Royalty Reality
The dirty truth about royalties. The author only gets a small portion of the pie.
I just got a statement from one of my publishers on one of the books they brought out recently. These are good people who do really good work so this isn’t a knock on them. It’s just the reality of publishing. I was pleased to learn I’d earned just shy of $9,000 on the book for this payment period which represents about 6 months.
Not awesome numbers but very decent numbers considering it’s only ONE title. But guess how much of that $9K comes to me?
About $900 bucks. That’s right. Only a little over 10 percent.
You might think this highway robbery, but it’s pretty standard for the industry.
Now here’s where it gets worse. I still owe a couple G’s on my advance which was spent a long time ago. So in the end, I get squat.
If it so happened my advance was earned out and they had sent me an actual check, the agent would get his 15 percent also, so that aforementioned 10 percent will turn into maybe 8.5 percent.
This is why it’s virtually impossible to make a living with traditional publishing exclusively. Very, very, very few writers do so.
You need to either have a job or start your own publishing venture to publish a whole bunch of titles independently from the gatekeepers (You can also be a freelance journalist/writer, like me).
Case and point. For the same time period, my imprint, Bear Media, did around $7,000, not including audio. So the real number is probably more like $9,000 - $10,000 range. Guess how much of that I get to keep?
All of it.
I’m getting checks from some other publishers, and I get monthly payments for the books I have with Thomas & Mercer, so it all adds up. But I thought you should be aware of the harsh reality of traditional publishing.
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