This is a fascinating, yet sobering post from L. Viehl whose book Twilight Fall made the New York Times Bestseller list. Keeping to a promise to her writer friends, she posted her royalty statement and detailed all her publicity efforts, etc., here: http://www.genreality.net/the-reality-of-a-times-bestseller.
For me, the sobering part is the shear volume of books sold. I've never seen numbers like that in my entire life. And her advance? Holy sh&t!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Lyda -- I can't tell what your comment on this means.
There are two questions I have. How long will this rate of sales continue?
And how fast can the author write books?
If the $50,000 advance represents the publisher's best guess of how much the book will make for the author, and it takes the author a year to write a novel, and each novel does this well, then this is a pretty good living.
But there a lot of 'if's here.
Granted, I would be happy to make this kind of money from writing. I have never gotten close. But it still does not seem like a lot of money for a New York Times best seller.
You don't think so? I could live on $50,000 a book.
Plus, getting that many books out the door seems insane to me. I can't even imagine it.... although weirdly, her actual royality statement looks exactly like mine (being Penguin and all that) except for the very, VERY different numbers. (Mine are much, much smaller.)
Post a Comment