Before you know it, the calendar will bring agent-pitching season. Those are the weeks between the end of summer and the year-end holidays. We’re told this is when agents decide what they’ll rep in the months that unfold starting in 2026.
There’s nothing like a retired agent to bring out fantastic financing. More agents are retiring than ever, but that might be due to the massive number of agents drifting about in the market. Lots of them not selling much, in this season. One who retired from the agent business years ago won’t stop telling us all his stories about the finances of publishing.
A popular subject among authors is how much they can earn. There are companies where you can get fired for discussing the salary of someone else. Writing books is supposed to be unlike that, because most book authors are not employees. They are freelancers, as far as the publisher is concerned. The publishers are their partners, and being a publisher is another difficult career to turn into real money.
Self publishing money
It’s possible to earn more than $1,000 in profit as a self publisher. I don’t care much about how likely I am to make more than $1,000, because at least as an author-publisher I can take action to try to get my sales up. In a traditional deal, I might make just as little money, or even less than $1,000, and have nothing to say about how to lift things up going forward. Discounting, bundling, all of that, left in somebody else’s hands. Good people, but underwater a lot of the time. More books to market than time to do so.
Then you don’t get to steer. For example, you might publish a book with an academic university press and lose control over pricing and discounting. You may know how to adjust those on sales sites, too; it’s not rocket science. Lots of us dream about getting traditionally published. Like any venture, there are shortfalls in that kind of outcome, too.
You want to be especially careful about paying for somebody’s coaching who says you’ll get an agent. You can imagine how many problems look like a nail while such a coach swings that kind of hammer. You hear promises that a traditional deal always includes an advance. Ten grand worth of advance. We know better, don’t we? Doesn’t anybody who reads about the industry know that? I don’t think traditional deals usually end up in five-figure or more advances for a single book.
But that former agent wrote an exhaustive column that wants to be a tell-all about author pay. Some it just isn’t true, and other mantras are too simplistic to believe. For example, Margaret Atwood didn’t self-publish The Handmaid’s Tale. She’s among a group of six referenced people who are called, uncharitably as usual, self-publishers. All six are legendary victors in the trade. Just about all couldn’t get an agent or a publisher to invest in their creations.
Atwood is the exception, but the mistake is calling her self-published at all. While a college student in the early 1960s, she self-published a book of poems with several classmates. At her expense, Atwood printed two hundred chapbooks. Back in the 1960s. Not a self-publishing story. When you bend an author’s story like that, it doesn’t help a don’t-publish-yourself premise.
How much you’ll earn
In the other case of earnings fantasy, no, authors do not typically earn less than $1,000 from their self-published books. Too many authors and books are on sale to be able to track anything like that and use the word typical. Some who have money to invest will earn a great deal more than their traditional counterparts.
The truth is that an author-publisher will leap to spending that money if they’ve got it. You can’t say that about all publishers. Some might do something as dismissive as save their best cover designer for other authors they’re publishing. That’s a choice that an author needs to make for themselves.
