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Sometimes, people—friends—make remarks to me, well-meaning ones, that show me they assume I make a living from book sales. They know I’m a writer, they know I’ve written books; ergo, my income must come from those books. It’s a logical assumption, on the surface. Teachers teach, cleaners clean, plumbers plumb, so writers…write, right? For a living?
That’s when I have to say—yeah, nah, it doesn’t work like that.
The notion of an advance, in particular, is often misunderstood outside of publishing and the music industry, which are about the only two industries that use them so extensively. An advance is a ‘market signal’: it’s a translation into cold, hard cash of the commercial expectations that a publisher (or record label) has for any given book (or record), in advance of its release. The advances that make news are the rare, enormous sums paid to the Barack Obamas of this world—existing members of the ruling class with accumulated power and wealth, to whom publishers hand over fistfuls of millions. But these really are the outliers.
There are many problems with advances, and one is that the sums involved are rarely spoken about, as if that were rude (it isn’t). Writers don’t generally know what other writers are being paid in advance by their publishers; we don’t know, for instance, what other, comparable writers are being paid for other, comparable books in the same genre or subject area, and without knowing, everyone is left to guess as to what they should expect to be offered as an advance by a publisher. If you have an agent then this might go better for you, as agents are paid to know, rather than guess, what a good or bad offer from a publisher is. They know the market. Agents are also paid to make the kind of financial negotiations with a publisher that you, as an author, might feel too uncertain or powerless to make, because you want your book published and are trying not to piss off the publisher. (The power imbalance is real.) I should probably point out here that I’ve so far signed three book contracts without an agent, and only acquired an agent last year after being approached by one for the first time in my career. This is partly a quirk of Australian publishing, where the industry is so small that having an agent matters a lot less than it would in the northern hemisphere.
The advances that make news are the rare, enormous sums paid to the Barack Obamas of this world—but these really are the outliers.
Secrecy is one problem is with advances: it prevents writers from knowing the material conditions in which we’re actually working, and how we might improve these conditions collectively. According to a 2021 survey by the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), which is the professional member body for Australian authors—but is not a union—a staggering ‘58 per cent of respondents indicated they received no advance for their work.’ Furthermore:
80.6 per cent of respondents received advances under $5,000. Only 13 per cent of respondents reported receiving an advance over $10,000; a marginal decrease from 14.6 per cent in 2020.
In plain terms, almost no author in Australia is being paid an advance that constitutes a liveable income—what you’re getting, if you’re lucky, is one or two month’s rent.
Another problem, perhaps an even bigger problem than advances being paltry (or non-existent) in the first place, is that an advance is really a kind of loan, not an outright payment (and by no means a wage). It works like this: if a publisher pays you a $5,000 advance for a book, you as the author have to earn that money back before you are paid any royalties for your book sales. And most crucially, you have to earn the advance back at your royalty rate.
Let’s say you’ve received a $5,000 advance, and your book is gonna retail for AU$24.95, and your royalty rate is the standard 10 per cent of the retail price minus GST (in Australia). $24.95 minus GST is $22.45, which means your royalty rate is $2.24 per copy sold (and only per copy sold, you’ll get big fat nothing for unsold copies). You’re gonna have to sell (divide 5,000 by 2.24) 2,232 copies of your book just to earn out (as it’s called) your advance, effectively paying your advance back to your publisher in royalties.
Almost no author in Australia is being paid an advance that constitutes a liveable income—what you’re getting, if you’re lucky, is one or two month’s rent.
Now, provided you earn out your advance, you’re at $0: you don’t owe the publisher money anymore, but, because you’ve been paying back your advance, you haven’t been paid any royalties yourself on those initial sales of 2,232 copies. (And in Australia, if you’ve even sold 2,000 copies of a literary title then you’re doing well.) You’ll get paid your $2.24 per sale only after you’ve cleared your debt to the publisher. (If for some reason your book doesn’t get published after you’ve handed in the manuscript—if, for instance, there’s a legal problem with something you wrote—you might well be on the hook for paying back your advance despite the fact that the publisher won’t publish your book.) Meanwhile, you’ll be paying income tax on your entire advance, even though it’s a really weird and contingent form of ‘income’. Fun times!
Even more fun: to quote that ASA survey again, 40 per cent of respondents indicated that they did not earn out their advance—in other words, they ended up in debt to their publisher for a book that didn’t sell as many copies as the publisher thought it would.
