Author Income Quotes

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

I'm probably one of the few authors in this country who could very comfortably live off my writing.

Many adult book authors supplement their income by teaching at the college level. Full-time professors fare well, but pay for adjunct professors is notoriously shabby. Children's book authors have a sweeter deal. We're invited by schools, libraries, law firms, and Fortune 500 companies to share our best writing tips and strategies.

For every Steven King, there are a dozen guys like me who make a good living. For every David Brin, there are a dozen authors who have managed to make it their day job. For each of them, there are a dozen more for whom writing is a terrific supplement.

A misconception that exists in the eyes of the general reading population is that authors make truckloads of money.

What is generally missed, is that my writing financed research.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.

Sweden is a small country, and a Swedish writer can barely make a living as an author. We were able to quit our jobs as journalists only after we had been translated into, among others, German.

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

You simply couldn't make a living as an author if New Zealand was your only market.

If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It's not that people won't burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline - but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.

Now my only income is a few royalty cheques from my books.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

Never measure literature by accounting statistics. A quarter of working authors earn less than $1,000.

We, the authors, want people to buy books. That is the only way we can earn - from our royality.

I know one author whose royalty income has been halved from £34,000 a year to £16,000.

Back in August, I wrote a post about the supposed race to the bottom with ebooks, refuting some nonsense written by an establishment bonehead. This meme won't die. People are still convinced that new ebooks are going to be priced at ten cents, and writers will starve, and this will cause a second Great Depression where banks will close and people will be forced to buy Kindles with food stamps, and then the earth will enter another ice age where all the bunnies will freeze to death.