“It’s downright wild out there”: A Q&A on Book Sales with Alyson Forbes

As part of our Money Week series, Alyson Forbes shares the ins and outs of book sales and explains how indie presses “care about your book the way John Cusack cares about Ione Skye in ‘Say Anything’.”

When the editorial team came up with the idea for Money Week, we knew it was an opportunity to talk to our colleagues and learn some of their publishing wisdom. Alyson Forbes was at the top of our list. As COO at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull, she oversees a number of departments—marketing, publicity, sales, and the writing programs. She has also held a number of senior positions at the Big Five publishing houses. Her experience means she has a wealth of knowledge about book sales and the finances of publishing, and we’re lucky to have her share it with Don’t Write Alone.

Over email, she and I chatted about determining advance sizes, royalty rates, how to keep supporting backlist titles, and the question she gets asked the most about sales figures.

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Tajja Isen: What factors determine the size of an author’s advance?

Alyson Forbes: Most of book publishing as a business is based on a collection of subjective data points. And all these odd little subjective data points influence what type of advance an author might expect for their work.

Here’s a few: The quality of the writing, the level of editorial involvement needed, the number of other houses interested in the book, audience appeal, comparative authors and how their books performed relative to expectations, the author’s online presence, how this genre has historically performed, the author’s profile in the writing community, how much money the publisher can spend in comparison to how well we think a book will sell.

The list can be endless.

We take all those data points and plug them into our P&L (profit and loss statement), which will sometimes, but not always, bring us to our final offer. Then we all haggle over various bits and bobs and, fingers crossed, sign a contract that is agreeable to both author and publisher.

TI: Book sales—the literal numbers of them—can seem like a bit of a black box. How are copies counted, and how often do writers “earn out”?

AF: It’s worth noting that an advance is a loan against your future earnings. If you don’t sell enough books to earn out, you get to keep the money, but there’s no more money coming until you reach earn out.

All publishers use their internal sales data to calculate the royalties their authors receive. The bigger the advance, the longer it takes to earn out. I have no idea for sure how often writers earn out their advances across the industry, but the number I hear kicked around most is less than 50 percent. For more than 50 percent of authors, a royalty check is something that they may never experience. Which isn’t necessarily bad or good, just a fact.

The goal for a publisher is that a book earns out the advance. That means we made money, the author made money, and the expected number of readers connected with the book in a meaningful way. Admittedly, it’s getting harder and harder to hit that mark. In fact, it’s downright wild out there. As the Big Five consolidates to compete with one another, advances get bigger for the most promising books, and it gets harder for indies to participate at auction. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in that position, all I can say is absolutely take their money. I get it. We’re all out here trying to make a living.

But if you are like many writers starting out, you’ll probably find yourself with an independent publisher like mine. Because our budgets for advances are smaller, we try our best to attract talent in other ways. That can look like more access: a personal relationship with the full team, better responsiveness to your needs, and editors who work intensely with you line by line to help create the best book possible.

Everyone in book publishing deeply cares about books. Indies take it to a whole different level.

Having spent what feels like a thousand years working with the Big Five, I can say with certainty that everyone in book publishing deeply cares about books. Indies take it to a whole different level. It’s sort of a cult-like fervency. Indies care about your book the way John Cusack cares about Ione Skye in Say Anything, and, guess what, we are standing outside your window playing Peter Gabriel on the boom box we got for our fourteenth birthday.

TI: How much does an author make per book (in hardcover, paperback, and ebook), and which format tends to sell the most copies?

AF: Royalty rates are much the same across the board no matter who you publish with. You get a percentage of the retail price on a gentle upward sales trajectory. The more you sell, the higher the percentage. Since hardcovers are the highest-priced format, hardcover tends to be more lucrative.

Sometimes trade paperback is a better bet. Bookstores love trade paperback originals, especially for debut authors. It’s easier to convince readers to try something new for sixteen dollars versus a twenty-seven-dollar hardcover. What will happen is a store may buy more of your book because a trade paperback is less expensive for them to purchase wholesale. More books in a store equals better chances of getting in-store merchandising, like table or window placements. All of these factors can improve your chances of selling your book to readers.

TI: We know selling, say, a hundred copies isn’t great and selling a million copies is amazing, but in terms of the in-between: What’s considered a good sales range for a debut book?

AF: This is probably the question I get asked the most. What makes a good sales range is dependent on many factors. The most important [one] is expectations. If a publisher has high expectations for a title and it doesn’t connect with an audience in a way that meets those expectations, it will be considered a disappointment. If it connects in an outsized way, it’s a surprise hit. If I spent $1 million and the book sells thirty thousand copies, it has decidedly underperformed against expectations. If I spent ten thousand dollars, it’s a complete raving success.

TI: What about how the sales of a debut affect the fate of the author’s next book?

AF: If a debut book makes a splash, the author can usually expect a more lucrative deal on their second book. And that deal often comes from the Big Five. Not great for indies, but we do take a lot of pride in building the careers of the authors we work with. We celebrate the success of all of our authors, current or otherwise!

However, splash is (surprise) subjective. Sometimes I’ll look up the sales of a book that I feel is inescapable only to find that it sold very modestly. Because the industry can be so insular, what we think was a huge bestseller was in actuality . . . not.

But this means agents have a lot of flexibility in terms of how they market their authors’ success or relative lack thereof, and publishers need to look at the performance of a book objectively when evaluating possible acquisitions.

TI: Do most backlist titles eventually stop selling? How can an author continue to support their backlist titles?

AF: Backlist is the unsung hero of the publishing industry. While most publishing houses will always make most of their revenue on new releases, backlist is pure opportunity. As a new release transforms into backlist, there is degradation in sales that will occur year after year. But if an author keeps pushing the book on social, stays active in their writing community, and creates lasting relationships with bookstores and other book-centric organizations, and the publisher invests a bit of time on metadata and marketing, a book can stay relevant into the foreseeable future. I’ve worked on books that really didn’t work well at publication that achieved long-tail financial success through the sheer grit of the author that penned them—and a little bit of ongoing support from the publisher. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it absolutely does happen.