Q: Can an author make a living from royalties?

I, Christlike, offer myself up as an example.

~public post~

The general population is slowly getting the message that things are really hard for traditionally published authors right now, in ways it was not hard twenty or even five years ago. Still, we dread that question from well-meaning acquaintances:

“But can’t you live on royalties?”

…royalties being the author’s cut of the purchase price of their finished book(s).

Let’s look at this myth, with numbers attached. Mine, to be precise.

First things first: by most measures in traditional publishing, my second novel The Actual Star was a success. It earned out its higher-than-average advance, which was $40,000*, less agent fee.

Here, it’s important to note that an advance is not a salary, nor is it a purchase price for the right to publish the book. It’s the amount of your own royalties the publisher advances you before the book is published. To get more royalties, your book has to first “earn out,” or make back the amount of the advance. As for the publisher’s cut, they make back their money before the author does, as its reward for ostensibly taking all of the risk. (In my opinion, since a publisher usually has the resources to stay solvent after one failure while an author often doesn’t, and since it’s harder for an author to sell a new book if their previous one hasn’t sold well, I don’t agree with this framing of risk. But I digress.)

The Actual Star earned out in sixteen months, after I spent a year promoting it on every platform I had, and my readers went all out in spreading the word. And it’s still selling across formats, especially ebook and audiobook. This is a big deal—70-80% of books never earn out at all. (I still have hope that my 2014 debut The Girl in the Road will earn out someday, but….despite the rave reviews, the book sold fewer copies against a higher advance. So it’ll take a long time.)

But back to the good news: The Actual Star is already in the top 20% of all books published, in terms of earning out. Great news, right? Right! It really is! The book I spent eight years of my life traveling back and forth from Belize, researching and writing and revising, was a success! It means that, last year, I started getting royalties every six months!

Here’s what the amounts were:

·      APRIL 2023: $2,565.47

·      OCTOBER 2023: $4,370.67

·      APRIL 2024: $0.00

.....Wait, why was the last payment zero dollars?

Because unlike most retailers, bookstores can return unsold books for a full refund, and do so, in bulk, all the time. That’s what happened here—bookstores returned ~1800 unsold copies of The Actual Star to free up shelf space.** That means that my “sold” books became spontaneously “unsold,” and my would-be "earned" royalties became "un-earned." This time, the unearned royalties from returned paperbacks canceled out the royalties I DID earn through e-books and audiobooks.

To be clear—when all the dust settles, I’ll still receive whatever I end up being owed. It just won’t be for at least another six months. But it does mean that the chunk of money I was counting on having this spring—even a modest amount, like one or two grand, to help cover rent—will not be materializing. I had no way of knowing this was going to happen.

Taking a bird’s-eye view:

My total royalty intake for the past calendar year was $4,370.67.*** This means I would have to write TEN books, each as successful as The Actual Star, in order to make the same amount through royalties (after advances) that I already make, annually, through direct patronage (about $3600/month).

Taking a closer look at those theoretical ten books: it took me five years to write The Girl in the Road, eight years for The Actual Star, and two years for Ordinary Time (the new novel with which I’m currently querying). So even if I worked at my fastest rate—two years per book—and every book were sold and published promptly, then earned out, then sold steadily—all HUGE assumptions—it would take me twenty years to reach the same level of annual income through royalties that I already make through direct patronage. I would be 62 years old.

And my royalty situation is better than average! It’s what’s considered a good situation!

"But Monica, you were paid $34,000 up front." (That's $40,000 less the 15% agent fee.)

Yes, this is true! So that brings my total earnings for the book to $40,936.

If we average that over the time since we sold the book (October 2019), that's $8,187/year.

If we average that over the time since I actually began to research and write the book (January 2012) to today, that's $3,411/year.

For what was definitely a full-time job.

Assuming a 40-hour work week, that comes out to about $1.70/hour, without benefits. 

And listen. I know I’m comparing apples to oranges here, because compensation is calculated so differently in the two cases—hourly wages of a “normal” 9-5 job versus cuts of a finished product.

But those finished products are the result of…well, years’ worth of hourly work. Done on spec.

And hey, the more copies I sell, the more that retroactive hourly wage goes up. But I break it down like this just to demonstrate that current publishing model assumes that authors, even "successful" authors, already have means. Publishers don’t pay authors for their labor. They assume we survive by inherited wealth (which many of us don’t have), a supporting partner (which many of us don’t have), a magazine market (that no longer exists), a job teaching in academia (which you can’t get unless you have an MFA, itself usually extremely expensive), or a day job in some other industry (which means now you’re working at least two full-time jobs, and if you’re also a parent or caregiver, whew…).

The reason I can survive is because I have the incredible support of a direct patronage community. The amount of support fluctuates from month to month, and the changes Musk made to Twitter have severely damaged my ability to advertise. As of now, I can still pay for basics—housing, food, healthcare, transportation—especially now that I’ve left the U.S. to save money. But my situation is very rare. And maintaining it is its own full-time job.

I’m not singling out individuals here. The model itself is the problem. But I do get frustrated when I hear about publishing professionals lashing out at writers who speak openly about class and power differentials in publishing. They express contempt for writers who name the disparity in models of compensation and material conditions, when they would never accept those conditions for themselves. (Here I’ll refer to excellent pieces about power asymmetries in streaming and theatre—applicable to publishing, too.) 

“But Publishing Is A Business, Monica." I've heard this many times from many quarters. Yes! I agree! But it’s a business built on the unpaid and underpaid labor of the very workers who generate its product. Art is labor, no different from any other kind of labor; just as artists are human, no different from any other kind of human. To take it a step further, humans deserve the basic means of life independent of their ability or desire to perform labor, and that's a whole other conversation; for now, while we advocate for Universal Basic Income, I welcome alternative compensation models for authors. And I appreciate whenever publishing professionals welcome them, too.

Anyway. To come back to the original question: “Can authors live on royalties?"

No. Even the vast majority of the small minority of authors whose books earn out cannot live on royalties. And even when we do earn royalties, we can never be sure how much we'll get, or when we'll get them. We have no meaningful ability to plan for the future on that basis alone.

~

And now to change tone completely: HELLO! I rarely publish public posts. If you found value in it—and I hope you did, because publishing my earnings makes me feel a wee bit vulnerable!—please consider subscribing on any of my platforms here. That's how I DO make the income I depend on from month to month for my full-time work. Because I don’t make it from royalties, and probably never will.

Much love (and more soon for y'all who subscribe!),

Monica

~

*The majority of this money went toward (1) paying down the debt I’d accumulated during the years I was writing the book on spec, and (2) paying professional wages to consultants out of pocket—on Kriol language, disability representation, ancient Maya archaeology, and so on.

 **Unlike most other manufacturers, publishers get to name the price of their products, which means that the usual method of inventory control via discounting slow-to-move merchandise doesn’t work for bookstores. (The “bargain books” you see are older titles bought for pennies to free up warehouse space.)

***For folks outside the U.S.: the federal minimum wage is $15,000 annually. This amount is generally far less than a living wage, which is what a person actually needs to cover all their expenses in a given area—housing, healthcare, groceries, and so on. A living wage in Pennsylvania, where I’m currently registered to vote, is $45,760 annually.