michaelrosenow.com

Toward the end of April, when I was eyeball deep in grading and final exams, words began to fly on the internet about the publishing industry and making a living as an author. I noted it as something I wanted to revisit after the semester and moved on.

It appears that Elle Griffin inspired the flurry with a post on her site, “No One Buys Books,” which got boosts from a recommendation in a New York Times subscriber newsletter, various posts on Substack (here and here, for example), and other places.

A few things about advances caught my attention.

I was fascinated by Penguin’s guidelines included in Griffin’s post that linked expected sales to the amount of an author’s advance:

• Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
  • Advance: $500,000 and up
• Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000-75,000 units
  • Advance: $150,000-$500,000
• Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000-25,000 units
  • Advance: $50,000- $150,000
• Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
  • Advance: $50,000 or less

Baylor professor Alan Jacobs chimed in to provide a viewpoint from someone who has published with both commercial and academic presses. His entire post is worth a read, but I want to call out two of his observations here.

First, Jacobs suggests an “advance” is a slightly misleading term. Rather than paying a lump sum up front, publishers usually dole them out in stages over a period of years. Jacobs uses a hypothetical $100,000 advance to illustrate:

• $25,000 at contract signing;
• $25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
• $25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
• $25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

This leads to Jacobs’s second valuable insight. “Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job,” he points out, “but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales.”

I’ve never thought about the actual distribution of an advance. Knowing that a $100,000 advance often translates to $25,000 per year (before taxes and if all goes smoothly) adds a clarifying perspective about an author’s ability to make a living (or not). Whether an author earns any additional money beyond the advance is entirely dependent on sales figures, I think, and is subject to the contract language. A title that doesn’t exceed the sales figures specified with the advance will not generate additional income. I’m also unsure about the cut a literary agent takes.

Little of this applies to academic books published by university presses. Helen Stephenson observed a trend in 1991 that has persisted. “Authors with some clout are able to negotiate advances into the contracts of some of the larger academic presses,” she wrote in the American Historical Association’s magazine, Perspectives on History, “but for the less well-known author or the college professor, caught in the ‘publish or perish’ bind, advances usually are non-existent or negligible at best.” Royalty agreements are common, but most checks for academic authors don’t have commas.