Why Some Books Don’t Earn Out—and Advice from Alice Hoffman
I wrestle with money and meet an artistic hero
A few months ago I woke up to a strange document in my email. Living on the west coast now, I’m always waking up to news, always stirring after people on the east coast have been up and sending emails for hours. This missive included an attachment: my latest royalty statement.
Royalty statements are difficult to understand. They don’t come with instructions, and I’ve had to do my research and ask for help in order to parse their many lines and numbers.
In short, when your agent sells a book, after the book is published you will receive quarterly accounting statements about it. Most traditionally published books receive a monetary advance, which is now distributed to the writer in two, three, four or even more parts. Once all the parts of the advance have been doled out, what money do you make from your book?
Sometimes, nothing. Writers only receive royalties once (or if) they’ve earned out, which means that a book has sold enough copies that it “pays back” its publisher the advance paid to its author. A majority of published books never earn out. The number of books that must be sold to earn out is based on the advance received, which can also vary hugely, and like most things in publishing and in the world at large is extremely biased, ableist, and everything else awful. Of course you would be thrilled to earn a huge book advance, but you also should be cautious, as this means your chance of earning additional money for your book via royalties could be lower.
Earning out is actually important for a writer’s career. It lets publishers know this artist is a good bet. This is someone whose work has sold.
I wrote a piece for Publishers Weekly advising writers, especially those of us who are not men and thus already at an earning disadvantage, to save the money from book advances, because no other income from a book is guaranteed. When I wrote that piece, my first novel Road Out of Winter had been accepted but not yet published (it also had a different title).
Road Out of Winter was published in the fall of 2020, and despite winning an award, getting good press, and being on sale lately, it has yet to earn out. But my second novel, Trashlands, published for the first time less than two years ago, already has. That was the strange line in my royalty statement, the line which suddenly had numbers—three figure numbers!—on it. I was receiving my first-ever royalty check for fiction.
Why did one of my books earn out and one didn’t? Why do some books never earn out?
For me, I can chalk it up to two things.