Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
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/
Works out to be low six figures.
So yeah, Howey is in that class.
And a higher class, too.
A very gracious gent. |
Thanks for the pointer. Now I've heard of him. I was wondering how he was able to churn out so many titles so fast, but I see that he basically releases his titles a chapter at a time. I've heard that was a popular method of maximizing revenue in the kindle indie world.
I can see why I haven't heard of him, post apocalyptic novels aren't really my cup of tea, but hey, I'm glad that he's had such success. Still doesn't really put him in Scalzi's category outside the indie fan base. That's not a put down, a number of authors have made good money writing Star Wars, Star Trek, et al novels and are quite well known in that specific group of people.
Ok, so John Scalzi gets a $3.4 million dollar deal over 10 years. We are, of course, talking about his advances, not how much he's actually making.
Let's do the math -
advance -
John Scalzi - $3.4 M
Hugh Howey - $0
Yea, they are both apples and oranges comparisons. You compare just Scalzi's advances to Howey's total proceeds. I compare Scalzi's advances to Howey's advances. In the indie world, no advances (except maybe crowd sourcing), so it's not a fair comparison.
I point out that your math only looks at the ebook sales, which Scalzi said was a quarter of his earnings while a book is out in hardback. No idea what Howey makes for audio books, paper book sales and foreign sales. To actually compare them, you would need to look at their total takes. Can't really compare ebook "sales" since Howey is producing chapter books (I think that's the term that they use) that he sales for a buck. Not sure how many chapter books are grouped together to form a novel. The Wool Omni edition, which is Wool 1-5 is 550 pages and sells for $5. So each book is roughly a third of the size of one of Scalzi's novels (a bit over 300 pages for his top three books).
I would also point out that the Scalzi posted his sales figures for Lock In - 2,000 ebooks per month which is used as the high end for all of Scalzi's books in the analysis you posted.