My author earnings - Year 4

A detailed breakdown (including figures) of what I earned in my fourth year as a children's author

Hello again, everyone. Welcome to the second post in my series on author earnings.

Last week, I published the introductory post to this series – you can check it out here, if you’ve not yet read it – in which I revealed what I earned in my first three years of writing for children, breaking down the sources of my income, and provided the context to each of those three years.

It’s already my second-most viewed Substack post, behind only this one, about earning out advances. And, of all my posts, it’s easily the one with the most likes and comments, so thank you to everyone who took the time to engage with it. I appreciate that more than you know.

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I hope that if you haven’t read the previous post, you’ll go on to read it now to get the full picture, but, regardless, here’s a reminder of what I earned in the first three years of my writing career:

Year 1: £6002 (profit of £5812)

Year 2: £16,101 (profit of £15, 975)

Year 3: £13,156 (profit of £12, 972)

So, what did I earn in my fourth year? Let’s get on to that now.

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Year 4 – the context

Still working 30+ hours a week in hospitality, condensed, if I remember correctly, into 3-ish days.

I had two published books to my name at the start of this financial year, and had another published during it. Both of my first two books (published in Year 3) earned out their advances within 12 months of publication, so Year 4 was the first in which I received income from royalties – and, of course, Public Lending Right (PLR), which renumerates authors for the lending of their books in public libraries.

(Interestingly, the rate paid to an author for a library loan is often better than the royalty rate received from a sale of their book, due to the fact that the vast majority of sales are made at a significant discount.

For example, a sale of a picture book at an author’s typical rate of 3.75% of the RRP of £7.99 would net them 30p (before agency deductions), but only if the book was sold at full price – which is rare; when I analysed my sales figures for my seven books that have earned out, on average, 96% of UK sales in the first 6 months were at a discount (often a super-high one).

It’s common for a picture book author to make only 3p for every sale, once agency deductions have been accounted for.

Yet the PLR rate is typically as much as 4 times that amount:

• 2021/2022 rate per loan: 30.53 pence (increased from 11.26 pence in the previous year – and I think this was a special ‘COVID’ rate to help creators out)

• 2022/2023: 13.69 pence

• 2023/2024: 11.76 pence

So, although PLR’s maximum payout to individuals is capped at £6,600 every year, it’s not difficult to understand why book creators are so grateful for it!)

Despite having gained some experience of school visits in the previous year, I still wasn’t exactly eager to do lots of them – so, as you’ll see, my income from events