Journal Entry
A NYT bestseller’s royalty statement
Author Lynne Viehl shows you the royalty statement of a NYT bestselling book:
We’ve all been told a lot of myths about what it takes to reach the top twenty list of the NYT BSL. What I was told: you have to have an initial print run of 100-150K, you have to go to all the writer and reader conferences to pimp the book, you can’t make it unless you go to certain bookstores during release week and have a mass signing or somehow arrange for a lot of copies to be sold there; the list is fixed, etc.
…
Despite my lack of secret handshakes and massive first print runs, in July 2008 my novel Twilight Fall debuted on the Times mm list at #19. I’ll tell you exactly why it got there: my readers put it there.
If you’re interested in the raw details of being a book author, head on over.
Filed under the topic On Writing: Business on April 17th 2009 at 1:25 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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Tobias is a Caribbean-born SF/F novelist who lives in Ohio.
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1. Alexander Field on Apr 18th, 2009 at 11:56 am
I’ve heard wildly varying reports about what it takes to reach the list – from 25,000 to 100,000 in one week to hit the list. But those numbers are about right. But it was the 8% royalty rate that caught my eye – that doesn’t look right! Thanks for that link.