How much to author's get paid today?

If you truly want to write, you'll do it regardless of the income. Your writing is something that you want to get out there, a story that you have a burning desire to tell. If you think your novel is that amazing, you'll keep writing.

That said, there is a need to be practical as well. The fact is, most writers (but for a lucky few) will not earn a steady income or be able to support themselves. It can take many years to build up a solid portfolio of writing and many years also to sell a novel to a publisher or agent. Consequently, many writers have day jobs in other fields.

As for movies being more popular than books, both mediums seem to co-exist happily beside one another and have for many years. The success of a book can often mean it being made into a film, while some movies are adapted as books. In fact, did you know that the novelisation of "The Sound of One Hand Clapping" by Richard Flanagan is actually more popular than the film it was adapted from?

Authors get paid a lot, but it depends on if the book is successful or not. Many publishing houses thought Harry Potter wouldn't get famous and rejected the book. What if it hadn't got famous? J.K.Rowling wouldn't have received so much money.

Hmm. Books on pdf forms only if they are popular enough. That's how the word spreads through. If nobody buys the books, and nobody likes them and it doesn't get popular, it wouldn't get turned into pdf. Just because pdf files are downloadable, it doesn't mean that many people actually prefer it. Most people do it because they're on the computer most of the time, or don't have money to buy them (maybe?). And of course, books are still popular. You should see some people at my school. Many of them own full sets of HP, LOTR and Inheritance Cycle and Twilight and all of that. I don't think a career in writing is hard, if you do it part time. What I mean by that is, at the start, nobody can be a full time writer. They need other sources of income. If they get recognition and start earning more and get fame, only then they leave their job. and I have absolutely no doubt there will be more of famous novels and ideas.

If they get published, people WILL read it. And even if it doesn't get published, you might have cursed yourself because you 'never took the chance'. Every author has to take one. Even J.K.Rowling didn't think her series will get so famous. In fact, the first print of her books was of only 200 copies, and more than half of them were distributed to the libraries. All you can do is hope, I suppose. And even if they don't get published, you'll write anyway, because that's what you love to do. Not many people can get their hobby as their full-time job and earn a lot.

All the best!

How much an author gets paid depends almost exclusively on two things:

1) their contract with the publisher and

2) how many copies of their work are sold.

The contract can vary greatly. Stephen King can walk in and command a 30% cut of all profits and demand to retain his own movie rights and they'll give it to him. But most first time authors get much less tantalizing deals. Some only get a one time fee no matter how many copies their book sales (say $10,000, but $10,000 if the book sales 1 copy or 1 million copies). Some only get a royalty after a certain threshold (like it may take 10,000 book sales just to make back the money to print, distribute, and market it and the author won't get a time until after that many books are sold). Other times, authors do get straight up royalties, but they may not get much promotion and be forced to do the marketing work for themselves.

I've known two authors--real authors. They both made about $40,000 to $60,000 a year. One of them still kept two jobs that he partly needed (lived in San Fran where even $60k doesn't go very far) and that he used to people watch to get character ideas. The other had a wife making $100k, so she really supported the family for the most part while he wrote (on the dreams of someday being a Stephen King and making millions). The first one DID get one of his books optioned into a move once and that brought him a sudden $250,000 windfall, but the movie never got made and, after taxes, a few years later that money was gone and he was back to struggling to make a fifth of that off his writing.

You are right, for every Rowling or Meyers or King there are literally THOUSANDS of nobody writers. The goal is to be the big ones, but few ever will. Being an author can be hard--and it IS a full time job. So if you want to be an author, write because you love to write and NOT on the hopes you'll really get paid for it. Writers write because they love to write--because writing is a compulsion for them--not for the paycheck.

PS - Don't forget, too, that the market is changing. Thanks to electronic reading devices several MAJOR books stores have already closed. Nearly half of the major publishing houses have actually filed for bankruptcy or are in financial distress. More people are self-publishing than ever before. The days of the super author may be fading in many respects.

In the UK, on average, the amount a published author earns from their writing is about 1/4 of the national average wage.

