How much does a novelist/writer earn?

Hey Stella, you could try fantasy and have them ruthlessly bludgeoned to death by orcs or eaten by aliens or something. Then you can make up the rules and you don't have to research all those trying things like police procedure because you can introduce some other rule to your fantasy world that bypasses any bits of reality that are inconvenient to you!

Mwah ha ha hargh.

Cheers

MTM

The $64,000 (£64,000?) question is how ebooks will change things. They are inevitably going to dominate, they cut out a lot of waste (paper and shipping and and overhead some of the middleman stuff), never go out of print or stock, etc., authors see 70% cuts (!) -- you know the arguments -- but who will get the benefit? Who has the pull. I don't think authors acting independently do, versus large publishers and retailers and even consumers. On the other hand, self-publishing suddenly is really and truly practical -- if you can get people's attention -- so we have a direct route like never before. Regardless, big changes.

>> Anyway: My question is how much WILL writers earn? <<

Actually, I guess that's what anyone thinking career really wants to know.

Nope, that wouldn't work. There's be no police involved in this ;-) I think what I'm doing, or so was the plan from the start, is something similar to Shutter Island/Inception. I have some basic plan, but I'm having difficulties getting from A to B to C and well... you get the drift. lol I'll write scene until the plot suddenly hits me.

Stella has bags full of turture in mind and a few dead bodies, too. But first and foremost: torture. I want to huuuuuuuuuuurt them idiots (former neighbours)!

I earned a £50,000 advance from Hodder for my first two books. They both took me around a year to write, and I've received most of that advance, even though the first one isn't out until this June. I also work as a ghostwriter and charge around £8000 a book, and these books usually take me around 3 months to write. So you can earn a decent living if you go at things the right way. Don't believe all the doom and gloom.

I earned a £45,000 advance for my first novel and £5,000 for my sixth. I live frugally and I have managed to avoid other work and not alter my lifestyle. Writing rewards.

Stella: Wait! Don't spoil the surprise.

Susanna: Thank you. That's a generous advance and wonderful performance. And yeah, there is some correlation between income and writing books people want to buy.... How important do you think the sex element is to your sales (sex sells, etc.). I ask because I'm hedging my bets by succumbing to temptation and selling in, um, another genre under pseudonym, while pursuing more literary goals as "me."

Obviously the value of advice depends a lot on the skill of who it's coming from and whether they're much like you, both of which are hard to gauge.

Nice going Susanna.
Stella, that's the way I write but it takes a long time and after I've got about a third of the book down pat there's usually a long pause - anything up to six months - while my brain sorts out what's missing. Then I usually trundle happily on to the end. I have about 30k of my third novel written and I'm fully expecting to grind to a halt any time around... now. I think writing through it, as you suggest, is a good technique. Alternatively, if my brain gets really friedn I leave it alone completely. I definitely planned more of two than one and am thinking I would very much like to completely plan 3 before I even start... because it does make it all a lot more straightforward. Good luck with the experiment, and hurting the neighbours!

Cheers

MTM

QUOTE by Samuel Johnson

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"

I agree.

When I was stuck at home with 4 kids in a foreign country (USA) without a work visa I decided it was a great opportunity to write a book. I came up with a 5 year plan for my husband (he liked that approach) and said that if I hadn't got published in 5 years I would go back to college to get my Phd in colonial history.
4 years 11 months in, I had my first e-book published by a digital publisher and the first month it came out I earned $1K and $2K over the year. That was 7 years ago and I've kept writing for digital press, NY publishers, UK publishers, short story markets and just made my first foray into self-publishing and I'm well able to support myself. as a full time writer. I write a minimum of 1K a day and aim to write around 3 books a year, or at least 2 1/2 depending on life and the health of 4 kids. :)
It also depends on the market you write for. In the U.S. the romance genre is 51% of the overall paperback sales and a $1.3 billion dollar industry. (And for anyone who thinks writing a romance novel is easy, be my guest and write one. :)) Like all genres they have their expectations, but writing around those is part of the challenge. And with email etc, a lot of British writers are finding success with U.S. publishers as well.

