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You are here: Home / Archives for earnings

Frances Hardinge: My novel helped me start a new chapter

September 20, 2018 By achuka Leave a Comment

Frances Hardinge was the subject of last weekend’s Fame and Fortune feature in the Sunday Times in which people are interviewed about their approach to money. It’s one page I always read in the Business and Money section (back page -easily found, for those who don’t normally look at this section.) It’s a sequence of stock, unvarying questions and the responses are always fascinating.
How much money do you have in your wallet?
Have you ever been hard up? etc.

Frances Hardinge describes the success of her children’s novel The Lie Tree, a tale of religion, science and murder in Victorian England that won Costa Book of the Year 2015, as a “financial bolt from the blue”. The author admits that she had hit a “low point” in her writing career only a year before: “Takings came to a little over £8,000, but after costs my earnings came to not much over £5,000.”

via Frances Hardinge: My novel helped me start a new chapter | Money | The Sunday Times.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: earnings, feature, money

3 Children’s Authors In Forbes Highest Paid List

August 4, 2016 By achuka Leave a Comment

There are three children’s authors in the lastest Highest Paid List from Forbes, at #2 #3 and #14.

irishtimes

  1. James Patterson $95m
  2. Jeff Kinney $19.5m
  3. JK Rowling $19m
  4. John Grisham $18m
  5. Stephen King $15m
  6. Danielle Steel $15m
  7. Nora Roberts $15m
  8. EL James $14m
  9. Veronica Roth $10m
  10. John Green $10m
  11. Paula Hawkins $10m
  12. George RR Martin $9.5m
  13. Dan Brown $9.5m
  14. Rick Riordan $9.5m

via Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins makes world’s richest writers list.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: earnings, list, pay

Authors’ incomes collapse to ‘abject’ levels

July 8, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

guardiansmallAccording to a survey of almost 2,500 working writers – the first comprehensive study of author earnings in the UK since 2005 – the median income of the professional author in 2013 was just £11,000, a drop of 29% since 2005 when the figure was £12,330 (£15,450 if adjusted for inflation), and well below the £16,850 figure the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says is needed to achieve a minimum standard of living. The typical median income of all writers was even less: £4,000 in 2013, compared to £5,012 in real terms in 2005, and £8,810 in 2000.

Commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and carried out by Queen Mary, University of London, the survey also found that in 2013, just 11.5% of professional authors – those who dedicate the majority of their time to writing – earned their incomes solely from writing. This compares with 2005, when 40% of professional authors said that they did so.

…

Mal Peet, whose children’s novels have won prizes from the Carnegie medal to the Guardian award, said his income from books had “dwindled really significantly” over the past four years. In the past, he said, he received royalty cheques of up to £30,000 for a six-month period. In the last half of 2013, his royalties for all his novels were just £3,000.

“My direct income from sales is abject – literally abject. There’s been an absolutely radical decline in my income over recent years,” said Peet. “I do live by writing, but that’s because I have got a backlist of educational books which keeps on selling, and I have a pension, and I have to go on the road. Because I’ve a certain reputation, I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that’s £25,000 for six years.”

via Authors’ incomes collapse to ‘abject’ levels | Books | theguardian.com.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: earnings, pay, writers, writing

The Tenured vs. Debut Author Report – some interesting facts, figures and graphs relating to ebook sales

May 28, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

• Big-5 publishers are massively reliant on their most established authors to the tune of 63% of their e-book revenue.
 
• Roughly 46% of traditional publishing’s fiction dollars are coming from e-books.
 
• Very few authors who debut with major publishers make enough money to earn a living—and modern advances don’t cover the difference.
 
• In absolute numbers, more self-published authors are earning a living wage today than Big-5 authors.
 
