{"id":7919217,"date":"2024-05-01T10:39:51","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T14:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/2024\/05\/01\/book-advances\/"},"modified":"2024-05-01T10:55:30","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T14:55:30","slug":"book-advances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/2024\/05\/01\/book-advances\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Advances"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;&#8230;Let&rsquo;s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book.<\/p>\n<p>Not impossible by any means.<\/p>\n<p>The thing is, and this is the point I think <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elysian.press\/p\/no-one-buys-books\">Griffin<\/a> should lean on more heavily: <em>&ldquo;advance&rdquo; is a misleading term<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Advances don&rsquo;t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$25,000 at contract signing;<\/li>\n<li>$25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;<\/li>\n<li>$25,000 at publication of the hardcover;<\/li>\n<li>$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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for <em>Breaking Bread with the Dead<\/em> my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.)<\/p>\n<p>In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book.<\/p>\n<p>Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months.<\/p>\n<p>And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication.<\/p>\n<p>So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on.<\/p>\n<p>The moral:<\/p>\n<p>Writing books can be a nice <em>supplement<\/em> to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to <em>replace<\/em> your day job, even if you&rsquo;re in the top 5% percent of sales.<\/p>\n<p>That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn&rsquo;t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest &hellip; <em>not<\/em>, as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elysian.press\/p\/no-one-buys-books\">Griffin<\/a> keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers.<\/p>\n<p>You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing.<\/p>\n<p>Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people <em>in the entire world<\/em> manage that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>&ndash; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.ayjay.org\/advancing\/\">Alan Jacobs<\/a><\/p>\n<p>| #Books #Publishing #Writing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;&#8230;Let&rsquo;s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: &ldquo;advance&rdquo; is a misleading term. Advances don&rsquo;t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":[],"categories":[157],"tags":[156,791,172],"views":325,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7919217"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7919224,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919217\/revisions\/7919224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7919217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7919217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himy.ca.muslimwiki.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7919217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}