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Originally Posted by avantman42
I pointed out to Steve that I thought he'd made a mistake. Since you had only implied, rather than outright stated, that advances are high enough to remove worries about paying bills . . .
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Yes I made a mistake.
Except in cases where your family is going hungry, personality may be the main determinant of worries over paying bills. Plenty of millionaires worry about paying bills. But this is just a detail. Advances transfer risk from author to publisher, albeit not to the point of eliminating authorial financial worries.
To me as someone who has worked at the same location, for the same employer, for 33 years, authorship seems financially stressful, in the extreme. By my standards, it sounds stressful even for an author with a part-time day job, and who never writes past the first chapter without first getting an advance obtained on the basis of a book proposal. Even if an advance lets you know what you will be paid, you don't know how long it will take to write, or how many rewrites your editor (or your own standards) will insist upon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
In the non fiction world, that $80K check might let a professor spend the summer researching his book rather than teaching summer classes.
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Dare I say that the real benefit to me, as a reader, might be similar with a $10K check? That's still more than a university press is likely to offer. And it means that author is going to have to earn the advance by producing, with editorial input, a better-written product AKA gearing the book to middle-brow readers such as myself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by avantman42
All that still doesn't answer the question of what the current average advance is. $80,000 was apparently the average in 2012. That was three years ago. Has it increased? Decreased? Stayed the same?
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Whomever knows isn't saying. A semi-wild guess is that median advance amounts track the economy, going up and down, more abruptly than salaries.