That's nowhere near enough to live on.

"I've got huge ideas, ideas that I'm constantly expanding on and that can be made into amazing novel series'. But I don't see the point in spending years on writing something, if there's a good chance that nobody (or not many) will read it.."

Then don't. If you don't actually want to write, you're wasting your time. Everyone has ideas. Everyone thinks their ideas would be wonderful of only someone would do the work to make them into books or movies. The only person who is going to do that work is you, and if you don't enjoy it, it will show.

1) Write because you love it. If you do it for any other reason you'll never be published because your heart won't be in it.

2) Set realistic income goals. Making $1000 per month from steady (set word counts everyday) writing is very doable. If you stay with it and produce even moderately successful novels you can write as a career and have the possibility of producing a breakout novel that earns you millions.

3) If you think movies are more popular then look into screenwriting.

4) Be prepared to pay your dues. If you want the big bucks you have to do what the big earners did. Stephen King weathered 43 rejections before being published and admits to writing 3000 words per day without fail.

Dean,

When an author is picked up by a literary agent and the agent finds him/her a publisher, the publisher will give the author what is called An Advance. This is usually quite a large sum of money and is what the publisher thinks the book will do, and more, on the market. The author gets 15% of the sale of each book. So if a books sells for $12.50 the author will get around $1.86. However, if it's a million seller, that's $1.86 x 1,000,000,000 books. Also, if the book is turned into a movie, there is another 10 figure amount.

PJ M

Well, then I'd advise you to stay away from writing for your own sake. If you can't see yourself happy just simply writing something you believe is spectacular, then it's probably not the business for you. Most authors don't even make enough to live on the money from sales of their writings alone. Few hit it big, but there will always be those few that do. If you're fully prepared to take the risk, and think you have what it takes, then I say go for it. Just keep in mind that it won't be easy, and a lot of the time, it won't be fun.

Most people who write fiction don't earn any money from it. Of those who do, most don't earn enough for it to be their sole source of income. Most of the people who *do* make a living from writing spent a lot of time not earning a living from it, but learning and practicing their craft. If that bothers you, well, nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to spend decades writing books that nobody will ever read. The world is short of many things, but fiction is not one of them.

Ideas are worth nothing on their own, because the public doesn't buy them - they buy books with ideas in them. If you want to be famous as an author, you need to put in the time to learn how to write a book that might make you famous. You need to write, on average, a million words for practice before you're capable of writing something the public might pay to read.

Don't worry about piracy - nobody pirates the obscure stuff. Look at all the questions round here about "where can I read Harry Potter / Twilight / Percy Jackson / Hunger Games / flavour of the month for free with no downloading?" People who want to read books for free want to read what their friends are reading, or what they've seen a lot of advertising for. If your book turns up on a filesharing site, that means somebody thought enough people wanted it that it was worth cracking the DRM and uploading it.

Is it harder to make a career in writing these days? In some ways, yes. More people than ever want to be writers nowadays, and the big publishers are getting more and more picky - partly because the economy is so frakked, and partly because they're all owned by big multinational corporations, who want each quarter to be more profitable than the one before. Both of those factors make them very nervous about doing anything that might lose them a lot of money, so they tend not to publish a book unless they're confident it will sell well. Previously, they would invest in an author's career, where they would be willing to lose money on the first few books in the expectation of making a profit on the later ones.

In some ways, there's never been a better time to be an author, because there are so many places that will let you sell a book directly to the public without having to convince a big publisher that it will make them rich. You have to do all the other things a publisher would do for you, like cover design, editing, and especially marketing (or pay someone to do them for you). It won't make you rich or famous, unless you're very good and/or very lucky, but commercial publishing can't offer you that either.

The short answer is - as much as they are worth. You have to convince a publisher to take on your book, or you have to publish yourself at certain expense and hope that your books sell. If you have the talent you will be able to convince some organisation to pay you for your creative material which they will publish in whatever medium they feel will make money for them (and for you, incidentally).

What's the difference between an author and a bench?

A bench can support a family!