It was that in-between period, around age ten. (That’s why they call them tweens). 

First, a caveat. As a parent, I’ve pretty much felt every stage was my favorite as we lived them. 

I would think, “I love this stage!”–and it has continued all the way to the present. For example, right now, I absolutely love having teenagers! 

But looking back at those tween years–well, they were rather self-centered, cared waaaaay too much about what other people thought about them, and acted like being seen with their parents was more embarrassing than having spinach stuck in your teeth.

But I love reading middle grade books!

It’s probably precisely because that age is so full of contradictions and growth that makes the characters lend themselves perfectly into stories with conflict and mishaps.

That’s probably why my first foray into writing a children’s book started with a middle grade novel. 

I haven’t finished it yet (anyone else in this boat?), and instead I’ve written picture books and chapter books. 

And generally speaking, if you land a publishing contract, you likely can expect the advance for your middle grade novel to be higher than for a picture book. 

I’ve been digging into the data about advances paid by the publishing industry from the #publishingpaidme hashtag. If you haven’t read my summary post about it, you can find that here.

Today I’m digging deeper into the category of middle grade books. 

Just to recap, here are the average advances middle grade authors get paid:

But the wonderful thing about the data from #publishingpaidme is that it includes information about the different genres and publishers. They also gathered lots of demographic data, such as gender identity, race, and sexual orientation.

So. Much. Data.

So I’ve basically been having a field day playing with making graphs to present all these interesting numbers.

But before I go on with sharing the results, a caveat.

The overall amount of data is pretty strong. There were 283 people who provided their advance amount for their middle grade book. Almost every respondent also included some information about the publisher (some named the actual publisher while others used a descriptor: Big 5, small/indie; medium sized). 

But for the other data categories, there were some where many people choose not to provide an answer. And for some data categories, there were small data sets, which means we can’t really draw too many conclusions from those numbers.

Middle Grade Advances by Publisher

The category that has the best data is that of publisher. However, while some people named the specific publishing house, others just used a broad category. So for the Big 5 publishers (which, by the way, include Simon and Schuster, Penguin/Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, and Macmillan), I provided averages for each individual house. But there is also a catch-all Big 5 category that I included separately. (I did not throw all the individual houses into this calculation either).

The publisher that came out with the highest average advances was Penguin Random House. The smallest, not surprisingly, was the small/indie publishers. What was a little surprising was the Hachette’s averages were just a little higher than for the small/indie category.

Here’s a visual for publishers:

How Much Middle Grade Authors Earned by Genre

Just for fun, I also broke out the numbers by genre. Here I was a bit surprised by the results. The category that showed the highest average was verse novels. There were only seven respondents for this category. But even removing the one six-figure outlier still resulted in an average advance of $45,500. 

Graphic novels came in second-highest. Out of 16 respondents, three were six-figures or more. Because these numbers affect the averages so much, I wondered what the result would be without them. Calculating the average for the non-six-figure amounts resulted in an average of $26,692, which is a pretty significant difference.

Middle Grade Advances by Gender Identity

Here again I wasn’t sure what to expect, but not what this! 

However, this is a situation where the sample size is a factor. Out of all respondents, the numbers broke down as follows:

• Male: 58
• Female: 187
• Non-Binary/Agender: 5

Comparing an average out of five people vs close to 200 doesn’t really allow one to draw too many strong conclusions. It could even be the responses for the non-binary/agender identity included multiple answers from the same author. There is really no way to know. Regardless, a sample size of five is not big enough to provide a good sense of an average for that category.

Also, with the number of women respondents being so much larger than the number of men, again, it’s not a great comparison. I’m pretty sure any statisticians reading this would have plenty to say on this subject! 

But nevertheless, the fact that the average advance for women was higher than the average advance for men is a least a little bit interesting. Could it possibly show there is some parity here between the sexes?  

