What an author earns is not exactly a needed mystery.
How much any author earns is a number that can seem as sacrosanct as the codes to the nuclear football that’s always within steps of the President. “I could tell you what I made,” some authors might as well say, “but then I’d have to kill you.” But some do tell, and we are all better for it — if only to see that the only common element in book publishing is making a book. Not even words are the common element, considering the coloring book craze.
Most 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 publishers. Some might do something as dismissive as save the best cover designer for other authors they’re publishing.There are too many variables. A Bureau of Labor Statistics survey report about writer compensation, used by a former agent, reports that writers earn, on average, $62,000 or so each year.
Gee, that looks great. When you pay attention to who comprises that BLS number, you see something else. Many, many of those surveyed who list themselves as writers on their taxes are not book authors. The non-book writers include
Magazine article writers
Copywriters creating ads and sales literature
Freelancers writing work-for-hire materials
Technical writers creating manuals and white papers
Writers creating content for websites, blogs, and social media.
Not fantasies; those are BLS facts about who’s a writer. But our ex-agent wants to stick to his BLS figure — even though the best pay for any writer is most likely to be in any one of those other five writing jobs. The best pay of all is as an employee, and that lifts up the BLS payment average, too.
So no, BLS is not a more reliable author salary survey. For reliability, there’s an organization dedicated to writers creating books, the Author’s Guild.
The Guild went into business more than 100 years ago when publishers got famous for not paying authors as promised. One fellow, Henry Holt, swore he’d never extend a contract to an author. Handshakes only. The Guild formed up to represent authors, so business could be above board.
The AG survey respondents do include some book authors who didn’t get paid last year, but these details of how many evade our former agent. He only says there are many unpaid authors in the survey. The AG payment average is about $20,000 yearly for all writing-related work. That includes teaching, coaching, and editing. AG authors surveyed earn about $6,000 a year for writing books alone.
The gravest error in the exhaustive salary roundup, though, describes authors who publish their own work. You can find the phrase “vanity publishing” in the article, which is kind of a dog whistle for “traditional is the only real publishing.” Over and over, a figure of less than $1,000 a year for what an author-publisher will earn gets tossed around. That number flows from nothing that I can see. There’s no good reason to sniff at author-publishing like this — unless you make your living trying to lead people away from it. Like a former agent would.
