12 Comments

Thank you for the post. In your experience, how often do you see debut authors get anything for their book?

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author

Frequently! But this is my whole job. I only see the authors who cross my path and not all do. It is hard to sell your first book and many don't. I didn't! But it's not impossible.

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I was looking at a book that I think will be a comp for a book I’m working on and found that it sold for a six figure amount after an auction with 10 publishers. I was unfamiliar with auctions for books so this article was very helpful. Thanks! The winning bid was an academic press—which also surprised me. I didn’t think academic presses offered six figure advances.

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Outstanding! Thank you for this invaluable article.

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What are debut novels selling for these days? Let's assume it's not super-buzzworthy or explodes in an auction. Ballpark is fine. Thanks!

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author

It varies wildly genre to genre! It could be $5000 or $50,000. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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What scope of rights and Iicence term do these sums cover?

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author

It varies! It is usually print and ebook in English at the very least. It will vary whether it includes translation rights or the sale of the English Language rights outside of the US. It rarely includes the film rights (i.e. the author keeps those) and more and more often does include the audio rights (i.e. the publisher wants those). The term is for the term of copyright, or when the book goes out of print (according to how that is defined in the contract).

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Thank you!

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Ok, how about SFF?

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author

$5,001 -$50,001. :) Sorry, it just doesn't really work like that. Audience, author, concept, imprint, market, whether the moon is in the seventh house, all that matters enough to make a more specific answer impossible.

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Fair enough. It hasn't changed then from when I followed it before.

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