Middle Grade Advances by Sexual Orientation

Here again we have an example of the categories with small data sets (Gay and Asexual) reported the highest average earnings. But this could be a simple matter of authors with robust advances reporting, and with a small sample size, their numbers skewed the averages high.

• Gay: 7
• Lesbian: 14
• Straight Male: 36
• Straight Female: 117
• Bi/Pansexual: 24
• Asexual: 9

But just for the sake of satisfying our curiosity, here is how the averages worked out:

Here those identifying as asexual and gay reported advances nearly twice as high as all other categories. There is no way to know if these authors’ books reflected their gender identity in subject matter or in any way. Did the publishers even know about the author’s gender identity? In other words, it is really impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from these results. 

The only category with a strong data set is straight females. With only 36 straight males reporting, I’m not sure we can draw a conclusion that perhaps straight women are bringing in higher advances than straight men. It does appear that there are more women authors than men overall.

Middle Grade Advances by Race

Finally, last but not least, here are the averages broken out by race. First of all, again there were some rather modest data sets for most races except multiracial and white.

• Black 12
• East Asian 13
• South Asian 17
• All Asian 30
• Multiracial 50
• Latin American 12
• White 196

Again, we can’t really take this data and conclude that Blacks receive higher advances on average than other races. But still, it was interesting that the average advances for Whites was lower than all other races except for Latin Americans. 

Whew! 

That was a lot of number crunching for me! I’m not a total novice when it comes to using spreadsheets, and thank goodness for that–it was very helpful for being able to do these calculations and create these fun graphs.

Conclusions About How Much Middle Grade Authors Get Paid

I wish it were possible to use this data to really examine how different categories of authors fare in terms of what kind of advances they receive. Still, I found it interesting to see what the broad averages for middle grade came out to be. And the numbers for the different publishing houses were interesting, if not exactly super eye-opening.

In terms of other demographics, I’m a half-full-glass type of person. So I like to think that perhaps these numbers show that regardless of your gender, race, or sexual orientation, you have a decent chance of getting an advance that is not affected by those factors. 

If you want to read about the broader issue of how much you can make as a children’s book author, check out my post here.

Next I’ll dive into the numbers for picture book and YA authors. Stay tuned!

The post How Much Do Middle Grade Authors Make? appeared first on Make a Living in Kidlit.

The breathless announcement of a book deal, followed by a screenshot of the announcement in Publishers Marketplace. 

(A rather plain and unassuming screenshot, I might add).

In keeping with the traditions of the publishing world, actual advance numbers, of course, are not discussed.

But it turns out, there is this weird code language used in the publishing world to hint at the level of the author’s advance. 

“A nice deal” and “a significant deal” have actual dollar amounts attached to them. 

So if you are wondering what kind of offer your fellow children’s writer received, knowing the code might shed some light on the answer.

Here’s an example of a couple of book deals I found on Twitter. (Keep in mind that I am not familiar with any of these authors or books, they are just some announcements I happened to find while searching quickly).

This announcement for Jenna Grodzicki is “a nice deal.”

This announcement for Brittney Morris is for a “significant deal.”

These phrases actually correspond to broad categories of dollar amounts for the author’s publishing contracts. 

Here is a key to decipher what the phrases mean:

• “nice deal” $1 – $49,000
• “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000
• “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000
• “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000
• “major deal” $500,000 and up

The most head-scratching category, of course, is “nice deal.” 

It’s kind of like categorizing age groups by breaking it down like this:

• “Young person”: 0-29
• “Bit older person”: 30 – 55
• “Middle-aged”: 56 – 75
• “Elderly”: 76 and up

If you are someone aged 25, you probably wouldn’t feel you should be in the same category as a newborn baby.

Yet that’s how the publishing gurus decided to break down the numbers. 

Of course, landing a traditional publishing contract of any kind is an accomplishment and a deal to celebrate. Even if it’s a no-advance contract, I would agree it’s still “a nice deal.” 

What about some of those others terms mentioned?

Auction

In the Brittney Morris example above, the announcement mentions a significant deal “at auction.” 