It’s worth bearing in mind here that large advances—the headline-generating kind—can be a ‘too good to be true’ proposition, particularly for debut authors. When I hear about a ‘promising’ debut author payed a large advance by a corporate publisher on the basis of hype, say an advance in the high six-figure range, I tend to feel sorry for them, even if that seems counterintuitive. If said author doesn’t earn that big money back in sales then they’re screwed, to put it bluntly. The publisher might make an author pay back the advance, or part of it, anyway, despite the lack of sales, in order to recoup their costs. (An advance is more like a bank loan than you might think.) The author probably won’t get another contract with that publisher, and perhaps not with any other publisher, either, because they’re seen in commercial terms as a failure.
Publishers, in effect, are betting on you, and if the bet doesn’t pay out then they won’t gamble on you again. This is another argument in favour of advances being transparent and regulated, so that every writer gets paid a decent but not an insane amount, rather than a few writers being paid millions and many writers getting nothing, or some writers getting heaps and then ending up in hock to their publisher when the glittery dream of a bestseller doesn’t come true. Or, you know, we could just burn the whole advance system to the ground and pay authors wages, instead, which they don’t have to recoup for their publisher? There’s an idea.
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In the eight months from April 2021 to December 2021, my second book, No Document, sold a total of 1183 copies in Australia. This means that at my royalty rate of $2.45, which is 10 per cent of the recommended retail price (RRP$26.95) minus GST, the book earned $2,898.35 in royalties. Did all of that money go straight to me? No, because Giramondo paid me a A$4,000 advance for the book, which is money I had to earn back for them first.
I want to emphasise how absolutely average, how commonplace, in the context of Australian publishing, these sorts of numbers are.
Along with book sales, what helped to pay back my A$4,000 advance was the sale of North American publishing rights to Transit Books for US$2,000. Giramondo keeps 20 per cent of that US$2,000, because they have worldwide rights to the book and 20 per cent is their cut of any rights sales to other territories (bearing in mind that Giramondo only publishes in Australia and Aotearoa, which means that No Document has to be acquired, in the language of publishers, by a US publisher to see publication in the US, and so on and so forth for every separate territory). Had I had an agent broker this rights deal, they would have also taken a cut, but I didn’t: the sale of US rights was negotiated directly by Giramondo, so the remaining 80 per cent of the US$2,000 that Transit paid for the right to publish the book in North America went to me, the author—or rather, it went to paying off the balance of my Australian advance, getting me back to $0 with Giramondo. I earned out my advance.
The balance of $1,029.73 is what I earned in 2021 royalties after I paid back my A$4,000 advance to Giramondo through a combination of book sales and the US rights sale to Transit. $1,029.73 is what I have been paid in royalties so far, for a book that took me nearly four years to write.
I want to emphasise how absolutely average, how commonplace, in the context of Australian publishing, these sorts of numbers are. $4,000 is, objectively, not a lot of money for an advance, but given the size of the publisher in question (tiny) and the kind of book that No Document is (extremely uncommercial), it’s not bad—in fact, I remember being pleasantly surprised that I was offered $4,000 as advance, having expected something more like $2,000. Recall if you will that ASA survey I quoted above: more than 80 per cent of Australian authors are paid less than $5,000 as an advance, and more than 50 per cent are paid no advance at all.
It may sound as if I’m trying to justify the conditions of book publishing here, as if it’s cool and fine and sustainable for authors to be paid only a few thousand dollars for books that take them years to write. To be absolutely clear, I don’t think this is a fine state of affairs by any means. My point is that it’s ordinary: beyond the glitz and distraction of the very few authors who are bestsellers, and who really do make a lot of money, and get paid massive advances, this is the reality for the majority of working writers. Publishing is not an industry magically exempt—because books!—from the stratification of wealth and resources that defines the rest of life under capitalism. Quite the opposite. Publishing, the music industry, the art world: these largely wage-free zones (for the artist) are in some sense the purest iteration of market logic. The worth of your art is the money it makes when sold—nothing more, nothing less.
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[Editor’s note: In a statement to KYD, the Australian Society of Authors note that in Australia, the circumstances in which a publisher may demand the repayment of an advance are limited, and are typically defined in the publishing agreement— for example, the failure to deliver the manuscript.]
This is an edited extract from Decorum Serves the Rich: a zine about author income, which is available in full at demandspopular.net.
