Suddenly that $100,000 advance, spread over the course of a year (which would be an incredibly fast turnaround for publishing a book, but let’s go with it) becomes around $60,000 - a decent salary as long as you don’t live in a major city. If you are writing nonfiction and you would like to have it fact-checked, you have to personally pay for that, too. The payments are pretax, so money has to be set aside for that there’s also the agent’s cut, usually 10%–20%.
In most cases, the advance is broken up into three installments, paid upon signing of the contract, filing the full manuscript, and the date of publication. “Like, I expected maybe a few people, the usual good eggs, to be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll say something.’ I did not expect it to reach the likes of Roxane Gay and people outside the YA sphere, because that’s the circle that I usually travel within on social media.”Ī note on how payments work: An advance - which most of these tweets are referencing - is the amount a publisher pays for a book ahead of its publication it’s an advance on the royalties the author could receive from book sales, so it is theoretically a projection of those sales. “I think one of the most surprising things is how far actually went,” McKinney said in a phone interview on Monday. In comparison, white author Lacy Johnson tweeted that her 2018 essay collection, The Reckonings, sold for $215,000. Gay received a $15,000 advance for her 2014 New York Times bestselling essay collection, Bad Feminist. In contrast, white literary fiction author Lydia Kiesling sold her debut novel, The Golden State, for $200,000 a year and a half after publication, she tweeted, she is still “ very far from selling that many books”. Ward, a two-time National Book Award winner for 2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied Sing, tweeted that even after she won the award for the former book, she had to fight for a $100,000 advance for her next book deal. Jemisin, and Kiese Laymon, were frank about the money (or lack thereof) they received for writing their bestselling, critically acclaimed books. The hashtag soon took off as prominent authors, such as Roxane Gay, Jesmyn Ward, Shea Serrano, N.K. McKinney picked up the momentum, tweeting on Saturday: “Do y'all need a hashtag? #PublishingPaidMe.
If y'all think the receipts are bad now, it's about to be CVS on this website, and y'all don't want that,” Onyebuchi tweeted on Friday. “Publishing houses, y'all BLM statements are cute but I'ma need that SAME energy when we start talking Black writers and book advances. McKinney, began a Twitter campaign to prompt the publishing industry to reckon with this gap. This past weekend, two Black YA authors, Tochi Onyebuchi and L.L. But some Black authors are calling out publishing houses for the glaring disparities in how much Black and non-Black authors are paid for their book advances. Today, many publishing houses are participating in a day of solidarity, pausing their work and donating to organizations that support the Black Lives Matter movement.