I’m pretty sure we all know that means she landed a good deal. Excuse me, I mean, in this case, “a significant deal.”

It’s exactly what it sounds like. When there is interest in a book from more than one publisher, an agent can arrange for an auction. Publishers call in their bids, and usually, the highest bid wins.

Having people competing for your book is a very good thing for the author and the agent!

Pre-empt

Here’s an example of a deal announcement that involved a pre-empt:

In this case, Bloomsbury wanted the rights to Katie Zhao’s book so much, they made an offer that was good enough to prevent it from going to auction. The idea of a pre-empt is to get the agent and author to allow the publisher to leapfrog over the trouble of an auction and just sell the book to them. Obviously, it has to be a pretty sweet deal for an agent to give up the chance for a nice bidding war.

Exclusive

Sometimes, a publisher will request an exclusive from an author as part of their publishing contract. This means the author is required to give the publisher the first shot at publishing their next book before shopping it around to other publishing houses.

If the publisher declines to make an offer, then the author is free to try to find a different publisher.

So the next time you see a publishing deal announcement, you’ll be ready with your secret decoder ring!

A good resource for digging further into \ the language of publishing can be found on the website of Nathan Bradford. This former publishing agent and author has a nice, comprehensive glossary on his website. You can check it out here. 

The post Your guide to the secret language of publishing deals appeared first on Make a Living in Kidlit.

Seeking to make a point about the industry disparities around what publishers pay authors, YA author Tochi Onyebuchi suggested authors start talking candidly about how much Black authors make compared to their white counterparts. Picking up on the thread, YA author L.L. McKinney started a hashtag on Twitter, #PublishingPaidMe, to push people to share actual numbers.

And things took off from there.

Real Data About What Publishers Pay Authors

In the span of a few days, thousands of authors had shared specifics about their book advances. The information was compiled into a spreadsheet which also contained information about genre, type of publisher (or even the specific name), and demographic data about the author (gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and, of course, race).

Onyebuchi and McKinney succeeded in shedding some light onto how many celebrated Black authors were failing to receive robust advances for their work, even for books that had received substantial critical and commercial acclaim.

I’m not here to get into a discussion about the disparities around what publishers pay authors. There are many great articles written about the topic, following the revelations of #publishingpaidme. These include the New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and PBS. I would encourage you to read them because the issue of transparency in pay by the publishing industry is an important one.

A Treasure Trove of Data

What #publishingpaidme also provided was access to a sizeable amount of data regarding advances among different genres and types of publishers. Keep in mind this is not a scientific survey. Participants self-selected, and there is no way to verify (at least in most cases) how accurate the data is.

But regardless, it sheds a brighter light into a subject that has been notoriously difficult to analyze. Some people were willing to reveal all in their Tweets, including advances per actual book title and publisher. Others provided data anonymously, and some responses were from those who self-published.

My intention is to try to analyze the data and summarize the results for you in the future. But as a start, I’ll offer a few broad conclusions that I’ve drawn from the information.

In the children’s book category, there were quite a few responses for middle grade, young adult, and picture books. There were a handful of entries for chapter books as well.

Children’s Books Get Smaller Advances Than Adult Books

The highest advances were given to authors of YA books.

This is probably not very surprising.

Overall, authors of adult books receive higher advances than those who write for children—for comparable situations. And YA books basically sit just under the adult category. 

From the data, advances for all categories of books for adults averaged just under $66,000.

For children’s books, the average advances came out to the following:

·  YA average advance: $47,000.

·  MG average advance: $32,000

·  PB average advance: $11,900

While informative, these numbers are not terribly helpful if you are wondering what you, as an individual, might expect from an advance.

These numbers are simple averages, which contain some serious outliers on both the low and high end. For example, in the YA category, several people reported advances of $0 – $30 on the low end. On the high end, there were many multiple-six-figure amounts, including two at $1,000,000. 

