Every­one always asks me how much money I make on my books. In fact, it is a favorite ques­tion with cer­tain nosy rel­a­tives of mine. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, it is not mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars. (I know. I’m bummed about that too). So today, I thought that I would talk a lit­tle bit about roy­al­ties to try to answer this question.

For those of you who don’t know, roy­al­ties are the amount of money that an author earns on sales of her books. Most authors are given an advance up front. These advances can range any­where from a few thou­sand dol­lars to a few mil­lion dol­lars. I’ve even heard of advances as low as $500 to $1,000.

For every book that’s sold, authors get a per­cent­age of the cover price. For exam­ple, on the mass mar­ket paper­backs of Spider’s Bite and the other books in the Ele­men­tal Assas­sin series, I get 8 per­cent of the $7.99 cover price.

That works out to 64 cents per copy.

Yep, that’s right. I get a whop­ping 64 cents for every copy of Spider’s Bite that is sold. (Tech­ni­cally, it’s 63.92 cents per book, but I’m round­ing up to make the math easier.)

Now, every sale, every 64 cents, counts toward an author’s advance. Say you got a hypo­thet­i­cal advance of $10,000. (And no, I’m not going to tell you how much my advance was. That’s between me and Uncle Sam). You would have to sell 15,625 books to make back that $10,000 that the pub­lisher has already given you. Any books you sold beyond that you would also get 64 cents on — but the pub­lisher would have to pay you or give you what’s known as roy­al­ties for all of those books sold.

Say you sell 20,000 books at 64 cents a book. Alto­gether, you would have earned $12,800. Since you made more than the $10,000 the pub­lisher orig­i­nally paid you, you would get a check for $2,800. (Of course, I’m not tak­ing into account the 15 per­cent that your agent gets right off the top of all of your advance and roy­alty payments).

You always hope that your book earns out the advance — you always want to have made more money for the pub­lisher than they paid you in the first place. That makes them more likely to want to buy more books from you, if they know your titles are con­sis­tent earn­ers for them. If your book doesn’t earn out its advance, you don’t have to refund the money … but you might not get another con­tract for more books either. Pub­lish­ing is all about sales, just like any other for-profit busi­ness is. You can write the best book in the known uni­verse, but if it only sells 500 copies, I doubt your pub­lisher will want you to write a sequel.

Now, the mass mar­ket paper­back roy­al­ties are only one kind of roy­al­ties that an author can make on her books. You get roy­al­ties for e-books, audio books, and every for­mat that your book is sold/packaged in. And, of course, all of the per­cent­ages and amounts dif­fer. Even your mass mar­ket paper­back roy­al­ties can dif­fer. For exam­ple, the per­cent­age can go up to 10 per­cent or even higher if you sell above a cer­tain num­ber of copies (like 150,000).

As far as e-books go, I get 15 per­cent of the price. So, for exam­ple, if you bought a Kin­dle ver­sion of Spider’s Bite (priced at $6.39 on Ama­zon), I would make 96 cents on that sale. (Again, tech­ni­cally, it’s 95.85 cents but I’m round­ing up to make the math eas­ier). And this is just gen­er­ally speak­ing. There are so many dif­fer­ent for­mats and per­cent­ages, that you’d have to be an accoun­tant to under­stand them all.

Of course, the more the cover price is for your book, the more money you get on every sale. For exam­ple, if your book is a $25 hard­cover and you get 8 per­cent of the cover price, then you earn $2 per book com­pared to 64 cents for a mass mar­ket paper­back. If your book is a $14 trade paper­back, you get $1.12 per book.

And it goes on and on and gets more com­pli­cated from there. Some­times, I think authors have to be accoun­tants, lawyers, Web site experts, and writ­ers all rolled into one to really under­stand all the ins and outs of the business.

So there you have it. A lit­tle bit about roy­al­ties. Any ques­tions? I’ll answer what I can in the comments.

One of the things that has really awed and hum­bled me is how many reader e-mails that I’ve got­ten for Spider’s Bite. I’m just esti­mat­ing here, but I think I can safely say that I’ve already got­ten more e-mails in the three weeks that Spider’s Bite has been out than I got for all of the Big­time books — com­bined.

