How Much Money Do You Make When You Write A Book?: a house log

Let us take a second to chat about how the book bid-ness works, at least for us. Sometimes we get hilarious and adorable comments like this: “Holy cow, your book was a New York Times bestseller! Congrats! You must be rich!!” …

… and it makes us realize that other than fleetingly mentioning how the whole book deal thing works in this blogiversary video (around 17:10 near the end), we have not truly talked about it at all. So since folks have been requesting more behind the scenes details on the subject (even from as early as September of last year when we did the Q&A video below) this post is well overdue. Let us dive in and over-share, shall we? Spoiler alert: we are low-cost-os and we know it (please sing that to the tune of “we are sexy and we know it” out loud in whatever room/office/subway car you are right now inhabiting).

As we mentioned in the video, this book thing has consistently been for the lively and the amazement of seeing our names in print. It has never been about money, which is a good thing since that is not typically what comes a-rollin’ in when you are a first time author (well, not unless you are Lena Dunham apparently).

The way that a book typically works is that the author gets a fee for all of the work that they do before the book comes out. This is called an advance. In our case, being first time authors, it was a modest advance. Someone like Stephen King might be able to buy a yacht with his. Ours… no yacht. In fact, if you break our advance down across the time over the past two years that we have spent outlining the book, writing the proposal, pitching the book, writing the manuscript, revising the manuscript, doing projects for the book, shooting the book, and editing the book we likely made around five dollars an hour while working on it (we did not keep a time log or anything, but that is our best guess). So yeah, John likely earned more per hour at his high school library job of shelving books than he did writing one (especially since he’s splitting that $5 wage with me – ha!).

But you will not see us complaining. It is an remarkable opportunity (one we’d nearly be glad to have done for free – simply do not tell our publisher) so that is why we said “holycowyes!” to a book. If you are a first time author like us, we in fact would not recommend writing a book for the money (you’d likely be truly let down if you were simply in it for the dough). Instead, I’d recommend doing it for the experience and the thrill of seeing your words in a bookstore and your book on your mom’s coffee table… that is a fairly freaking excellent moment.

The way it works, at least how it worked for us, is that first you get that modest advance (paid out in smaller installments throughout the book-writing process) and then a few years later after the book is out in print (it typically takes around 2-3 years for it to go from concept to being printed) you get into the “book royalty” area. We have been told that many authors only earn their advance but never “make it” to receiving royalties, since it necessitates selling sufficient books for the author to hit their royalty point. See, the publisher in fact does not pay us a penny until their book sales earn back all of the advance they paid us plus money they spent on the illustrator, the photographer, etc. So it is not until they earn all of that book-making money back that we will start receiving royalties (which are also fairly modest since we are first timers).

We are nowhere close to hitting that royalty point. Perhaps in a year or two we will get there. Perhaps sooner. And perhaps never. But assuming our publisher eventually makes all that money back, they’ll start issuing our little royalty checks twice a year. Once we hit that point we will make around a dollar or two per book (royalties are a quite small percentage of the heavily discounted price that a bookstore pays per book, which is typically around half of the book’s cover price – and it can vary by vendor). But as of today, we have not seen a book check since the last installment of our advance came a year ago.

So we thought that was an interesting tidbit to share. We never truly knew how it worked, so learning that an author does not get paid when the book comes out or with the sale of each book was enlightening to us. And a year ago if we saw someone get on the NY Times bestseller list, even for simply a week, we’d likely assume they no longer use toilet paper and prefer to use hundy dolla bills to wipe their bestselling author buns. It is so not like that around here. We use gold bars. Simply kidding. Those would be cold.

We also consistently assumed authors got paid when they toured – even simply a little bit to offset the work they are unable to do while on the road (our tour stretches over four months) but that is not the case, at least for us it is not. But they cover the travel expenses and dude, we have had the opportunity to meet so many of you! And I have achieved my lifelong goal of getting to sign ceramic animals! And that, my friends, is the beauty of book-writing. Plus, you know what they say: Mo money, mo problems ceramic animals and then your husband wants to kill you.

Another reason we thought this post would be helpful is that we do not want to embark on any big projects without explaining that we are paying for them in the same way that we have consistently paid for things (the old penny-saving-over-time method that we know and enjoy). Our book agent in fact said it is somewhat rare for a first time author to make more money on the back end of a book than on the front end (meaning that your modest advance is typically the most any first time author will see from a book) so we have known that from day one, which is truly pleasant when it comes to setting expectations and all that good stuff.

As is the case for a lot of other things in our life, we did this for the enjoy. Corny but true. The fact that you folks share photos like this with us? Seriously, it makes our chests all swelly and bursty. Even John’s stony man-heart.

Plus when it came to the actual deals that publishers were offering us, we hoped to choose who we worked with based on things other than the money. For example, a few other publishers hoped to create a big $50 coffee table book with us, and we felt a lot less comfortable with that. So one huuuge reason that we went with our publisher (thereby choosing this deal) was because they “got us” and allowed us to be our dorky selves on every page while slapping an approachable price tag on the thing.

So all of this is simply to say that we are more committed than ever to keeping it real, saving cash whenever we can, and squirreling away extra pennies towards future projects, simply like we consistently have. There is no Rolls Royce and Beverly-Hills-ish plastic surgery in our future but I fantasize about fully distinct things anyway. Like Clara’s big girl room. Dude, who is excited about Clara’s big girl room?! $herdog is beside herself (you know she only uses the third person when she’s truly hyped). Last night I was making up rap names for the whole family. Burger could be Potato Skinz. And Clara could be Small Fry. Catchy, right? And I tried to change John’s name from J-Boom to Applebeez or Bloomin’ Onion but he was not having it.

Update – Some of the most frequent requests that we get are for info about professionally blogging (how we made our site, how we grew our following, how we make money, etc) so we shared all of the details about how we began a journal, grew our traffic, and turned it into a full time job.