That Xiran Jay Zhao video about the amount of time it takes to get paid by the publisher, a couple of time she says "that's just the way it is." Are there actual, legitimate business reasons for holding off paying someone 6 or 8 or more months what they've earned for their book? Or is it the publisher basically going "We'll pay you when we pay you. What are you gonna do about it?" because they're essentially the one in charge?
And is it the same for all authors? Or is there an unofficial "tier" system based on your name? Are they telling people like Stephen King or James Patterson or Neil Gaiman "you'll see your money in 8 months" or are they more likely to be getting monthly checks just because of who they are?
There are some legitimate business reasons, yes.
Okay, so let's look at the way a book is sold to a publisher. I'm going to use very round numbers, because I don't want to do a lot of math right now. So say I sell a book for $15,000 under the traditional three installment contract--signing, delivery/acceptance, and publication. What this means is I sign the contract, I get a $5,000 check! Yay! I will also get checks when the book is turned in and accepted, emphasis because it means I can't just give them a word jumble and claim I turned the book in, and then again when the book comes out. We're ignoring side situations like "book is never turned in" and "book is never published."
But wait! My agent gets 15% off the top of each of those checks, which isn't a whole lot at $5,000--$750--but means I'm receiving effectively a $4,250 check, and then waiting maybe a year for the next one.
In the US, 1/3rd of that check goes automatically to taxes, and I cannot math that very well, but it's about $1,416. So I'm left with $2,834 as my payment for the year. This is why most authors will have day jobs.
This structure makes sense. They pay you to call dibs on your book: they pay you when the dibs pan out: they pay you when they can start making money. Now, recently, some publishers have started going to a four stage advance payment, and I can't see any real justification for that. Maybe someone will give me one. I'd be fascinated to know what it is.
So here's the thing: until the book is out, there is no more money. You've been paid for the book, but it's not making money for the publisher yet, and so of course you're not getting more money. It used to be the expectation that your advance would pay your bills while you wrote the next book; that is clearly no longer the case. I live in Seattle. A single check from a three-stage advance isn't paying my mortgage for a month. But.
Once the book is out, it can start making money, and that's when things get complicated. Say a bookstore places an order for 10 copies of AWESOME NEW BESTSELLER. Yay! That should be ten sales, and ten units of whatever your royalty is, right? Only these are physical items, and bookstores can return them, so your publisher marks it down as "ten sales, five reserve against returns," meaning you're only getting credit for five sales until the return window (usually a year) runs out. Where it gets a little hinky is when the bookstore sells all ten and orders ten more, and the publisher still has it marked as "five (now ten) reserve against returns." Basically, you're only getting credit for half your sales until that reserve window closes.
Sadly, thanks to certain retailer policies, this has been grandfathered into applying to electronic sales as well.
TL,DR: The delay in royalty payments is to give bookstores time to sell the books, and mean that your publisher doesn't pay you for a hundred sales, only to ask for the money from fifty to be given back when books are returned. This could happen faster in the modern world, but that would involve publishers paying us faster, and they like to keep the money in their hands as long as possible.
To the best of my knowledge, no one is A Big Enough Author that they can demand their money now, right now. And this is why trad publishing continues to self-select for the wealthy and the young.
So @softness-and-shattering asked "why the young?" and followed it with "bc theoretically more able-bodied and able to work three jobs?" and yes, that is exactly it.
I was thirty-one when my first book came out. I was no longer as spry or resilient as I had been at eighteen, but I was basically flooded with endorphins at all times, brought on by getting my heart's desire, and so I was "able"--quote marks intentional--to burn my candle at both ends and in the middle for several years.
I kept working a forty-hour a week day job, with a three+ hour commute, and writing effectively forty to sixty hours a week, for those several years. I wore myself thin as paper. You could see through me. But I still had the resilience to burn, and I wanted this badly enough to burn it.
I am not saying that's a good thing. It was terrible for my health and for my relationships. I barely survived. I would not survive it if I were trying to do the same thing again, today. All creative industries eat the young, because the young are willing to be eaten. Some of us just survive to crawl away and keep going.
Seanan explains the structure of publishing payments very well here! In Xiran Jay Zhao’s video they explain excellently the priorities these payments led them to adopt.
I am rotten at calculations but I did want to chime in on the young and wealthy thing. A few times I’ve seen (lovely!) readers who wanted to see more of my work wondering why I wasn’t producing like Author X or Author Y, and I would sit stricken with the knowledge Author X or Author Y was wealthy, and thus had leisure to write I didn’t. I was young when I started publishing (24) and I was fast and worked hard, but I also thought if I just worked hard enough that would BE enough and had no idea what toll that would take on me. I love writing and I’m a people pleaser (which often ends in ‘the people around you do not seem that pleased’). I was running around going ‘I’m fast! I can do this! Coach put me in!’
One project I went basically without sleep for a month, and I caught pneumonia. That project was cancelled, so it was for nothing. I kept working too hard, and I kept getting pneumonia. For years. My writing went off a cliff. Eventually I was diagnosed with late stage lymphoma. Now, I don’t think working too hard on that project gave me cancer, I think cancer was always coming, but I do think maybe it reached me earlier than it would have. I lost most of my thirties to cancer, and trying to come back from cancer working the same way I had, and realising I was chronically ill now and simply couldn’t. I made my choices. But I would say, think carefully about how you expend your energy because you don’t know when you might hit your limit. The arts are beautiful and rewarding and tough, so burn strategically. I really thought I wasn’t coming back: I thought I would die and then I thought I couldn’t write because my confidence was shot. A lot of people burn up and don’t survive, either literally or as artists. I thought I would try anyway, one last time, and I am so, so excited to have Long Live Evil coming out next year, a new book of my very own, and good things happening for it! But it was such a close-run thing, and I’m still terrified. Be wary, my doves.
