There’s a new Twitter hashtag #PublishingPaidMe which aims to get authors to disclose the size of their advances. John Scalzi writes a response at his blog Whatever. Here’s his post at #PublishingPaidMe.

Now I think disclosure of pay rates is always a good thing. If you know what everyone else is being paid, you are armed for your own pay negotiation. So in principle knowing what other writers are being paid in the way of advances ought to help you too.an

But of course it isn’t as simple as that. An advance isn’t a salary. An advance isn’t even a measure of what the author ultimately gets paid. And it’s certainly not (usually*) the amount a publisher pays for the book, although many people, including authors who clearly should know better, seem to treat it that way. As Mr Scalzi points out the advance is merely a guess by the publisher at the amount of royalties the author might be due after a period of sales. It’s an estimate that a book of the sort you are working on ought probably to sell this or that number of copies, which means that they can offer to pay you up front a portion of the royalties due to you after about a year’s-worth of sales. In effect the payment of advances represents publishers funding authors while they write. Of course the publisher expects to make money off the book, and if they do the author will do so too. If the book sells more than expected, the author will be paid more: if the book sells less — the author gets to keep the advance. Not a bad deal surely. Investing in the success of the book by paying advance on royalties is a way to persuade authors to sign with you rather than with a competing publisher: it is not society’s mechanism for supporting authors.

See also Advances.

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* Usually — but the advance will turn out to be the full amount paid in those distressingly common cases where the book ends up being less successful than estimated, and the advance doesn’t “earn out” because it paid royalties on more copies than were ultimately sold. These unearned royalty payments represent quite a drain on trade publishers’ resources. This is one of the calculations behind the postponing of many new books during the current business restrictions. There’s probably no right or wrong answer to the dilemma: I would bet even more advances than usual will be failing to earn out in the coming year. However, sympathy is not called for: optimism is a job requirement, and competition involves risk.