Hey Colin!

I am not personally interested in writing, but I love reading and I am curious about the publishing world.

I often wonder how difficult it is to make a living as an author. To my knowledge, an author can either self-publish (mostly through e-book platforms) or close a contract with a publishing house. While the former gives you a higher earning per sold copy, the latter may help you gain visibility and expand your audience, although offering you a smaller royalty rate. What’s your experience on this?

Also, financially speaking, how much difference does the book format (paper, digital or audiobook) make to the author?

Thank you and take care,

Pietro

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Hey Pietro-

The short answer is that it’s incredibly difficult to make a full-time living as an author, regardless of one’s passion and any advantages one might have when getting started.

Precise figures are tricky to find and vary by market, but some available data show that the average successful, publisher-published author in the UK will make about £10,500/year, which translates to around $12,390/year.

The Authors Guild 2018 Author Income Survey found that authors in the US are faring even worse, with a median income of $6,080 in 2017, which is down 42% from 2009.

And those are the lucky ones: most authors are paid average advances by their publisher (under $50,000, but generally closer to $5,000-8,000 for their first books) and will never “pay out” (the advance authors are paid must be earned back through their ~10% share of sales before they are paid royalties), which means they’ll never earn back their advance and thus, never earn royalties—what they get up front is all they’ll ever get from a particular book.

A truism I’ve heard repeated in the indie author world is that you’re one of the lucky ones if you manage to accrue over 100 lifetime sales of your book, because the market is so competitive, and the vast majority of authors will not manage even that. And though the financial side of indie publishing is a bit more favorable in the long tail than going the traditional route—if you price and platform appropriately, you can sometimes earn 70% of the sticker price of your books, rather than closer to 10% via the traditional route—you also then lack the implied credibility of having made it past the gatekeepers of the publishing world, which makes it trickier to get press, visibility, and respect.

My experience thus far has been limited to the indie world: I’ve had a few opportunities to take the other path, and it hasn’t been worth it for me to do so, yet, though the right opportunity may come along at some point and change my mind on the matter—neither option is inherently better or worse, just different.

That said, I’m in a relatively privileged position when it comes to having that option, because I’ve been building my online presence, my audience and reputation, for over a decade: which isn’t a guarantee of success for any particular book I publish, but it does mean I have a group of people who know my work and who are therefore more likely to give the books I publish a chance—not a luxury everyone enjoys, nor an advantage that’s quick or easy to establish.

I typically tell people who ask me about getting into publishing that they should make sure that they enjoy the work enough to do it even if they never make a cent, because there’s a significant chance that the book they write—no matter how brilliant and valuable it is—will never sell more than a few copies. Which is a frustrating thought, but a realistic one, unfortunately, so it’s prudent to ensure that the writing of the book is valuable unto itself, rather than being emotionally invested in the distribution of the book, if you want to make a career out of authoring.

There are still success stories, of course, and industry unknowns sometimes write a great novel, get an agent via some means, and then end up with a high-end, impressively lucrative career, essentially out of nothing.

This is not common, though. The majority of even the most brilliant works ever produced are never seen by more than a few dozen people.

It’s important, then, to write because you love writing. Attempt to make your work financially viable, certainly, but also infest in alternative skills and career options so that you aren’t relying on an incredibly unforgiving industry for rent money—even if that means working as a barista or coder to support your writing habit: there’s nothing wrong with becoming your own financial backer, your own patron.

Regarding your question about formats:

The popular format of the day changes semi-regularly, and can also change based on the genre in which you’re publishing.

My experience was that paperbacks were dominant when I started writing full-time, back in 2009, with ebooks on the rise and audiobooks still an expensive-to-produce novelty.

A few years in, ebooks became the most popular format (this was when the Kindle and its competitors were upgraded and rapidly gaining market share) with paperbacks in a slow decline and audiobooks gaining a tiny, barely noticeable chunk of the market.

Over the last couple of years, audiobooks have become the biggest sales channel for me and many other authors I know, with paperbacks gaining over previous years and ebooks becoming the still-substantial, but somewhat stagnant, incumbent format.

That said, most of my bestselling work is nonfiction, and I know people who write primarily fictional works who have seen different format-based ebbs and flows.

There are advantages and disadvantages inherent in each of these mediums, the larger movements of the overall market and technology sector influences what’s popular and when, and the work itself is a huge factor in determining who’s work sells in what format, and to whom.

The relative advantages and disadvantages, economically, have also shifted over the years, and will no doubt continue to do so.

At the moment, I personally make the most profit from selling audiobooks, but it does cost additional time and money to produce an audiobook, while formatting a paperback and an ebook is a relatively simple endeavor, once you’ve got a finished book ready to go. Those profits, then, will sometimes prove lucrative, but will sometimes barely, or fail to, cover the costs of that additional production work.

One of the major downsides of the audiobook world at the moment is that Amazon owns so much of it (about a quarter to a third, depending on the region) that they can demand exclusivity and tend to get it.

I sell my work through Amazon’s Audible platform, and if I’m exclusive with them I make 40% of the sticker price when I sell an audiobook, but if I go non-exclusive and am able to sell my work on other platforms, my share of Audible sales drops to 25%. Those numbers are partly reliant on the fact that I produce my own audiobooks: folks who have to hire narrators and producers sometimes pay a percentage of sales to those narrators and producers, and authors working with publishers often take home substantially less, as a dominant chunk of that income goes to them.

So to summarize, it’s not at all easy to make a full-time living as an author, and most of us, as a result, have other things that we also do to both increase our book sales, and make other sorts of income alongside those book sales.

The medium in which our books are purchased does matter, but the degree to which it matters, and the difference in profit between different formats changes over time and based on our expenses and relationships with publishers—so there’s no single, best format to buy if you’re hoping to make sure more of your money makes it back to the author.

Your best bet in most cases is to reach out to the author directly, via email or social media, and ask them if they have a preference. In some cases it won’t particularly matter to them, but I can tell you from experience that it’s nice to have people ask because it shows that they care enough about you and the work you’re producing to do so.