A small note on the author advance survey

My Author Advance Survey (version 2.0) is still a popularly linked item online that brings a lot of readers to this blog. Back when I first set out to find out what people got as an advance, it was both a bit of information digging due to aspiring writers online arguing over the details, as well as published writers, with everyone resorting to using anecdotal observation as facts, something that always drives me nuts.

It was done also to temper the idea that writing a novel equaled instant fortune.

That being said, I’m now seeing my article constantly linked as ‘proof’ that ‘traditional publishing’ is dead, and new writers should look at my numbers as a reason to not publish.

On the one hand, that’s fine by me. Less competition for actual readers and actual money.

On the other hand, I do take seriously the ‘pay it forward’ part and continue to try and educate. I’ll do that by saying the following:

An advance is not the end all and be all of a book. It’s just the advance. Sure, many novels don’t earn out the advance, but since you don’t have to pay back an advance, the advance is the lowest amount you’ll make off that book.

Just like many in that survey, my first novel got an advance of $5,000. Proof that publishing is broken? Doubtful. Crystal Rain has, since selling in 2005, gone on to make me more than that. A lot more. It’s sold German, Czech, Russian, Polish, French, Romanian and Japanese language rights, each of those bearing money. It sold book club edition rights. It sold audio rights. It has paid out royalties. All of which mean that the book has made me a lot more than just the initial 5K.

Is it hard to start the snowball, to get enough novels out there so that things are popping. Foreign rights sales don’t all come with the advance, but over time. And are not guaranteed (Crystal Rain has sold to a bunch of countries, Ragamuffin/Sly, less so).

Would it be nice if the advance was large enough I could live a year off it? Yeah, no doubt. With each book I write, as time goes by, I aim for a higher advance. But an advance isn’t the whole story. I make almost as much off fiction as I did at my old day job. I make twice as much than I did at my old job because I also freelance nonfiction gigs, which make the other half up.

All my survey does is look at the advance numbers, not what authors *make*. That’d be a whole other survey. A useful one, no doubt, but one I don’t have the time to run, because I’m working on finishing up my latest novel.

Which I’ll be submitting to the ‘dead’ world of ‘traditional publishing’ via an agent so that I can continue paying for my mortgage and drinking good scotch.

Filed under the topic Journal on March 14th 2010 at 8:00 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.