They say that the only way an ordinary person can make a fortune, these days, is by writing a bestseller.
But, as Slate reports, that ain't necessarily so.
In 2012, a month after the publication of her memoir, Wild,
Cheryl Strayed was on a book tour, soaking up the wonder of her first
big success as an author, when her husband texted her to say that their
rent check had bounced. “We couldn’t complain to anyone,” Strayed told
Manjula Martin, editor of the new anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living: “My book is on the New York Times best-seller list right now and we do not have any money in our checking account.
Few connections are more mysterious than the one between
writing books and making money. Strayed most definitely did make money
on Wild, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film with
Reese Witherspoon, but she didn’t get her first royalty check for it
until 2013, “so it was almost a year before my life actually changed.”
Yes, there was that $400,000 advance—an amount to make any aspiring
memoirist’s eyes go dreamily unfocused—but Strayed and her husband had
run up so much credit card debt that almost all of the money went to
paying it off and supporting her family while she finished writing the
book.
Book advances, which are advances against the royalties that will be earned after the book is published, aren’t forked out in one lump sum, either. The payments come parceled out in (typically) three or four checks paid on signing the contract, on delivery of the manuscript, and on publication. The writer’s literary agent then takes a percentage of that. When Strayed sold her first novel a few years earlier for the seemingly handsome sum of $100,000, the advance amounted to, as she puts it, “about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the IRS … it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn’t enough to live off.”
Book advances, which are advances against the royalties that will be earned after the book is published, aren’t forked out in one lump sum, either. The payments come parceled out in (typically) three or four checks paid on signing the contract, on delivery of the manuscript, and on publication. The writer’s literary agent then takes a percentage of that. When Strayed sold her first novel a few years earlier for the seemingly handsome sum of $100,000, the advance amounted to, as she puts it, “about $21,000 a year over the course of four years, and I paid a third of that to the IRS … it was like getting a grant every year for four years. But it wasn’t enough to live off.”
So how do writers avoid death from starvation?
By teaching people how to write, more often than not!
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