see your money; whereas the self publishing route only guarantees money from the amount of books sold. Consider the traditionally published authors first.
Traditionally Published Authors Earning Potential
First off, what are royalties and advances and what are the differences between the two. Simple, an advance is the money a publisher pays you up front for signing a book deal with them; royalties are the money you get paid after your book gets published, for as long as your books are on the shelves, but comes with a major stipulation: earning out. Basically, until the publisher makes back the amount of money they gave you in your advance, you don’t get royalties.
Book Advances
The amount of money you get from each medium depends heavily on several factors. For advances, they are as follows:
Celebrity
This could be being an actual, red-carpet-walking kind, or just having a built-in audience, which ranges from people reading your work on Wattpad or AO3 to having a blog or YouTube channel. Having people who would already be willing to buy your book takes pressure off the book publisher in finding you an audience, which in turn raises the amount you can expect for your advance.
Fiction or Nonfiction
The differences between nonfiction publishing and fiction publishing can be quite vast throughout the entire process, but this is another place where they differ. Because they are for drastically different markets, the money you can expect for each will change. Fiction has a wider appeal, and therefore could make publishers more money; however, nonfiction can get into markets some fiction books cannot, like college curriculums, which give them a different appeal
Compelling Story
If you write a compelling story, more than one publisher may be interested in acquiring your manuscript, which can raise your advance significantly. This is because a highly favored manuscript usually sets off an auction of sorts, where all interested publishers bid with potential advance amounts and conditions of book contracts (what extra rights they may want or say you get to keep, ie. getting books adapted, foreign rights, etc.) — which can drive the advance amount pretty high!
Comp Titles
If there are other books on the market similar to your manuscript that are doing fairly or extremely well, that can also bolster the amount you can expect from an advance, but if there are a lack of books with your particular market in mind, that may lower your chances of a higher advance.
Established Author
For many of you, this may not apply (yet!), but if you have already written a book, and it has done well, you can expect more for your next advance. On the other hand, if you were already traditionally published and your first book sold poorly, you may expect to see a lower book advance.
Major Publisher
When going any of the publishers in the Big Five (see How To Get A Book Published) you can expect a larger book advance on average than if you were to go to a smaller, independent traditional publisher. This is simply because bigger traditional publishers have more resources and cashflow than smaller ones, and therefore can afford to shell out more money on advances.
Literary Agents
Literary agents are a big part of the publishing process and this is one of the reasons why. Not only does the literary agent you pick to represent you talk to publishers on your behalf and therefore affect whether or not you end up at aforementioned big publishers, but your literary agent also negotiates the book contract that determines the advance amount! So pick your literary agent wisely, we have a whole article dedicated to finding the best literary agent for you here, and a handy checklist to walk you through the process of finding one here.
Because of these factors, your advance can range anywhere from a small $5,000 to $1,000,000 or more! To raise your chance of getting a higher book advance, try to implement any of these reasons. Do research on books already out that are similar to yours, make sure your story is compelling, and try to land a big publisher. Combining these factors can get first time authors advances in the five to six figure range. As for royalties...
Book Royalties
Here are the factors you should consider with royalties, which is really just one: sell, sell, sell! Once your book is out there, there’s not much else you can do except market yourself and your book how the publisher tells you, but book sales are the only thing that affects your book royalties.
The standard for the traditionally published author royalties is anywhere from 8-15%, depending on if they are paperback books or hardcover. although the industry may be slowly shifting away from that number. So the more your book sells, the more money you get — nothing else. You cannot determine how much your book sells for unless you decide to self-publish (see Traditional Vs Self-Publishing), nor can you determine how many books go out and to where, that is all left up to the publisher. So sit back and do your marketing. Once you’ve made it to getting royalties, there’s not much else to worry about.
Overall, once you get to the stage where advances and royalties are in play, the hard part is mostly over. Your book has been picked up by an literary agent and has made its way into the hands of someone who’s interested. Now all you have to do is write, pick covers and possibly art, and do publicity.
Publicity: Traditional Publishing
Traditionally published authors may or may not have publicists, but in traditional publishing there are departments that are solely about advertising multiple books at a time — including yours. Some of these may be paid opportunities like talk show appearances if you're one of the more established authors they have on the roster. This is yet another way authors, specifically traditionally published authors can make money. Since traditional publishing can and does bolster how many people are exposed to your writing, you have a higher chance of getting the recognition needed for paid press events and publicity.
Self Published Authors Earning Potential
As opposed to traditionally published writers, self published authors don't receive advances and therefore take on many of the costs of publishing a book, such as printing costs, inventory, and fees for selling their self published book on sites like Amazon and other online book retailers. This can seriously limit their chances of financial success — but don't be discouraged! Even with these caveats, there are decent ways to make money as a self published author!
Book Sales
Book sales are the main factor in self publishing earnings. A traditionally published book and a self published book could sell the same amount of copies for the same genre and the same retail price and comparatively, the self published author would make more money than the traditionally published author. Why? Because not only do self published authors make more in terms of the percentage on sales (anywhere up to 70% of the sale money compared to traditional publishing at 15% royalties) but they also do not have to "earn out" and advance — because they didn't have one! This can mean that if you choose to self publish books, you could make the same amount as someone traditionally published with the same, or less, book sales.
