Money

[newmyname]

I've just looked into one of my favourite books and it sold 15000 copies. At about 10 percent commission the author would have made about £6000. Does this seem right ? Is it really that unprofitable ? It's a good book

I doubt s/he will have made that much (assuming no huge advance). Their agent will have taken 15%+VAT for a start. Authors often have to pay their own expenses to attend promotional events such as smaller literary festivals.

Yeah I think v v few authors make any money

It's terrible. They should be paid more

If it was traditionally published then the author will get somewhere around 10% of the profit for a paperback and 25% for an ebook. That's the profit not what someone buys it for. And then their agent if they have one takes their commission. A book takes a year to write and then it's sold for 99p and the author has probably made about 10p. Most authors have a day job because they can't earn a living being a writer.

Self published books get 70% of each sale, so better money but upfront costs to produce it and all marketing is down to the author.

By whom, though?

Most of us are perfectly well aware that we are going to need a day job, unless we happen to write something commercially successful. Someone I know, a household name these days, only stopped working as a ghostwriter when her tenth novel became a word of mouth success and was adapted for film, and I think she was helped by family money earlier on. her tenth novel wasn’t any better than the previous nine, it just generated a lot of word of mouth because of its subject, plus I think it got picked up by one of the TV book clubs.

Plus most books sell the majority of copies as e books (and the HUGE majority of those sales will be when the price goes to £1.99 or even 99p). I've sold a quarter of a million books overall (so not all one book, chance would be a fine thing!) and I have a day job to cover costs, and that's with several of my books hitting the Kindle Toop 100 list.
None of us write for the money, which is just as well, as most people will quibble over the cost of buying a paperback, or even an ebook, when they will happily spend that amount of money on a cup of coffee and a piece of cake in a cafe that are gone in moments.

It just doesn't seem right for the publishing company to take almost 90 per cent

It's more like 7% of paperback sales if your sales are low.

It's because we are used now to having very, very cheap books. We used to have an agreement between the publishing industry and booksellers until the 1990s - you couldn't buy 99p books or whatever then. Now that that doesn't exist any more, books are sold at a very low price which only benefits the consumer.

Books in Europe and the US sell at much higher prices.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat exactly, a lot of books are cheaper than a can of Coke. It's crazy.

The creative arts are not well remunerated. Everyone thinks they can write a book, so why should they pay more than a couple of quid for a year's worth of someone's work (plus editors/cover artists/typesetters etc).

People think nothing of spending £2.50+ on a birthday card which has two words in it, yet they then only want to pay 99p for 100,000 words. It is a crazy situation.

The publisher will be the ones paying for the design, typesetting, printing, warehouse storage, shipping, distribution, sales to bookshops, promotion, marketing. 90% seems like a lot but they front all the costs and there is a large team involved that need to be paid, as well as the material costs. They also often pay an upfront advance, even if the author isn't well known. (Source: I work in publishing)

Screen rights are apparently where the real money is, for most authors.

I suppose it's a worthwhile way to go into it, that it better be good enough for netflix

A friend of mine has had three novels optioned, but none ever got produced.

Books are a very cheap-to-the-consumer form of entertainment per hour. Unfortunately, people don’t value them as ‘cheap’ now that Amazon has normalised selling them at 50% less than their recommended retail price.

Bookshops buy in at 45-50% of the cover price. So the publisher gets, let’s say, £5 of each £10 paperback - if they sell it at a regular price, not a massive discount like to supermarkets, where maybe they only make £3 per copy. Then they pay the distribution fees, the printing costs (paper is expensive), wages, overheads, author royalties and advances, marketing, everything else.

I honestly think it’s a wonder any books get published at all, tbh.

That's why everyone in publishing is paid peanuts 😂

A friend of mine has had three novels optioned, but none ever got produced.

Even the option fee bumps you up significantly.

Non fiction is often worse too. I published something in 2019 and think I’ve made about 1000 from it total.
on the other hand if you do self publish effectively it can top up nicely. I’ve just hit a lovely personal milestone albeit after some time but it’s now entirely passive income

This, sadly. I've made £5k this year but it paid for our holiday. You just have to see it as a bonus :)

I have been in publishing for 30 years. Authors don't get 10%, 3-4% if they are lucky, of which agents will take 15% (20% if overseas, 40% if double agented) tax and NI ins. another 30%.
Most authors get more per book from a library loan (I think about 12p per book) than from royalties.
Don't forget no royalties are paid until advance paid off.
(If you think this is bad, book illustrating is worse.)

This is why, increasingly, publishers aren't paying advances. Yes, it's lovely to get a lump sum up front but it makes budgeting very hard because you have no idea when that advance will earn out - could be six months, could be never. I think it's much better to move to immediate royalties (with a 90 day lead time), so at least you've got a vague idea month to month of what's coming in.

I think advances are still important. They are a pledge of good faith, and a help with marketing- there's a real push to get a book to at least earn out its advance, even if it fades away afterwards. Without that, I imagine books that are just published on the chance they might take off would have a very short shelf life and marketing budget if they didn't make good sales and reviews immediately. (Although I only work in fiction, so I'm not sure if the same applies for non fiction.)

I don't really understand why we have books at this rate

I think I've made a mistake on how many copies sold. It's actually really hard to find that, but there are 90000 ratings for it on good reads. I think it's more likely there's another zero on top of what I thought