And you know what the truly awe­some thing is? Almost all of the e-mails have been really, really pos­i­tive.

I thought that some folks might be dis­ap­pointed with Spider’s Bite since it is so much darker and grit­tier than the Big­time books, but every­one seems to be really enjoy­ing the world of Gin Blanco. In fact, sev­eral folks have writ­ten to tell me that they like Spider’s Bite more than they do the Big­time books. It really seems like peo­ple are respond­ing more to the dark and gritty reads these days, espe­cially in urban fan­tasy and para­nor­mal romance.

Of course, it’s not all been wine and roses. One lady e-mailed me to say that she didn’t think that I should use giants and dwarves in Spider’s Bite because she had watched some real­ity TV shows where peo­ple had made fun of real-life dwarves.  Um … okay.

I wrote her back and told her that giants/dwarves have long been pop­u­lar char­ac­ters in all kinds of fan­tasy books, that there are good and bad guy giants/dwarves in my books, and that I’m not mak­ing fun of real-life dwarves at all. She wrote me back and thanked me for explain­ing my posi­tion and said that she hadn’t read that many fan­tasy books — she was mostly going by what she had seen on TV.

She was very gra­cious and polite about the whole thing, but it still made me think — why do peo­ple e-mail authors in the first place?

Of course, I under­stand e-mailing and author to tell her how much you enjoyed her work. I do that myself, and I cer­tainly appre­ci­ate it as an author. Writ­ing is a hard, lonely busi­ness and get­ting a pos­i­tive e-mail from a reader really does brighten my whole day.

But I won­der about other e-mails that authors get — the ones that aren’t so nice. I haven’t got­ten any myself, but I’ve heard hor­ror sto­ries from other authors about peo­ple who e-mail them to com­plain about their books, their char­ac­ters, or what­ever. I’m not talk­ing about bad reviews — I’m talk­ing about per­sonal e-mails where peo­ple are basi­cally rip­ping an author up one side and down the other.

I’ve always won­dered why peo­ple do that kind of thing in the first place. Why waste your time e-mailing some­one to tell her how much you hated her lat­est book? Why not put the book aside and just go on about your life? Why not save your energy for the books/authors that you love?

I guess I just don’t under­stand why peo­ple use their pre­cious free time to do that sort of thing. Maybe it’s because I work at a news­pa­per. You would not believe the calls that we get — every sin­gle day. And you know what? Half of them are peo­ple call­ing to com­plain about some­thing. Why didn’t we do this story? Why was so-and-so on the front page? We’re Repub­li­cans, we’re Democ­rats, we don’t have the good sense that God gave a tooth­pick. And on and on and on … It’s like folks don’t under­stand that there are actual real-life peo­ple who work at the news­pa­per, peo­ple with feel­ings. Nobody likes to be yelled at — espe­cially before 9 a.m. But I have been — plenty of times. The sad thing is that it’s hap­pened so much that it doesn’t even bother me anymore.

And I’ve heard about authors being lam­basted like that. There’s so much neg­a­tiv­ity in the world already, so many bad things that hap­pen. I guess I don’t under­stand why peo­ple add to it this way.

Ah, well. Enough rumi­nat­ing for one day. To all the folks out there who do take the time to con­tact authors and tell us that you like our books, you guys are the rea­son that we write in the first place. You rock!

As for those other folks, maybe I don’t have the sense that God gave a tooth­pick — but at least I don’t go out of my way to be rude and mean to peo­ple like you do.

Okay, so my blog tour for Spider’s Bite is over with. No more guest posts for a while, which means that I’ll be post­ing here on the blog again. So stay tuned …

Is over at Bit­ten by Books. I’m giv­ing away some books and Ama­zon gift cards. The event starts at noon CST today and runs through mid­night Feb. 19 CST. Check it out!

I’m also doing a guest blog over at Read­ing with Tequila, which includes some yummy recipes.

And sev­eral book blogs are fea­tur­ing reviews and more of Spider’s Bite today.

I’m doing a big release party and give­away over at Bit­ten by Books on Feb. 18–19. I’m giv­ing away some books and Ama­zon gift cards. If you RSVP, you get 25 entries into the give­away. Here’s the link to RSVP. Check it out!