I see that only one mention's made of non-fiction (the chemistry textbook). My husband is an academic who's written dozens of books and hundreds of articles in 35 years. No money is ever paid for articles, the university system's set up so that promotion depends on publishing in the right journals, so they're basically doing you a HUGE favour by allowing you to show what you've added to the sum of human knowledge! :). Books don't count for much in academia. Writing has let him get ahead in a career he loves but the financial rewards for the books themselves are very small, no more than a few hundred a year averaged out, admittedly because the market for individual subjects is also small, unless you have a text generally adopted in a country with a large population (but don't get me started on illicit copying...).
It seems small reward in some ways for the sum of his research and intellectual effort but, as I said, he loves writing and his job and if he worked in any other area he probably wouldn't easily be able to write on his subject because, as an individual, he couldn't do the research. I guess some might say that any royalties at all are a bonus in the circumstances.

In the US you have tons of MFA programs as well as undergraduate writing courses, many of which are taught by well known writers. They aren't teaching for fun. Granted in the states a lot of people work in order to get health insurance, but it's not only that. And those are the writers who are SUCCESSFUL.

In the e-book market I think volume of output seems to be the key. If you have seven or eight books all selling in handfuls that soon adds up to £100 a month. Add the fact that every extra title brings in extra readers, some of whom will want to read your other books and I'm sure you get the picture.

So really it's all down to time, do you have enough to write lots of books and are you are the kind of writer who can produce good books at high speed. If you are, you're set.

If you are a slow writer with a very busy Real Life you're not quite so well placed to make money.

Cheers

MTM

Can someone please tell me the minimum amount of books a publisher will expect to sell before he begins to make a profit. say at £9.99 per book. Are they able to calculate the market for a particular genre.

Thanks

I can't give you an answer to that though if you look around the web, you'll probably find something. Profit for a publisher would also depend on whether or not they paid the author an advance on the royalties and whether or not they got it back. Most manuscripts will never make it to a publishers unless they go through agents, and I've heard a magic number for agents in calucations is 5,000 copies. If they don't think a book is going to sell at least 5,000, they probably won't even try to get it to an editor. Authors have been dropped if their previous book sells less and/or fails to earn back the advance.

There's an interesting recent publishing tale about a novelist whose previous books didn't have a lot of sales. Her agent had to submit her manuscript with a pseudonym as a "new" novelist in order to get he publisher interested. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/books/patricia-obrien-as-kate-alcott-sells-the-dressmaker.html.

The reason I called it a day - money! Writing fiction was, and I would guess still is, the hardest way to earn a daily crust. American writers generally do better because they are (or were in my time) pretty slick at marketing. Seven published novels, and as many filed under 'Incomplete', and 20+ years of freelance journalism kept me a step-and-a-half from the Poor House. If money is your main criteria I would suggest you start a publishing house or become a literary agent - they who dispense largesse in nano-measure. If however you want to depart this life via Harold Pinter's unfinished kitchen-sink drama 'Bloody Mortality', having experienced a few unfettered moments of pure joy from putting pen to paper ... and finding it works, keep writing!

Lest we feel too sorry for ourselves, there are tougher and more thankless jobs such as the guys who pick up my garbage. I respect them. They don't ride the truck any more, not since the county contracted it out. They load it and run after it! Anyway, I feel privileged even to try and hope/believe modern publishing will shift the power towards the people who create versus deliver content. (I think this will require some flavor of unionization.) One of the field's fundamental problems is that there are so many more people who want to do it than market for their work, but also I'm not sure how large the pool of or demand for true talent is. If I fail, I will principally blame myself even if I know that my work was good (maybe) and acknowledge the role of luck looms large. For every Harry Potter there are a thousand doorstops.

Please share more tales of firsthand experience, good or bad!

I think generally people write for the same reason they act, make music, paint, etc. They have to do it. It's a compulsion. Anyone who gets into it for the money is nuts.

Marion, the compulsion is definitely why I do it.

I can honestly say that I write for my own sanity -- the little bit that is left -- but I publish to make people forget their lives for a few hours, escape whatever they want to escape. And of course to make money.

Don't let the money taint your work... money will always be obtainable; creativity itself dwindles when you concern yourself with how much it is worth.

A publisher is unlikely to take on an author unless they are confident of selling 40,000+ copies....

That's why none of the big ones, in the UK, will even look at fantasy until a small house has proved its worth for them. Not that I'm cynical or anything.

I don't blame publishers. They're a business in the end. If you have a business and sell pretty red dresses and they go like hot cakes and someone offers you a yellow dress you know it's not going to sell, even if the quality is better, you'll continue to sell the red dress. I know I would.

Still weird because fantasy is one of the most selling genres.

Wow, SL. 40,000 copies. can that really be expected for a first time author, I'm rich. Would that figure be regardless of the size of the publisher, say, Pen & Sword, publishers for Hist/Fic.