Writing Books
Because self publishing from beginning to end takes a shorter amount of time than it does to traditionally publish, this means self published authors can have more books in the market in a shorter time frame. This may not seem like it makes a difference, since book writing is done by all full time writers, self published or not, but given that the average traditionally published book takes over a year (2-3 years on average!) to come out, that time adds up.
The speed at which an author writes is highly dependent on them, but if they are particularly fast and have good enough writing skills to write compelling novels, self published authors could end up writing multiple books in a year or two and having them all to market within that same time frame — which means they could effectively double or triple the amount the expect to see in book sales and compound the effects self publishing has on the amount given for each sale. Essentially, with more books at market, self published authors make more than if they followed the standard practice of traditional publishing, which sees a book seemingly every other year from an author.
Publicity: Self Published Author
Even though this is less likely to bring in any money, since we went over this as a source of income for trad publishing, we might as well go over it for the self publish crowd. While less likely, you could still become an author that gets paid for speaking events and talk shows. E.L. James is a prime example of what self publishing success looks like, not just in general, but in the avenue of possibly paid appearances on talk show television.
This is truly an avenue of revenue where the two camps are basically in the same boat. To get these opportunities, you will most likely have to become a bestselling author — which traditionally published authors are more likely to become, but not by much.
The Big Question: How Much Do Authors Make?
So, you may be thinking: "yes, these are the ways authors make money, but how much do authors make? None of these things are actual numbers!" And the answer to this...is not as straightforward as you might hope or think. Unless you are working for a "book farm" of sorts (a collective of writers all working to produce several books a year under the same pen name) there is no average author salary. Heck, if every author could be guaranteed a salary, everyone would take their writing career more seriously!
But there is a reason this article is called how much do authors make, and it's not a clickbait-y one. While there is no average author salary, there are some average estimates we can give authors just entering the field, whether that's the self publishing way or the traditional publishing way. Let's change it up and start with the self publish writers.
Self Publishing Estimates
Try not to get discouraged, but for many self published authors, financial success is not found. The current consensus is that the average self published author makes anywhere from $1000 for the life of their book to possibly being in the red. You would only seem to end up in the negative if you are holding inventory, since if you use print on demand you are only charged on what you sell. Nonetheless, the average does not look great. But fret not! There are some more promising figures from a recent survey!
According to the Alliance of Independent Authors from an April 2023 report, self published authors make an average of $12,749, with 25% making the aforementioned $0 - $1,000, 43.8% reporting gains of $20,000+, and 28% making over $50,000. This is not including money from secondary jobs! The report also says that over 2,000 self published writers made over $100,000 in total using Amazon KDP. These numbers may be a bit skewed, since the data is based in The UK, but it shows that there is profit to be made as a self publisher!
If that's not enough for you, we already brought up E.L. James with her major success in writing the Fifty Shades of Grey series and the movie franchise it spun, but Colleen Hoover is yet another example of how you cane become a bestselling author writing self published books.
Traditional Publishing Estimates
The numbers for traditional publishing can also be a bit grim at first blush, with the average book advance for an author's first book being anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000, a number backed by literary agents I know personally. Coupled with the fact that many authors do not fully "earn out" or don't earn out for several years, the average author may be capped at the amount of their book advances.
Once again, don't lose hope! There are many cases of first time authors getting higher advances, we even listed some of the reasons for that in our first section! It really is true that some authors with their first time out of the gate get high five figure advances, without being a super big influencer or celebrity.
Now let's look at royalties. There aren't really reliable estimates of the average author's book sales, but the figures we heard and could find were anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000. If we take an advance of $10,000 and say the retail price is $13.95 for a royalty percent of 8, at 3,000 copies sold per year we would not earn out for 3 years, and after that would earn $3,348 per year in royalties; at 10,000 copies sold per year we would earn out in the first year with a yield of $1,160 and then every year succeeding would earn $11,160 in royalties. This is assuming no discounts, deals or other lowering price initiatives happen and no dip in sales over the years occur. So many factors influence how much authors make in the market, and this is an estimate based off of the low end figures to account for the unknowns.
A higher estimate for royalties would assume a higher book sale amount, higher price, and a higher percentage. Here's what that might look like: If we assume yet again an advance of $10,000 for a retail price of $17.95 at 15% royalties, at 3,000 copies sold we would earn out in the second year, and the years to come would yield $8,077; at 10,000 we would earn out in the first year with $16,925 of take home money and a yield every year after that of $26,925; if we were in the above average selling point of 20,000 copies sold we would earn out our first year with over $40,000 and our yield per year would be $53,850! Once again this is assuming a steady flow of sales each year and no discounted book prices.
Something to keep in mind here is that both scenarios explained above are well within plausible for a newer author, because much of this is dependent on your book deal and how well you and your publisher promote your book — which is highly individual. You could have a high advance or a low one, you could sell 20,000 copies or 500 or even become a bestselling author out the gate and sell millions. For many this may even look like high volume sales in the first year or two and slowly declining sales in the years after.
Recap
So in conclusion, the answer to the question: "how much do authors make?" lies in several everchanging factors. Average self published or indie authors can expect anywhere from nothing to $20,000 per year, and trad published authors can expect anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000+ per year per book. These amount can be affected by how many books sold, how many of their books are currently on the market and more.
It can be tough to break into higher tax brackets with a writing career, but once you build up a library of books, you can make some pretty decent money as an author, even without bestselling status. So keep writing!
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