"Why is it so hard for writers to talk candidly about how much money they make"

Old Hack said:

It could be done without sharing advances, earnings, sales figures. The focus would have to be different: on the process, rather than the product. It might help show people how trade publishers DO market and promote the books they publish, for example. Just a thought.

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Something like that would be great. I used to see posters in the Tenth Circle thread sharing this kind of info about their published or soon-to-be-published books, and it was hugely helpful as I prepared to go through the process. But it's been dead there for a while. Maybe people don't realize it's there, or don't expect to find that thread in Rejection & Dejection? (It makes sense in that "sub hell" is a place to which most writers have to return over and over, published or not. But the thread wasn't just about being on sub.)

Dennis E. Taylor said:

Yes, and if you earn out your advance (especially if you do it quickly), future advances are larger.

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Yes they are

Btw, if you haven't seen it yet there's a very candid post from Kameron Hurley here about what she made last year: http://www.kameronhurley.com/made-writing-fiction-2016/

The "don't ever talk about how much your earn" thing came as a surprise to me when I joined the writing community. For all the years I've been in IT, everyone has been very open about their wages. I thought it might be just a quirk of my low-income Scottish bubble, but over the years I've expanded my network to lots of English colleagues and they're all very open about their salary figures too. There's a bit of a fear of being seen as bragging, but that dissolves quickly after a few drinks.

The company I work makes it only mildly difficult to gauge other employees wages -- it's all banded/graded, as another poster mentioned, and you can guess their wage within £2k. The trickiest part is calculating in regional differences, since Scottish employees in IT field tend to be paid a good couple of grand less than their colleagues in the same role south of the border.

I really love the pragmatic, brass-tacks approach of the wonderful self-publishing diaries in AW and elsewhere. It feels like we are stronger, as writers, when we speak openly about what works and what doesn't: comparing advertising routes and tactics, sales channels, swag options, speaker prices etc.

I was thinking about this after reading Kameron's latest post, and I realized the big problem (for me, at least) is that "how much do writers make" isn't really a question that makes sense. Since it's all freelance, the key is the output and the pay rate, and what's true for one writer isn't necessarily going to extrapolate to anyone else.

What might be interesting is aggregated data on the earnings of single books, broken down by genre (with enough transparency so you can toss aside outliers if you want). Maybe percentages of earnings broken into advance vs. royalties as well.

Fiction writers are, in a way, manufacturers of widgets; maybe, for those trying to plan, it's more useful to see how much money the average Widget X makes.

(I have no idea if there's any way to get at this data. )

I hadn't seen Kameron's latest post. Thank you! Just found her blog thanks to the stuff on this thread, and I'm enjoying it.

It's very eye-opening, and I'm glad to find it.

This, to me, is a good example of a published writer's journal that gets down to the level most of the self-publishers do. Does anyone know of any similar blogs?

@lizmonster: I concur that there aren't many standard answers, when you ask "how much does a writer make". The problem with correlating data there is that given the vast amount of publishing houses and options, and the fact that different genres have different sales expectations... too many variables to be able to give hard and fast averages, let alone get a good baseline. Now if you focused it down to "what are published romance writers likely to make at THIS stage of their career," then you might have more success. Maybe.

I suspect the only reason that self-publishers have it easier (when it comes to getting solid numbers that somewhat line up) is because the practice is just starting to take off in a profitable manner. We're in the golden, early years of the boom still. The options and ways of self-publishing have yet to diverge in the ways that standard publishing has done.

There's not as much, hm... history. Yes, that term probably works.

ASeiple said:

Does anyone know of any similar blogs?

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Jim C Hines usually does a yearly one, though the 2016 one isn't done yet (maybe because he's doing a survey to get a wider data range).

Several of us have mentioned Jim C. Hines' survey, and he has just started to publish the results: 2016 Novelist Income Survey Results, Part 1.