Money – and the earning of it as an author – is still a mysterious business. Maybe that’s partly because earnings can vary hugely from author to author, and book to book, so there really is no One Size Fits All. An agent will not know how much an author is guaranteed to earn on their first or next books (although they might be able to take an informed guess!) or throughout their career, at the point they begin working together with an author. There are so many variables (more on those later) that it’s usually impossible for an agent to say, ‘this book will earn us millions/peanuts!’. But as agents we are very aware that all of us have bills to pay, and we want to support our authors earning as much as possible.

In the world of non-fiction, there are often more tangible factors to support an advance for a book: the idea itself and how ‘of the moment’ it is – and, of course, the author’s platform as expert on the topic, if relevant: i.e. does the author come with a ready-built audience or following that might translate to book sales, which publishers can factor in when offering. But for fiction it can be hard to estimate potential earnings from the outset.

An author can have many avenues for income, and an agent works to support and increase those (see Roya’s piece on rights). Most authors will not only earn from their book deals but also from some of the following: TV/film/radio/theatre, events (speaking, panels, chairing), teaching, mentoring, judging competitions, writing articles for press and online platforms, and sometimes from brand endorsement.

As agents, we usually start earning for our authors with the sale of their first book to a publisher, most commonly in the UK. To give you an idea of the structure of a book deal and how you might earn from it (a very general idea! There are more detailed breakdowns on the Society of Authors’ website) let’s start at the beginning, and on home turf (in the UK!):

Once an author and their agent have worked on either a novel or non-fiction book idea to the point when it’s ready to submit to publishers, the book heads out on submission and money conversations kick off when a first offer is made by an editor.

An editor will usually let an agent know they’re keen on the book as soon as they’ve read it (or the proposal), and after circulating the book with colleagues to get their vote of confidence too, will take the book to an Acquisitions Meeting (held weekly at most publishers) to get sign off on offering from the many other people that matter: Sales, Marketing, Publicity, Digital, Audio, Production, and more; at smaller and/or independent publishers, decisions on whether to offer for a book might be taken by one or two individuals, instead, but with similar concerns in mind. Agents will use anything possible in their armoury to suggest the book is a potentially good earner, e.g. we will use the most favourable comparison titles in our submission letter to editors, to indicate to their sales team that this is going to fly, e.g ‘It’s THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB meets Jack Reacher’!

If the editor has the nod from all the relevant people in-house, they then go and look at £££ – often these take the form of predicted profit and loss sheets based on sales of similar published books, and likely costs of production – and cost up a financial offer for the agent and author. Traditionally, the editor then sends an agent ‘the offer’, i.e. the advance they’re willing to pay for the book, and the deal memo to break down the key terms of a proposed contract.

Deal memos usually include the following:

The grant of rights to the publisher: are they buying UK and Commonwealth rights to publish the book, and is that including or excluding Canada (a key market for the US publishers, so we tend to hold it back if separating out US rights), or is the offer for World English language rights (excluding translation), or World All Language rights (every country around the world, including translation rights)?
The main royalties the author will be earning on sales of the book in the UK, across print and e-book editions, and sometimes audiobook too.
The key sub-rights earnings, eg if the book is sold to a third party such as newspapers for extracts, or large print publishers for production of a LP edition into libraries. Most commonly there are splits on sub-rights sales that start at 50/50 and increase from there, e.g. if your UK publisher sold Large Print rights to a third-party large print publisher, you might see 60% of that advance payment paid to you under the terms of your contract and set against your advance, and your publisher would keep 40%
The advance and how it will be broken down into instalments. For example, if I receive a final and best offer of £10,000 for a novel next week (the 3rd week of March), here’s how those payment stages might look:
Your 1st instalment will be paid on signature of the contract - once your agent has accepted an offer (subject to contract) on your behalf, it may then take a couple of months for the contract to be passed back-and-forth between publisher and agency, who often have a template agreement but might still negotiate or fine-tune your own contract until it’s ready for signature. In some cases, a substantial contract (American contracts can often run to 40 pages!) may take several months to get to signature stage. Let’s hope for a smooth conversation here and estimate signature in mid-May. Payment: £2,500, end May/early June 2022
Your 2nd instalment will be paid on delivery and acceptance of your book. Although you will have an official delivery date in your contract, the exact timing of the release of your delivery advance can differ from publisher to publisher, and book to book: for many, the ‘acceptance’ stage may come when you have edited your book with your publisher to an almost final stage. For some (non-fiction) books, you may have to wait until the book has been read and approved by a legal team, or if you’re quoting a lot from other texts then you may need to wait for permissions for those quotes to have been cleared. For a few, your delivery advance might be paid not long after you first send the book to your editor: this is usually the privilege of more established authors who deliver and edit dependably! It’s generally understood that your book will be more-or-less ready to go to the printer at the point the delivery advance is released by your publisher.
Let’s imagine in this case that the publisher wished to publish in spring 2024. In which case, the author might deliver an edited manuscript of the novel within a few months of signing their contract, it could go back-and-forth a couple more times, then be sent to a copy-editor and the advance instalment released at the point where the text is near-final. Payment: £2,500 December 2022
Your 3rd instalment will be paid on first publication: whether hardback, paperback or electronic edition, your publication advance should be due to you as soon as your book first goes on sale. If this book is a debut novel, then publishers will often prefer a long lead time pre-publication in which to send out copies and get buzz going around the book, the lead time being the period between a first widely-shareable copy of the text and first publication date. So, in 2023 there may be no further income on this deal from the UK publisher, while proof copies of the novel are being sent out to generate excitement for the book and get anticipation growing ahead of spring 2024 publication. Payment on publication of hardback: £2,500, March 2024
If there is a 4th instalment, it is most commonly paid on publication of a second edition, i.e. if you’ve had a hardback copy of your book published first, a paperback edition might follow 9-12 months later. Let’s assume here that paperback publication is spring 2025. Payment on publication of paperback: March 2025.

