Revealing my royalties (and that's NOT a euphemism, honest...)

Money Matters #3 - in which I reveal what I’ve earned in royalties to date in my 8 years as a published author

Welcome back to my Money Matters series, in which I take a deep dive into everything author earnings – and provide specific details of mine – in order to make the most opaque and mysterious area of publishing a little more transparent (hopefully!).

If you haven’t already, please do read my introductory post to get the context for this series, and my post on advances and what ‘earning out’ actually means, which will be helpful for understanding the topic of this post, which is all about royalties – more specifically, how much I’ve earned in royalties since becoming a published author.

Before I dive into that, it’s probably worth me explaining what royalties are.

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Royalties explained, briefly and simply (there’s a lot more to it than this…)

A royalty is a sum of money paid to the book’s creator(s) from each sale, at a rate specified in the publishing contract – usually as a percentage of the book’s RRP.

For instance, the typical royalty rate for a paperback picture book sold at the full RRP of £7.99 is 7.5%, split equally between the author and illustrator if they are not the same person, i.e. 3.75% for the author, 3.75% for the illustrator.

However, as most publishing contracts typically work on an ‘advance on royalties’ basis (where the author receives an upfront payment set against future royalties), the author receives additional income from sales of their book ONLY once their pot of royalties exceeds the amount that they were paid for their advance – the point at which the author has ‘earned out’.

(I explain advances/royalties/subsidiary rights/earning out in greater detail in the previous post in this series. Again, do read it if you haven’t already.)

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MY royalties revealed…

So, how much have I earned in royalties since becoming a published author in June 2016?

My first book, You Must Bring a Hat, was published on 30^th June 2016.

My latest royalty statement (received October 2024) covers the period from 1^st January 2024 – 30^th June 2024.

So the period of time for which I have royalty data runs from 1^st July 2016 to 30^th June 2024, in which time I’ve earned a grand total of…

…£43,247.99 in royalties from my books.

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A couple of points to note:

· I haven’t included Public Lending Right income (income from library loans) in any of these figures. I will cover PLR and my PLR earnings in a separate post.

· I also haven’t included sales figures – it’s too complicated and time-consuming to work out, and there’s little correlation between number of copies sold globally and earnings, beause…

· the type of rights deal (i.e. co-edition (at 3-5 % of net receipts v translation rights deal (at 37.5% of advance + royalties)) has a greater impact than sheer volume of sales.

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Dividing that amount by the number of years over which it has accumulated (8) gives a royalty-income-per-year mean average of £5406.

Which is a totally MEANINGLESS and MISLEADING average, because, as you’ll see from my breakdown of that figure below, income from royalties is far from consistent and predictable (especially in the early years of being published).

To say I can/should expect to earn £5406 from royalties every year would be ridiculous.

So, let’s pick apart that total figure in detail to give you a better idea of what my royalty earnings have been year-on-year and book-by-book.

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An analysis of my royalty income

I explain in my previous post that 7 of my books – let’s call them Books 1-7, even though they don’t correspond to the first 7 books I had published – have earned out, meaning that I am paid a royalty whenever a copy of any of those books is sold.

We could, therefore, divide that figure of £43,248 by 7 and say that, on average, the books of mine that have earned out have made me, on average, £6178 in royalties across their lifetime.

But, again, that’s not a very helpful statistic, because some books have earned me far more royalties than others:

Lifetime royalties to date:

Book 1: £1805.14