: Re: How Much Can You Make From Writing a Book? Obviously this question has a lot of different answers. I'm interested in the typical total profit that a writer might expect to see from: A NYT

@Tiffany377

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I can't really comment accurately on your particular examples, but royalties and payments can become quite complicated.

For example, there is often an advance against royalties to consider initially. This advance is up-front money for the author, and is typically paid when the book goes to print. I have read that publishers will often shoot for an advance to equal what they expect author royalties to be in the first year the book is out. However, bigger names get larger advances, and a good agent may be able to wheedle a slightly better one as well.

When royalties start coming in, they first go against the advance. (If the book never sells enough copies for the royalties to reach the advance amount, the author still keeps the full advance.) Until the author profit reaches that advance number, they don't actually see any of it. Once the author's earnings exceed the advance, they'll begin getting payments on a schedule.

Royalties can also be tiered, meaning that if you sell X number of books, the royalty rate increases, and if you sell Y books above that, it increases again, and so on.

Further, the royalty rate depends largely on the type of print run. Hardcovers have higher royalties (and higher prices), so hardcover runs will be more profitable at an equal number of sales. Trade paperbacks typically have lower royalty rates, and mass market paperbacks even lower. Adding to the complication is that a book that has an initial hardcover run is often reprinted a while later in one or more paperback forms.

E-books are still a new product, and as such, the rates are in subject to fluctuate. E-books may be released simultaneously with hardcover or paperback editions, or separately, and their pricing varies considerably depending on that release timing, the publisher, the author's name, Jeff Bezos's mood and the current celestial alignments.

Some "average" royalty rates, that you should take with a grain of salt, for all the reasons already stated:

Hardcover: 10 - 15%
Paperback (Trade and Mass Market): 7.5 - 12.5%
E-books: 25% (many in the biz suspect this could soon go as high as 40%)

Also remember that agents will typically take 15% of the author's portion as their commission.

Some sources (by no means comprehensive): 1, 2, 3

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