As your agent, we work to ensure that you’re paid as much as possible, and we discuss the payment stages with you at the point that publishers are offering so you have a realistic sense of when you will receive income from your book deal.

This is how your (UK) book deal might take a couple of years or more to pay out its full advance. As soon as the book goes on sale it will be earning royalties on every copy sold, which start chipping away at the £10,000 paid to you by the publisher. An advance is all yours to take and run with, once you’ve been paid it, but it stands as a figure to earn back via sales once your book is out in the world: put bluntly, this book will need to earn £10k via hardback, paperback, e-book, audio, and other methods, before you see any further income paid to you from your publisher. It’s still the case that most books won’t earn out their advances for a while after publication, if at all.

I appreciate that this isn’t exactly cheering news… So, in the meantime, we look to other revenue streams for our authors. We will try to sell many of our authors’ books into the US, too. It’s obvious that there is a big and healthy readership there, although we can sometimes be stymied by our books being deemed ‘too British’ or ‘too local’, meaning that not every book will work for an American readership. For instance, a beautifully-written grief memoir should be able to strike a note for readers everywhere, but the US will have scores of their own writers covering this topic too.

Our fantastic rights agents take our books overseas and press them into the hands/inboxes of editors around the world who might translate and publish them. Those additional deals in, for example, France, Japan, Brazil, Croatia and many more, will help to top up an author’s income and those deals can come at the most unexpected and welcome of times.

If the UK publisher doesn’t insist on taking audio rights off the table along with print (and many do), there might be the opportunity to place those with an independent audio publisher. Perhaps we could option film or TV rights, or even consider whether the book might work on stage. In a best-case scenario, we might be able to find our author and their book UK, US, audio and translation publishers, and sell TV/film rights to a production company. These advances would be paid out differently (translation and audio publishers often pay 50/50 on signature and publication; an option fee is paid in full upon signature of the contract), meaning further income for authors.

And on those variables I mentioned earlier, here’s why income can be so unpredictable for our authors:

Publishing schedules
We publish books into our own publishing seasons, as a general rule (certainly at the larger publishers): new fiction will arrive from Feb-July; self-help in January; most of the big names (John Grisham/Nigella) in autumn, when they can cut through the busy pre-Christmas period. So, a decision about when your book is published – and you receive your publication advance – will be made according to the time of year it’s likely to receive best publicity, and can fit into a publisher’s schedule of the many other books they will be publishing that year.
Genre
An author may be publishing more than one book a year – for example, if writing romantic fiction and publishing a summer novel and a Christmas novel, like Sue Moorcroft. In that case, the author might be paid 2 x delivery and 2 x publication advances per year (+ signature advance if it’s a year there’s a new multi-book deal!)
Mid-list authors
If an author has been published before, it can be more of a challenge to find them a new publisher, and if their sales haven’t been high then the likely offers on a new book will be lower. However, an author can be successful elsewhere in the world while their books sell more slowly in the UK, so there may be healthier income from a translation publisher.
Pandemics
It’s perhaps unsurprising to learn that the Covid pandemic affected book sales hugely, and this has had a knock-on effect for authors and their income. Previously healthy retailers for books had to close or reduce their book stock – here and overseas – and we’ve yet to see high street and supermarket book-buying return to former levels, even though books have been selling in greater number as a whole. Unfortunately though, certain books and authors did suffer from being published during lockdowns etc., and there’s no doubting that their income was diminished as a result.
Multi-book deals
Sometimes we’re selling more than one book to a publisher, meaning that the signature advance will account for two or more books at once being signed up, and an author’s income is a better-known quantity across the life of the contract. There are pros and cons to signing a multi-book deal as an author and agent, but if it looks like the best thing to do at the point of signing up the first book, then we’ll be setting out your income across an even longer period, and this can offer a tiny bit of stability for authors, in the short term.

It’s worth remembering as a final point that an agent takes commission on the deals they broker for you so for each advance payment the author receives, as a general rule their agent is taking 15% commission in the UK and 20% commission from any overseas deal (standard commission rates for UK-based literary agents). To make this absolutely clear: you should NOT be paying any ‘fees’ to an agent to represent you, we work on a commission-only basis. If you’re approached by an agent who suggests otherwise, it might be worth referring to the Association of Authors’ Agents to check they’re a member/legit.

I hope this piece is helpful: it’s tricky to try and cover all the nuances of an author’s earnings in one (overly-long!) post, but you’re welcome to pose us more questions about this online in our #AskAgent #BFLAOpenWeek sessions on Twitter. And, as an author, the best you can do for yourself is ask an agent questions about money from the very first meeting. As I say, we won’t be able to give you figures and dates at that point, but we will be able to talk you through how hard we will work to earn for you, and the potential extra revenue streams we predict could be successful. Remember: we don’t earn until you do, so we want that income just as much!