• When comparing debut authors who have equal time on the market, the difference between self-published and Big-5 authors is even greater.
In this report, we will also reveal how e-book earnings represent roughly 64% of a traditionally published fiction author’s income, and therefore why authors should focus less on statistics geared toward publisher earnings and trade bookstore sales and consider their own incomes instead. Finally, we will tackle the difficult question of just how many authors are earning a living wage today. The results are sobering.

via The Tenured vs. Debut Author Report – Author Earnings.

This final chart reveals a startling insight: If the Big 5 hadn’t signed a new author since 2009, and simply released new works from their long-established authors, they would still be making 63% of the e-book revenue that they are making today. Ownership of backlist and long-tenured authors is quite clearly big publishing’s most powerful commodity.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: analysis, authors, earnings, graphs, information, publishing, report

From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author’s life?

March 5, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

In The Observer magazine last weekend Robert McCrum wrote a piece about the struggling mid-list author. He focused on adult authors, but the changes in publishing he describes, and in particular the sudden loss of funding and drop in advances, affects children’s authors just as badly.

Many of the comments in the online discussion that his piece has so far generated fail to grapple with his central observation:

To writers of my generation, who grew up in the age of Penguin books, vinyl records and the BBC, it’s as if a cultural ecology has been wiped out. For as long as most of us can remember, every would-be writer knew the landscape of the printed word. This Georgian square was home to publishing grandees (now retired). On that high street were the booksellers (now out of business). In those twisting back streets, you could expect to find literary agents working the margins with the injured innocence of pickpockets at a synod. It was a mutually dependent ecosystem.

Publishers were toffs, booksellers trade and printers the artisan champions of liberty. Like the class system, we thought, nothing would change. The most urgent deadline was lunch. How wrong we were. The years 2007-2010 are pivotal: first, as Thomson has described, came the credit crunch. And it occurred at the very moment that the IT revolution was wrecking the livelihoods of those creative classes – film-makers, musicians and writers of all sorts – who had previously lived on their copyrights.

Roughly speaking, until 2000, if you wrote a story, made a film or recorded a song, and people paid to buy it, in the form of a book, a DVD or a CD, you received a measurable reward for your creativity. Customers paid because they were happy to honour your creative copyright. When the internet began in the 1990s, many utopian dreams of creating an open society, where information would be free for all, sprang into prominence. Wikipedia, for instance, is the child of such dreams. Today, Wikipedia is appealing to its users for subscriptions.

Among many champions of the open (and free) society, Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?, celebrated the idea of knowledge without frontiers from the comfortable security of a university post. The reckoning has been slow in coming, but now there are some crucial indicators of a change of heart. Lanier, for example, acknowledges that, in his excitement at the birth of the worldwide web, he forgot about the creative classes. He concedes that he has watched a generation of his friends – film-makers, writers, musicians – become professionally annihilated by the loss of creative copyright.

Copyright is the bone-marrow of the western intellectual tradition. Until the book world, like the music world, can reconcile the extraordinary opportunities provided by the web with the need for a well-regulated copyright system, artists of all kinds will struggle.

What do YOU think? IS copyright the issue?

via From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author's life? | Books | The Observer.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: advances, copyright, earnings, publishing

Sara Sheridan: What Writers Earn: A Cultural Myth

April 26, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Sara Sheridan writing in Huffington Post:

Sheridan

how much does a writer have to sell to make it?

Average earnings in the UK were around £26,500 in 2012. To make this amount on a book contract for a paperback edition selling at £7.99 that pays 10% a writer would need to sell 33,166 copies a year. And that’s if the book isn’t discounted as part of a 3 for 2 promotion, for example. That is a lot of books! To put it in perspective to get to number one in the UK paperback chart last month you’d have needed to sell almost 20,000 copies a week. This means that going to number 1 doesn’t even earn you the national average wage (and that book may have taken the writer months or even years to produce). The odds of making a mint are very long – writing is a risky profession.

via Sara Sheridan: What Writers Earn: A Cultural Myth.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: authors, earnings, sales, wrirers, writing

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