So who was actually worth their advance??

a #PublishingPaidMe analysis

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Before I get into any analysis, I might need to explain what #PublishingPaidMe is for people who weren’t following the issue at the time. In June of 2020, Black YA author LL McKinney created the hashtag on Twitter asking authors to share their advances on a crowdsourced Googledoc for the sake of transparency. This took honesty and the willingness to be exposed on the authors who entered lines—I do want to point that out, as the person writing this. There were some uncomfortable things that came to light: for example, the size of NK Jemisin’s advance for her Broken Earth trilogy—which has sold tons and made her the first person to win the Hugo Award for best fantasy novel three years in a row-one per each book in the trilogy—was smaller than people expected, whereas a white man named Chip Cheek whom no one had ever heard of was paid 800k for a novel no one read. (I feel comfortable saying that because he was one of the mean girls involved in the Bad Art Friend saga). The day after the hashtag launched, former Stegner Fellow, two time National Book Award Winner, and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Jesamyn Ward tweeted:

I mentioned the Stegner thing because it is exactly the sort of fodder that would make many literary publishers start to salivate about launching a particular new debut novelist. But some debut novelists get 800k for their first books. Some don’t. (For transparency’s sake, Salvage the Bones was published by Bloomsbury. She is with a different publisher now.)

Anyhoo, as a data person, I was naturally very interested in what was in the dataset, which you can see here. I think almost all the entries were entered by the authors themselves. Some data is more anonymous than others, whereas some authors straight up said who they were and for what book the advance was for. We often hear about authors being punished for not having good sales and this affecting their ability to get another book deal. There is also some sense that if you get paid a big advance, and then don’t sell well, this taints you as a writer. (I am less of the mindset that getting a big advance and not earning out means you’ve done wrong—different agents feel differently about this, fysa.)

What I will likely never find out but desperately want to know is the extent to which acquiring editors get flak for paying out big advances that don’t pan out to good sales. Because we know the author gets hurt—I don’t know really, if the editor gets a black mark on their name at their house for making a bad guess. Because we all know that acquiring books is guesswork, and when you are on the author side it really hurts when it feels like no one is taking a chance on you, specifically when they are taking chances on other people who end up no panning out.

Specifically, with this data, what I’m interested in is, based on what advance the editor gave, how good was their guess about how well the book would sell?

I had to trim the data quite a bit. First of all, I can only estimate sales for books that I know the names of, so truly anonymous rows of data had to be deleted. I took out YA, Middle grade and picture books, because honestly I know nothing about those markets. This left me with the following genres: Thriller/mystery, Science Fiction, Historical, Literary, Romance, and Women’s fictions. I took out multiple book deals because that would muddy the water a bit (this, interestingly, took out a HUGE swath of the romance books). If an author had entered more than one book, I randomly selected one book. But I did select books before doing anything with numbers, like looking up sales.

This left me without about 60 books with advances ranging from 1k (for a university small press novel) to 1.3 million for Jeanine Cummings American Dirt. I estimated sales by taking the number of Goodreads ratings and multiplying by 4.649 (this is the number you need to multiply by to get from my own personal number of Goodread ratings to my number of book sales for Never Saw Me Coming, which is 170k.) This is a very blunt estimation of sales, because as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, there’s no good data readily available on other people’s books. Sorting by sales, the top seller is Gone Girl with about 15 million sales, and the lowest number of sales is about 100 for that same small university press novel.

If you look at the top 10 biggest sellers you have:

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn. Her third book

American Dirt (like it or not, it sold) -debut.

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing—a debut from someone with a strong literary pedigree.

Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows, the first book in a debut fantasy series.

Bitten, a romance novel written by a Kelley Armstrong, a prolific cross-category writer.

Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers

Zakiya Dalila Harris’s debut thriller The Other Black Girl.

Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept- literary debut about the backstory behind Doctor Zhivago’s publication.

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, a science fiction novella.

So four of the top 10 were Black, and half were genre, the other half literary/bookclub/women’s fic.

