I was just reading this blog post:
I must say, though the concept is sound, I'm afraid his dollar amounts are a bit off. The average advance for a first novel is $1,000 or less, and it's rare that you'll get an advance until after you have a bestseller. For the average author an advance is just a mythical dream they hope to someday be famous enough to aquire.
The average book sales for a first time novel is 500 copies world-wide. This is also the average sales for books that are not first time novels.
To become a best-seller you must sell 10,000 copies per printing, but only a handful of publishers print more than 2,000 copies per printing.
The average writer hits best-seller status with their 9th novel.
Ad only those who have already sold over 100,000 copies of a single printing well ever see an advance as astronomical out of proportion as the $100,000 figure he gave you.
He might want to check his facts better before he teaches to many more workshops. It's wrong for him to be setting up aspireing writers to what well quickly be an earth-shattering heartbreak once they make an attempt to get their first novel published.
This may have been what happened to him, but this is an exception to the rule, not what the average writer can expect.
~~EK
Reading, writing, and arithmetic
I must say, though the concept is sound, I'm afraid his dollar amounts are a bit off. The average advance for a first novel is $1,000 or less, and it's rare that you'll get an advance until after you have a bestseller. For the average author an advance is just a mythical dream they hope to someday be famous enough to aquire.
The average book sales for a first time novel is 500 copies world-wide. This is also the average sales for books that are not first time novels.
To become a best-seller you must sell 10,000 copies per printing, but only a handful of publishers print more than 2,000 copies per printing.
The average writer hits best-seller status with their 9th novel.
Ad only those who have already sold over 100,000 copies of a single printing well ever see an advance as astronomical out of proportion as the $100,000 figure he gave you.
He might want to check his facts better before he teaches to many more workshops. It's wrong for him to be setting up aspireing writers to what well quickly be an earth-shattering heartbreak once they make an attempt to get their first novel published.
This may have been what happened to him, but this is an exception to the rule, not what the average writer can expect.
~~EK
Comments