How much did I get paid to write my latest non fiction?

One month sales update, my fiction deal, and more.

Welcome back to my very transparent book launch! I am currently in Australia, about to begin the Ozzie leg of the book tour. About an hour ago, I called my mum crying and said the words “I don’t know If I am physically capable of doing this.” She told me a few things, first of all, that I am amazing and have done so much but that also I shouldn’t trust my thoughts after 30 hours of travel when my body thinks it’s 2 am in the morning.

She is very wise. But fucking hell those thoughts feel true right now. I’m tired and run down and I’ve been doing scary, vulnerable things for the past month. It’s a lot. The creative life is a lot.

So I decided why not do something really hard and vulnerable!

Today we’re going to be looking at several things about the launch of We Need Your Art. We are also going to be looking at my recent fiction deal.

It’s been a month since We Need Your Art launched, and so we’re going to do a sales update! We’re also going to look at how much I got paid to write this book, and how those payments are structured. We are going to be uncomfortably transparent in as many ways as I can because, CREATIVE INDUSTRIES NEED TRANSPARENCY. All creative industries are built around artists feeling like they can’t talk about the business side openly. I’m trying to change that, one Substack post at a time.

One month sales updates:

Below are snippets of my emails from each region from a little under a month of sales.

USA: From my editor, actual angel Meg: I only have US numbers, but the start has been fantastic: we’ve sold 5400 copies across all formats to date. I’m incredibly thrilled to see the start and the continued movement—consider me a proud editor!

UK: The lovely Phoebe she said this a few days ago: “I wanted to send a quick update, to let you know that we have sold another 138 copies through the TCM of We Need Your Art in the past week, bringing the total UK TCM value now to 973 copies. We have also sold a further 105 audiobooks this week, bringing the audio total to 390. It’s really great to see sustained sales this week, and the audio team are delighted with the audio sales! Congratulations!”

AUSTRALIA: Literarily just got an email from my lovely publisher Ashwin and he said this: “Also, I just wanted to say, your sales Down Under up to the end of last week is 1260, so steadily climbing a few weeks out since release. I am sure we will see a rise in sales over the coming period when you are back 'home'.” These are only physical sales, not digital or audible I don’t think!

A total of 8023 books for the first month.

How do I feel about these sales numbers

Just reading over that now, I think I feel pretty good. We aren’t breaking any records. We aren’t hitting any lists. We aren’t ‘wowing’ anyone. I am inherently very ambitious. Of course a part of me wants the book to “blow up” but I’m playing the long game. I remind myself of that daily. And it’s so beautiful to see the number slowly growing, my book’s message is spreading out in the world like trickling tendrils of water.

What have I been doing in this month to support the book?

This month has felt so different to last month. The lead up to the book launch was incredibly social media and podcast heavy as I explained in my first essay. This month, I’ve been on the road on my (self funded) book tour! I’ve been finding wherever my books are stocked and signing them. I’ve done an event in New York, Philledelphia, London, Berlin, Amsterdam and am about to do several events in Melbourne and Sydney. I’ve been meeting YOU: creatives, artists, readers. I have been connecting in real life. It feels incredibly meaningful.

I hear a lot of people say: don’t tour, you’ll exhaust yourself and you can get so much more reach and impact with a single instagram post. And sure, I might be able to REACH more people through an IG post, but nothing, NOTHING, compares to hugging an artist, talking with them to their face, actually being with readers. I believe in person promotion matters very much. I believe it’s being forgotten. I believe that now more than ever, being with readers and artists makes huge impact.

I was very afraid to share my sales numbers on my first week.

