Hugh Howey?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Howey
He's the guy quietly making 7 figures annually in SF all by his lonesome.
He turned down a Scalzi-class contract because it was less than he was already making.
Which is more than enough to fund an entire data center of hundreds of computers to capture and process the Author Earnings data as a public service.
Apparently he's a pretty good SF writer.
Hopefully the movie will do justice to WOOL.
As for Scalzi's much publicized deal...
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/05/20...-for-13-books/
Quote:
Tor says Scalzi sells “a healthy five-figure number of his books every month.”
Let’s look at a couple of possibilities for “healthy” and see how Scalzi would do if he sold a less-than-healthy five-figure number of books every month as an indie author.
If each of Scalzi’s 13 new indie books sell 1,00o ebook copies per month, that’s a total of 13,000 copies each month. (PG’s getting better at math all the time). Again, PG would have few problems naming a significant number of indie authors with much less name recognition than Scalzi who consistently average sales of more than 1,000 copies per title each month.
To make the math easier, we’ll assume that, instead of taking the Tor contract, Scalzi indie pubs his 13 ebooks and sells them on Amazon for $2.99 each.
At 1,000 books per title per month, these sales would generate about $327,000 per year in indie royalties for Scalzi (no agent necessary). If we increased the sales of these 13 books to a more-healthy five-figure annual total based on 2,000 copies per title per month, Scalzi would be looking at $653,000 per year in royalties. And, unlike advances, which will cut off after the last book is published, that $600K+ per year won’t fall off a cliff after ten years.
Now certainly Scalzi’s indie income would start smaller and serious indie income would be back-loaded while presumably the advance income he will receive from Tor will be more front-loaded with Scalzi receiving payments from Tor before the books are sold. Performing any sort of front-loaded vs. back-loaded analysis is definitely beyond PG’s meager math skills.
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Works out to be low six figures.
So yeah, Howey is in that class.
And a higher class, too.
A very gracious gent.