Well, you guys are famous. To us. Naturally, people tend to assume that anyone whom they perceive as famous must be rich.
Then maybe you should take steps to make that assumption reality. Just click the PayPal link on my website...
A common misconception! I remember when I first started selling short stories to AMAZING . . . my co-workers at the airport couldn't understand why I was still working there! Never mind that I was making more money bussing tables . . . .
OK, I am a bit confused. Earlier, it was mentioned that many of you don't have agents, and deal directly with Simon and Schuster. My question is, to expand on The Laughing Vulcan's questions, how do you know how well the books are selling? How do you know when S&S is giving you a check based on selling X-amount of books, that they're not really selling X-plus-10,000 and only telling you X, and pocketing the difference, especially when they don't publish the sales figures? Not that any major corporation would ever screw over the little guy, mind you... Greg Cox, James Swallow, and KRAD, thanks for the additional information, as well as what happened to Ordover. Greg, what is the name of the Jeff Ayer book you referred to? Might have to track that down. I'd like to address TGTheodore's concern about my tackiness in asking about pay. He was dead-on. It is tacky to ask someone how much they make. But (there's always a "but"...) according to viewer count, we have many lurkers checking this thread out, and I'm all but certain many of them are would-be authors studying these responses, trying to determine if it is worth the time investment to try and be a published author, and my job requres an ungodly time investment itself. The lively interaction on the "Copyright" thread in Trek Lit is also interesting. So I apologize if I offended any of you in asking how much...my questioning was intended to be more oriented towards how does the pay system work, i.e. advances and royalties, etc., so my wording was not quite precise. But I am admitted curious to see if the pay was anything like I had imagined, so thanks for setting me straight on that. I am reminded of something Stephen King remarked on in a foreword to one of his books. You don't do it for the money, or you're a monkey. You write to tell a story, to get it out of your head and onto print, and the money is just a beneficial side-effect from doing something you love to do, and NEED to do. Then again, his bills are paid well into the 24th century...but there must be some truth to his words, as I have paraphrased them. I drive trains for the money, the benefits, and the retirement plan. But it is admittedly cool to go through small Nebraska towns in the summer, and see little kids wave at you as you go by, and toot the horn at them (some of them throw rocks, though, the little frackers). When you're a little kid, cool jobs are policeman, fireman, jet pilot, astronaut, and yes, locomotive engineer. No little kid ever says, "When I grow up, I'm going to be an insurance underwriter!" So it is nice to do what I do. But the glamour wears off at 3:00 AM, let me tell ya. Gold plated Harrier, indeed I rather liked that mental image! KRAD, the print run information places it in greater perspective. I also understand now that you don't get any more money until your "royalties" exceed your advance, i.e. if your royalties were that $25k but your advance was $10k, then you would only get $15,000. Minus agent fees, etc.
To publish is to make something available to the public; the words share a common root. S&S doesn't publish (make public) the sales figures, but they do send the authors biannual earnings statements as private business correspondence. If we're lucky, we get royalty checks around the same time. Well, you'd get $25K; you just would've gotten the first $10K of it up front and had to wait a while for the rest.
The book I mentioned was STAR TREK: VOYAGES OF THE IMAGINATION by Jeff Ayers. It features lots of behind the scenes anecdotes on how Star Trek books get written.
Oh! VofI. I do have that book; just didn't make the connection. Will have to check it out to find the "behind-the-scenes" look. The only thing I read in it thus far was the timeline portion. Thanks
That is frequently the way of life for cats, though. Much of the time they contribute nothing to the organization than hair and carbon dioxide (which our household plants would need, were they not made of plastic), but nothing can substitute for the purr and forehead rub.
I don't do a lot of publishing, but my total royalties and advances wouldn't even pay for a postage stamp. My only work that ever sold, sold a grand total of 2 copies. In my field you normally don't get advances, just royalties. My other work was published by the government as a part of my job as a government researcher and writer, and they don't give royalties, just a regular paycheck for working my 40 hour a week job.
Oh my, I just had to comment on this. I'm a published author. And I'm a librarian. Do you think I hate libraries? I think libraries are one of humanity's best ideas ever. There are zillions of people who cannot afford to buy books because it means they'd be going without food or clothing or shelter. You betcha I want them to be able to read what they want to read whether or not they can afford to buy. Me, I'm omniverous when it comes to books. I buy new, I buy used, and I borrow from friends and libraries. Anyhoo.... FWIW, I don't think the original question was tacky at all. Now, if someone said "I'm not comfortable telling you," and the questioner then started to argue, that would be tacky. But that wasn't the case here. To the original poster, you might enjoy looking at the blogs of writers Jim C. Hines and John Scalzi. They don't write tie-in, but they lay the numbers all out there every now and again.
What I would like for Christmas... A sarcasm smiley. Please. Please! The tongue out thing isn't working anymore.
A good point. Also, however: there are vastly more astronauts in the world today than people who make a living writing Star Trek fiction. So a kid actually has a better chance of becoming an astronaut than of becoming a Star Trek writer.
While I don't have anything to add to the conversation, I really want to thank the authors for their answers in this thread. It's one of the most fascinating threads I've seen in a long time. It's really interesting to get to know some of the behind the scenes information, and to understand a little better about how one is paid for all of their hard work in creating the novels that we all enjoy so much.