If you divide the number of sales by advance, this gives us a number that says “per each dollar the author was paid in their advance, how many copies did they sell?” The highest here is Gone Girl, with 38 copies. She was paid a handsome advance— 400k— for the book. It looks like she got a 60k and change for each of her first two books, by Shaye Areheart Books, a former imprint of Crown (Penguin) and Gone Girl was published by Ballantine as part of a second book deal. I think they took one look at that book and knew they had a winner on their hands. I don’t think they could have possible guessed that just HOW MUCH of a winner, as Gone Girl was a runaway hit and has basically been the thriller to beat for more than a decade. It would be both fair and not fair to say that they underpaid for that book.

Another way of looking at this data is to divide the advance size by the number of sales- this effectively tells us “each copy that was actually sold ended up costing the publisher this much.” Ideally for the publisher, they would pay as little as possible while selling as many copies as possible. In other words, how “cheap” did you get your author? The cheapest were Gillian Flynn and Brent Weeks with 3 cents per copy. Rounding out the top ten, Rivers Solomon, Noelle Salazar (a historical fiction that sold well but got a 15k advance), Kiese Laymon, Roxane Gay (An Untamed State), Kelley Armstrong, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Elissa Sloan. So half of the “publishers got the most bang for the least buck” were POC. Roxane Gay was paid 12.5k for that book, during a period of time where she was basically literary royalty. There is a note in Kiese Laymon’s entry—I’d have to assume he wrote it himself?— thats says “Went from $17K and down [to 5k] because asked to remove racial politics.” I read his memoir Heavy (which is very good) and I believe he tells some of this story, and also he writes about buying the rights to two books back here on lithub.

If you look at the BOTTOM ten of the list, publishing houses were paying between $10 and $37 per copy sold. Five of these were 6 figure advances. All of those advances were paid to white authors, and all were lit fic. One of those is Chip Cheek.

I will point out that there were some handsome advances paid out to minorities: Yaa Gyasi, Imbolo Mbue, Zakiya Dalila Harris each got a million dollars for their debuts. Rivers Solomon got a substantial raise after The Deep to 500k. Viet Thanh Nguyen got a quarter of a million dollars for The Refugees, though there is a note that this was increased from 100k after HE WON THE PULITZER PRIZE. So, he still got paid less than Chip Cheek.

I do want to go back, using myself as an example, and explain why getting a big advance and not selling well is not necessarily your fault. My first book earned out within a year of a six figure advance. Per every dollar of the advance I was paid, I sold about one copy. I was happy with these numbers and my publisher was happy, and my agent says that mount of sales, buzz, and positive critical regard would dub the debut as success story. I got paid more for my second book, but the sales aren’t great, it got no buzz, and I guess the like one trade review of it that exists was positive. I did my job here—I wrote a good book. There are a variety of factors that can go into why a book doesn’t sell even though people wanted it to. Maybe your book came out just before a terrible news cycle. Maybe your book came out when a bunch of very different other books were going viral. I once met Galadrielle Allman, the daughter of that Allman from the Allman Brothers Band, and her memoir about her and her father sort of got scooped by another publishing house rush publishing a different book about the Allman Brothers Band, preempting hers. Maybe your publishing house decided not to invest in you. Maybe you got sick in the sixth month PR lead up to your debut. Maybe a global catastrophe happened.

Getting a big advance does not necessarily mean that publishers try or are able to make all the stars align for you. So there are some people with decent advances that may be looking like they underperformed. I’m actually way more interested on what goes on in a publishing house when a book gets all the things—the big advance, the most attention, the most marketing—and it still falls on its face. Sometimes I think about who gets taken a chance on and who doesn’t. James Frey keeps getting Big Five deals. A romantasy debut that sounds exactly the same as all the other ones can get a handsome advance while a midlist author who sold okay or even strongly can have trouble getting a book deal at all. But a variety of authors, Gillian Flynn and Taylor Jenkins Reid, have demonstrated that you can have a few books, then write one that absolutely blows up—but you need to be given that space to keep writing and keep being published.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash