Book Advances 101
THERE are few things authors enjoy talking about less than money. It feels icky to dwell on spreadsheets and percentages when we’re trying to make art. At the same time there are even fewer things authors want to know about more than money, especially since the ins and outs of the business side of publishing are often confusing and opaque. When I first started writing I felt I didn’t have any idea how things worked. So I decided to teach myself. Since then I’ve published books with both a small press and a Big Five publisher and worked in various parts of the industry. Here are some of the things every author should know about a seemingly simple yet complex part of publishing: book advances.
Just what is an advance?
On the most basic level an advance is the up-front money a publisher pays an author to publish their book. (Although increasingly much of that up-front money doesn’t appear until later. We’ll get to that in a bit.) More technically, an advance is an advanced payment against, or out of, the royalties that your book may earn. A royalty is the percentage of each sale that a publisher pays the author. So this means you will not get any more checks until your publisher has earned back the advance. Some people call an advance a “signing bonus,” but a bonus implies extra money, whereas in fact an
