Monday, February 07, 2005

How Much Does a SF/F Writer Make?

Off Tobias Buckell's site, survey results from 74 writers: How Much Does a Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer Make?.

Summary: The typical advance for a first novel is $5000. The typical advance for later novels, after a typical number of 5-7 years and 5-7 books is $12,500. Having an agent at any point increases your advance. There is some slight correlation between number of books and number of years spent writing as represented in the 5-12.5 thousand dollar advance shift of an average of 5-7 years. Charting individual author's progressions, which I will not release to keep anonymity, reveals a large number of upward lines at varying degrees of steepness for advances, some downward slides.

Some authors noted that they'd gotten large advances in the 90s but were being paid less now.

5 comments :

Lynn said...

Yeah -- well, it only made me increasingly curious who the outliers were, the ones with the 600K amounts that threw off the averages... Tell, tell, I wanted to scream.

Anonymous said...

I followed the link, and geez... look at all them numbers! Leave it to a SF/Fantasy guy to go into Aspergers-like hyper-detail on the salary figures.It is detailed as it is because I knew the SF/F community would hold me to a great degree of hyper-detail examination, so I consulted with a friend who took a stats course :-)

Authors just need to know how to fake it ;-)

Anonymous said...

I followed the link, and geez... look at all them numbers! Leave it to a SF/Fantasy guy to go into Aspergers-like hyper-detail on the salary figures.It is detailed as it is because I knew the SF/F community would hold me to a great degree of hyper-detail examination, so I consulted with a friend who took a stats course :-)

Authors just need to know how to fake it ;-)

-tobias buckell

Anonymous said...

Sorry for the double post.

-tobias buckell

Lynn said...

Hi Tobias -- I actually guessed you were rigorous because of your audience. I think it's appropriate. :-)