In an attempt to provide a more useful figure, I also calculated the median average, which worked out as follows:

·  YA average advance: $25,000

·  MG average advance: $20,000

·  PB average advance: $8,000

And because data is easier and more interesting to consume visually, here is a summary of the analysis in graph form:

The Money is Not in Picture Books

Again, nothing about this is shocking. But while the data had examples of authors who received very small (including zero) advance amounts for each of the three categories of children’s books, only one picture book author reported a six-figure advance. For MG and YA, there were several who reported six-figure advances. There were even a couple of seven-figure YA advances paid.

On the other hand, MANY picture book authors reported advances in the range of $1,000-5,000. In fact, I was surprised at how many authors reported advances in the $6,000-7,500 range even from large publishing houses.

I am assuming (for the sake of consistency) the numbers being reported in the picture book category were for the author’s share of the advance. (Advances are split between the author and illustrator). 

Looking at this data, I would caution any writer of picture books to expect an advance in the range of $8,000, especially as a debut author. Unless the $8,000 was the total advance, to be split with an illustrator.

A Quick Lesson on Advances

To clarify, the information shared on the #publishingpaidme hashtag are for advances offered to authors for their books by the publisher.

How do publishers decide how much of an advance to offer? Well, it depends.

The amount of the advance takes into consideration market research, the publisher’s budget, expected trends, and maybe some consultations with a fortune teller.

Okay, kidding.

But an offer is based on the publisher’s best guess of how much they think the book will earn. In some ways, it’s kind of a crap shoot. A book may be expected to be a huge bestseller, and be a dud. A book that appears risky because it is unlike anything that exists on the shelves could surprise everyone and be a big hit.

What About Royalties?

IF (and this really is a big if) an author earns out their advance, then they can start to earn royalties. I talk about this calculation in my blog post here.

Basically, because most children’s books sell less than 10,000 copies, most authors do not earn out their advance. Which means the total amount they are paid for their book is the advance provided by the publisher.

Remember: Advances Do Not Come With Value Judgments

One of the most important points authors need to remember is that an advance is not a reflection of how good a book is, or how well it is written.

I think we can all come up with many examples of really terrible books that are known to have received six-figure deals. Some of them even end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

For writers of children’s books, this can feel especially unfair. But the fact that publishers pay lower advances on average for children’s books does not mean they are less worthy than books for adults.

Right?

To boost your faith in this truth even further, here’s something I heard Newbury Award winning author Linda Sue Park say about writing for children as opposed to adults.

Books we read as children stay with us. They affect us deeply and lodge deep in our hearts. While books we read as adults can be important to us, nothing is like the experience we felt as kids.

No one ventures into writing for children because we hope it will make us wealthy. If you are like me, we do it precisely because a book, or many books, had a profound impact on our lives as kids. And we want to pass on that meaning, that joy, or that comfort to the next generation of children.

So keep writing for children, and know you are doing something worth far more than the monetary value of any advance, regardless of the amount.  

The post What Publishers Actually Pay Children’s Authors appeared first on Make a Living in Kidlit.

“I write children’s books,” she said.

“Oh, there’s a ton of money in that,” the DPS officer said.

My friend’s eyebrows shot up so high they practically hit the ceiling.

You Mean Children’s Book Authors Aren’t Rich?

If you are a writer for children, experienced authors will often give you this advice:

Don’t do it for the money.

If you are new to children’s writing, or just starting to explore it, this may come as a surprise to you.

What about Jeff Kinney, you ask, the creator of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series? What about Rick Riordon and his Percy Jackson books? And how about Suzanne Collins, of Hunger Games fame?

What about J. K. Rowling, who has a net worth of $1 billion dollars??

Exactly what kind of numbers are we talking about, then?

Walk into the children’s section of a bookstore, or a library—even if you lived to 150 years old, there is no way you could read all the books. Every year, enough children’s books to fill a football field are published.

Surely most of these authors are at least making a decent living from their books?

Actually, no.