But I knew that my job as AMIE was to share generously about this process of my first trad pubbed book. I felt instinctively that this was my role: to share this journey openly, generously, to the extent that it makes my skin crawl. Indeed, I felt almost sick sharing them. I imagined other writers reading my numbers and thinking “awww, that’s cute.” I imagined people thinking “wow, she has a big audience on instagram but it doesn’t do much, does it!” I imagined the publishers being angry with me. I felt genuine fear. But the response from you has re-enforced how much writers, creatives of all sorts, have been deprived of actual clarity about how these systems work. The more we know the more powerful we are. And Artists deserve to feel FUCKING POWERFUL. So, today I also want to talk about how much I was paid to write this book and how payment works with a book like We Need Your Art.

How much was I payed?

If someone asks me directly, I will tell them. I have spoken about it in talks with writers, and I have endeavoured to be very open about it. However, I have always stopped myself sharing my advance on the internet because I’ve never seen it done before, and consequently, it doesn’t feel safe… it feels taboo. Also, because it was a good advance, and I didn’t want sharing it to seem braggy. There are actually so many reasons not to share this piece of information. But as I sit down to write this essay, none of them seem good enough. As I said, after my latest article about this book launch I felt a tangible desperation for transparency. Creatives have been told to keep our experiences about our industries quiet.

I was paid a 300,000 USD advance for this book.

For me, (for most of us) this was a lot of money. I was fucking stoked. I played it cool when my agent Amanda told me, but obviously this was an insane thing to be told. James and I went on a walk after Amanda accepted the advance and this is the photo of me:

I have spent my entire career as an author choosing myself, self publishing, valuing myself, championing myself. This is The Way. I will always do this. I will never allow something outside of me determine my value. But when you have already chosen yourself, when you already value yourself being chosen and valued by someone else is something you can enjoy and delight in. And I did. I delighted.

How am I paid?

I do not get a huge lump sum payment.

First off, 15% goes to my agent. Without Amanda, my deal would’ve been a FRACTION of my final advance. She fucking earns it, and I love that my wins are her wins and vice versa. (As a side note, Amanda writes amazing substacks about the industry and is a fucking rebel in this space, go read.)

I get that money in four instalments. One when I signed the book deal, one when I handed in my completed manuscript, the third when the book came out, and fourth, I think it’s a year after the book launches, or perhaps when the paper back comes out? I don’t mind the split payments, it’s good for taxes and spreads out income over time.

Basically, it’s 60k a year for 4 years before taxes. An amazing amount of money for James and I. It’s almost exactly the median wage for a full time worker in the US. So a great deal, but, when you divide it up, not the life changing amount it seems like when you see it there as one big number.

When will you earn royalties?

Let me quickly go over how an author is paid in a traditional publishing setting: A book advance is money your publisher gives you upfront when you sign a book deal. It’s like a bet, they believe your book will sell, so they pay you in advance. Then, as your book sells, the money you earn from each sale goes toward ‘paying back’ that advance. Once enough copies sell to cover the advance, you start earning royalties.

But you don’t get the full price of every book sold. You get a royalty — usually around 10% of the book’s price. I think my royalty may be a little better.

So let’s use my book as an example.

I’m not 100% sure on my royalty rate but the standard is around 10% on a $30 hardcover.

That means I earn $3 per book sold.

Now divide my advance by my royalty per book:

$300,000 ÷ $3 = 100,000 books

So I need to sell around 100,000 books to “earn out” my advance. Only 91,977 books to go before I see royalties.

It’s important to note that most books never “earn out” their advance. And you aren’t a failure if you never earn out.

What has getting that advance meant for you?

It’s meant lots of things! Here are some of my thoughts.

• As soon as we accepted the offer, I recommitted to being an independent artist, always. Self publishing and taking up space without gatekeepers was not just a road to travel so I could eventually get picked. Since signing the deal I have been extra intentional about continuing to build my own sources of income and ways of creating. If you’ve read my “how do I make money” essay - you’ll know that I have eight streams of income. I refuse to become dependent on the publishing houses. I never want to NEED them. I want to have the power, always. I want to be a writer, forever, whether they want to publish me or not. Plus, I fucking love taking up space and sharing my writing however the fuck I want. I mean, I took out all my swears out of WNYA!! I will always need a space to say “fuck”, a lot.

