Young Writers Society

I understand that publishers pay the writer either a one-time payment, or a set percentage. I also understand that this percentage is very low. I was just wondering about how much a writer would get.

I am not in writing for the money, but I just hate the idea of working so hard for around, who knows? Two years? Just to give the publisher all the take? This is the first time that I am seriously considering self-publishing, or better known as *gulps*, vanity publishing.

-Mark

Well, publishers don't actually take any money from you - they give it to you. The payment system is actually rather complex (which is one of the many reason why it's handy to have an agent to deal with it all for you), but it goes something like this:

- You get paid an advance. For your first book, this will be rather small (only a few thousand, I believe).

- You also get paid royalties. That is: for every book purchased, you get a very small percent of the money.

- However, you don't get any of your royalties until after the sum of your advance has been reached in the equivalent ammount of money you'd get from royalties. (That was badly explain. Let me try again: say you get a $3000 advance; now, you won't start getting any royalties until the equivalent ammount of your royalty payment has made $3000. Essentially, the advance isn't in addition to the royalties - you have to 'pay it back' first.)

- When your books have sold a certain ammount of copies, the percentage of each sale you get in your royalties goes up a little. This repeat a number of times, presuming your book sells enough.

- Your agent will also take between 15% and 25% of all the money you make.

- With each book you write - assuming you're successful - the ammount you make will increase.

- You also get money for selling extra rights you own - such as the rights to make a movie adaption. You want to keep hold of as many rights as possible when first getting your book published, so that you'll be able to sell them later on (otherwise your publisher will be the one that sells them on, and they'll get the money for them).

- Note: I'm no expert, so I may have got some of this wrong.

Thanks Sureal, that cleared a lot up. I think it is just the principle that the publisher takes aroun 60% of the profit, and I take around 10-20%. I would be woking really hard, only to let the publisher reep all the money.

Thanks,

-Mark

*Breathes sigh of relief

Glad we've got that sorted, I was confused aswell. And Mark, next time you think about Vanity Publishing, don't. I've read your stuff and it's better than that.




Eimear

As I understand it, the point at which you're paid royalties doesn't really correlate with your advance.

It isn't like you have to 'pay back' the amount you've already been given, but I've always gotten the impression the standard is that you have to sell about 10,000 copies of your book before you start getting royalties, irrelevant of the amount of royalties you would have earned up to the amount of your advance (so in monetary terms it could be more or less than your advance that you could have gotten up to that threshhold just as easily as the same amount.)

And in the UK, I think the standard advance is likely to be in the region of about £5000 for your first novel.

Thanks everyone, great advice

-Mark

Thought I'd point out that self-publishing and vanity publishing are not the same thing, as you mentioned it.

Vanity publishing is where you pay someone to print a very small amount to give to your friends etc.

Proper self-publishing means you market and publicise your novel yourself, make deals with book shops etc to properly sell it. This is often a good choice for people who have very specialist non-fiction books they want to publish, and can be alright for publishing fiction, but only if you have the resources and dedication to market it properly (no easy task). Some people have even started out self publishing their books, and then because of having sold them well, have then been offered huge book deals by traditional publishing companies.

Honestly? You shouldn't worry about money. If you truly want to write for a living, you'll find a way to deal with your home conditions and be able to publish stories anyway. That's called a passion. Anyone who writes to make money is not a true writer.

All proffessional writers write to make money. It's their job.

Thank you everyone.

Honestly? You shouldn't worry about money. If you truly want to write for a living, you'll find a way to deal with your home conditions and be able to publish stories anyway. That's called a passion. Anyone who writes to make money is not a true writer.

You are missing the point. It is the principle. You are saying that you would spend months, years writing a novel, only to find that the publisher takes all the effort for doing nothing?

And yes, Sureal is right, being a writer is like being the owner of a business, it is your job.

-Mark

Thank goodness for this thread. I've been trying to find info on this, and this post puts it in nice, easy, LAYMAN'S terms.