Let’s look at some numbers.

Expected Income for First-Time Authors

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) describes a typical compensation package for an author of a children’s book. This example pertains largely to picture books, which on average run about 32 pages.

Keep in mind that for picture books, the money paid by the publisher is split between the author and the illustrator (unless they are one and the same).

How Much of an Advance are Authors Paid?

For this example, we’ll use a situation where the author receives an advance from the publisher. (Some publishers, especially the smaller ones, do not give advances).

Typical advance: $6,000 – $12,000

Author/Illustrator split: $2,700/$3,300 – $5,400/$6,600

After the advance, authors can then earn royalties, which are often set at around 3.5% – 6% of the book’s sale price. (This figure reflects the fact that royalties, which are typically 7% – 10%, are also split with the illustrator). No royalties are earned until enough books have sold to cover the advance.

This is what is referred to as “earning out” your advance.

The Bottom Line

Generally, most picture books sell around 5,000 to 10,000 copies in hardcover form, and few are made into paperback. Most will also go out of print within about two years.

Easy readers have similar compensation packages, but royalties are not split on novels. So in this case, an author could receive an advance of $5,000 to $8,000 with 7% to 10% royalties.

Let’s use an example of a typical 32-page picture book. The book is assigned an advance of $8,000, which is split 45%/55% with the illustrator, leaving the author with $3,600.

Let’s say the book is listed at a retail price of $17.99, and the author is given royalties of 4%.

Book price ($17.00) x royalty (4%) = $0.72.

Yep, you saw that right. She will earn less than a dollar a book.

And if the author has an agent, part of that money (about 15%) goes to the agent, leaving the author with $0.61 per book.

Which means more than 11,000 books have to be sold before the author can even begin earning royalties.

Which means she probably won’t.

Financial Numbers for Other Children’s Book Genres

Literary agent Jennfer Laughren provided some ballpark figures for other types of children’s books in a blog post she wrote in 2015. Here are her estimates of advances for different levels of children’s books:

• Chapter Books: $5,000 – $12,000
• Middle Grade Novels: $8,000 – $20,000
• Young Adult (YA): $12,000 – $30,000

These are numbers she came up with from her own experience with her author clients, so they were not scientifically compiled. But Ms. Laughren has been in the children’s book business for awhile and is a total pro, so you can be assured these are solid numbers.

As you can see, these numbers are pretty discouraging if you are hoping your children’s writing is going to be your ticket to quitting your day job and sipping margaritas at the beach instead.

And yet thousands of books are published each year. Thousands more are written and never even published. Someone is writing all these books.

Are they all just chasing a pipe dream?

For the Love of Writing

“Write because you love writing,” is a common refrain among seasoned writers. “If you are writing for the money, you are doing it for the wrong reason.”

The numbers don’t lie. The truth is, writing for children typically doesn’t provide enough income for authors to sustain a comfortable, or really even a bare-bones, living.

But if you do keep at it, and focus on improving your craft and writing stories that children want to read, and their parents want them to read, and eventually land a book deal, I’m guessing every single published author will tell you it’s worth it.

Getting your book out into the world and touching children’s lives in some way, whether it makes them laugh, or think, or connect with your story or characters in some way, really is priceless.

Does This Mean You Need to Accept a Life of Low Wages?

While it is extremely difficult to achieve enough success through book sales alone to become a full-time children’s book author, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on your dream entirely.

At least I don’t think so.

There are those who successfully support themselves as children’s book authors. But that doesn’t mean their only source of income is through their books.

There are other ways to earn income related to your work as an author.

Here are some examples:

• School visits
• Providing editing and critiquing services
• Teaching writing classes
• Ghostwriting services
• Opening a publishing business

Because you want to make a living as a children’s book author, the first step is selling your books.

As a first step, let’s explore some of the best ways to market your books and increase your sales.

The post The Honest Truth About How Much Money Children’s Authors Make appeared first on Make a Living in Kidlit.