• It meant that I was a little surprised with some of how the Publisher’s approach to marketing has been. For me, it seemed like such a huge amount of money to invest, to then not back it in a major way. When I could only find my book in a few stores in the USA and the UK, I felt confused. Why invest so much and then not get it in stores? But Penguin makes almost a billion dollars in profit each year off almost 5 billion in revenue, so I guess my advance is just not that big in the scheme of things.

• It has made me consider the power of platforms. I know many of you will ask, could you have gotten an advance like this without your instagram platform? No. I don’t think so… I believe that the advance was that size mostly because I already had relationships with a community who wanted to hear what I have to say. Non-fiction editors are often looking for authors who have an inbuilt audience, or are experts in their field. This is not the same for fiction, as I’ll talk about in a bit.

• It has meant that I think about the next book deal a bit more than I’d like. The publishing houses essentailly took a bet that paying me that much money would be worth it to them… but will it? Will they want to pay me this much again? Having a big advance means a little extra pressure. I need to sell a lot of copies for them to see me as one of their “good” authors.

What about your fiction deal?

I got a fiction deal for my historical detective novel earlier this year! I have been publishing non fiction and fiction on my own for years, but trad publishing is a new game for me, so excuse my ignorance, but from my outlook they seem very different beasts.

I was paid a $10,000 advance for my fiction by a small independent press. One thirtieth as much as I got for WNYA and a lot less than I make from self-publishing in a year. I got my first payment the other day when I signed the contract, and I will get this in 4 payments too. It’ll come out in November. I’m excited! It’s been a much smaller operation, but again, an interesting learning curve. I’m so glad I am going on the journey. I’m a curious creative, and I like seeing how different systems work.

My platforms may have had a sway over them buying my book, but as you can see, it didn’t have anywhere near the sway that it had over the non-fiction space. On average, I believe, fiction deals are much less than non fiction, especially for a debut. I suppose that’s because most non-fiction authors tend to have platforms first.

Was I happy with this deal?

Yeah! I was really happy. Funny story. I was a day deep into the worst tummy bug of my life when I got the news. Head in the toilet, randomly scrolling through my emails to distract from the nausea. I weakly call out “James… I sold my book!”

I have earned far, far more than 10,000 dollars from my self-published fiction. Being trad pubbed might not be a good financial decision but I am curious and excited about how this traditional publishing journey will go. I downplayed the news initially, internally and externally. I brushed it off. But there was a moment sitting on the heated bathroom floors again (I hang out in my bathroom a lot apparently) where I recognised that it meant something very profound for me. If you’ve been with me for a long time, you’ll know that I spent around six years trying to get a trad publishing deal for my fiction before I eventually self-published. I was desperate for it. I thought it would change my entire life if I was chosen. It has not changed my life. But, as I sat on those nice hot tiles I let myself cry. As I type it out now, I cry.

I cry for her. For Amie who tried so hard, who was so broken by hundreds of rejection. I cry because I owe it all to her. Her resiliency, her relentlessness, her softness. I cry because I got a book deal for her, and I got it in the best way: when I didn’t need it, when I had already chosen myself.

So, yes I was happy with the deal. Just as happy as I was with my non-fiction.

I have just told you so much random information about my journey.

I’ve really gone off on one today. I opened the gates of transparency and welcomed you into my bathroom and told you all of it.

Having conversations about finances as artists is uncomfortable, but when we talk about this stuff together it makes us more powerful. We are living in a culture that tries to rob artists of their value, that tries to play us off each other, that wants us ignorant. When we do the brave thing and talk about our finances, wherever we are on the journey, we are reclaiming power. You art has so much value.

I sincerely hope that this essay serves you, that you understand the spirit in which I wrote it. I am, of course, nervous to share it - so thank you for holding me so tenderly.

Amie.