In the past, the barrier to writing a novel was set quite high. Literacy wasn’t as common, writing instruments could be extremely expensive, publishers weren’t as accessible to common folk, and having the time for writing was even more of a luxury than it is today. So, though becoming a novelist was difficult to pull off, if you were able to, you’d likely get published and make some kind of money from it. And even if you didn’t, your access and ability likely made you well off enough to care for yourself.
Today’s publishing scene is a wholly opposite situation. Most Americans have access to the tools and knowledge necessary to write as well as means to get in touch with publishers, but the competition has increased exponentially. Many authors we meet with have the dream of writing full time. Don’t we all? But is it possible today? That’s what we’re here to explore.
Getting Paid for Short Stories
I could talk about novels all day long. So, before I do that, I want to be sure to address the shorter side of fiction. The average short story is 5-10 thousand words. So, you could produce a story a week if you wrote at a NaNoWriMo pace with 40 hours a week set aside to do it. Not impossible, but it is very unlikely long term.
If you’re aiming for paying publishers, the average contract is about $650 per short story. That means you could make $33,800 per year if you manage to write and sell a story per week. It’s a meager living, but it actually works out to more than $16 an hour. Not terrible. Of course, the problem comes in where there aren’t 52 publishers that will pay you $650 per story. Even if you were published once per year per publisher (quite impressive), you’d still have to find other sources of income.
Enter writing competitions. The average short story contest has a $25 entry fee and a prize of $1000, equaling out to $50,700 per year if you win every single one. But some contests go up to $10k for first prize, which could help pad your total. Flash fiction competitions are even more lucrative per word at an average of $750 for less than 1,000 words. 52 of these a year would earn you $39,000 per year. More than traditional publishing, but also more risky.
Of course, even combined, you’re unlikely to see 52 stories published in a year. But you could publish some and put the rest toward a short story collection. Maybe you’d want to publish those traditionally.
Traditional Publishing Advances
Whether you’ll receive a $10,000 advance or $100,000 for a novel as a debut author can be a bit of a crap shoot. You can find some data online saying that publishers pay certain amounts for debut authors in each genre, but that’s changing. Runaway literary fiction hits like the Goldfinch and All the Light We Cannot See have publishers betting more on previously overlooked genres as well.
That said, the likelihood of you receiving a six-figure advance as a debut author is unlikely, but that may be to your advantage. If two books, one with a $15k advance and another $100k, each sell 15,000 copies, the smaller advance will be seen as a success, while the larger will likely barely break even. This makes the author with the smaller advance more likely to publish again with the same publisher. However, it’s also clear that good publishers will spend more in marketing, publicizing, and promoting a book with a bigger advance because they have a bigger investment to earn back.
At the same writing pace as your short stories, a 70,000 word novel would take you about three months to finish. Your ability to sell one novel is approximately the same as three months of short stories, but overall it is more lucrative per word to write a novel with a $10,000 advance than all the 12 short stories written in the same time period combined.
But what about when you are earning royalties, you might ask. Don’t worry, that’s next.
Book Royalties for Traditional Publishing
As said before, writing a novel at a NaNoWriMo pace is more lucrative than doing the same for short stories with the advance alone, and it’s a good thing, too, because 7 in 10 novels don’t earn out their advance, or make up the investment the publisher puts in the author. The average published book only sells 500 copies, and more than half overall sell fewer than 100 copies.
But let’s pretend you’re one of the lucky few who sells more than the average 6,500 copies to earn out. You’ll likely receive something between 15-35% of revenue. If your book sells 25,000 copies, you’ll bring home approximately $62,000. That’s a reasonable wage in most of the U.S. at $29 per hour for the year. Still, it’s a stretch. Less than 5% of published titles each year accomplish it.
Those blockbusters that make authors into millionaires, they are as uncommon as rising to out-earn Jennifer Anniston in acting. Last year, 500 titles of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold more than 100,000 copies. That’s about 0.04% of titles that make it to market, and they earned about $300,000 in royalties. But even that can be misleading. Most of those titles are actually classics that have been selling for years as high school teachers continue to assign To Kill a Mockingbird.
How much your novel earns once it’s picked up by a publisher is largely out of your hands. The most you can do is write the best novel you can and hope you get a passionate team behind you. That is, unless you decide to forego traditional publishing altogether.
Self-Publishing Profits
When you’re planning to self-publish your novel, you get a lot more control over every aspect of the marketing and publishing of your story. You get to decide how much to invest up front in marketing, cover design, independent editing, and more, and you get to choose what constitutes a success that allows you to keep publishing as you move forward. That said, it’s always most lucrative to run your self-publishing like a business, and a good editorial partner will have resources to help you cut costs on your publishing journey.
You also get a lot more share of the profits of your book. Authors who publish through Amazon’s Kindle program can earn 70% royalties on books priced between $3 and $10 and 35% on books that fall outside of that range. You won’t receive an advance for your time spent writing, but you will earn a bigger share of the profits overall. And authors that have the most read pages for their genre in a given month receive a $25,000 bonus from Amazon that can be used as an advance for your next novel.
Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t publish the likelihood of success for its authors like the traditional publishing world. But the good news is that less time spent querying means more available time to market and bring those numbers up for your story. Still, we believe that the chances of earning an annual pay check are still relatively low. But the chances of earning back your investment is pretty good!
The average self-publishing author spends $3,000 bringing their book to market. If you’ve written a novel selling for 9.99, you’ll only need 429 copies sold to break even, which is less than the average number of copies a book sells. If you only break 500, you’ll end up with a profit of $500. But if you’re wanting to earn yourself the equivalent of a $10,000 author advance, you’ll need to reach 1,859 copies sold. Not undoable, but much more of a stretch. It’s likely to take about as much time marketing as sending the average number of queries. But in the end, you’ll be guaranteed to be published, and this year may be a prime time to self-publish with less competition.
So, is it still possible to make writing fiction a full-time job? Not usually. But has it ever? Just like acting, it has always been uncommon for authors to be more than starving artists. Overall, it can be just as difficult to make ends meet these days as in the past. The circumstances just look a little different. In order to make it happen, you’ll likely need several years of additional support from other income to make ends meet. But sometimes, it’s worth all extra headache because in the end you’ll have a book on your shelf and a community of readers. It's okay to have a dream. And in the meantime, you get to write. Isn’t it glorious torture?
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