A writer I work with recently showed me her royalty statement from a major publisher. She’d spent three years writing the book. It had been well reviewed, reasonably well promoted, and had sold about 12,000 copies in hardcover, which is respectable for literary fiction. Her total royalty earnings after the advance earned out: $4,200. For three years of work. That comes to roughly $1,400 a year, or about $27 a week. She could earn more working a single shift at a fast-food restaurant.

This is not an unusual story. It’s not even a particularly bad one. Most books don’t earn out their advances, which means most authors never see royalties beyond the initial payment. And those advances, especially for debut and mid-list authors, have been stagnant or declining for years. The median advance for a traditionally published book is somewhere in the range of $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the genre and the publisher. For a book that took two to three years to write, that works out to less than minimum wage by any calculation.

I’m going to spend this essay explaining why the economics of author compensation are broken, what we’re doing differently at ScrollWorks Media, and why I believe that paying writers properly isn’t just ethical, it’s good business.

How the Standard Model Works

The traditional publishing compensation model has remained essentially unchanged for decades. An author signs a contract granting the publisher the right to publish their book. In exchange, they receive an advance against royalties, which is a prepayment against future earnings. Royalties are typically set at specific percentages of the book’s price: commonly 10% of the hardcover list price, 7.5% for trade paperbacks, and 25% of net receipts for e-books.

The advance is supposed to represent the publisher’s estimate of what the book will earn in royalties. Once the book has earned enough in royalties to “earn out” the advance, the author starts receiving additional royalty payments. In practice, according to various industry surveys, roughly 60 to 70 percent of books never earn out their advances, which means the advance is the only money the author ever sees.

On the surface, this seems reasonable. The publisher is taking a financial risk by paying the author upfront, and the royalty structure means the author shares in the upside if the book does well. But look more closely and the problems become apparent.

First, the royalty percentages haven’t meaningfully increased in decades, even as book prices have risen and publishers have found new ways to monetize content (audio rights, digital rights, subsidiary rights). An author today receives roughly the same percentage of each sale as an author in the 1980s, despite fundamental changes in the publishing landscape.

Second, the advance model creates a perverse incentive structure. Publishers have every reason to keep advances low, because a book that never earns out its advance is effectively getting free content beyond the advance amount. If a publisher pays a $5,000 advance and the book earns $20,000 in royalties, the publisher keeps the difference until royalty payments are issued, and the timing of those payments (typically twice a year, with significant delays) means the publisher is sitting on the author’s money for months.

Third, and most importantly, the entire model treats the author’s time as essentially free. A $10,000 advance for a book that took three years to write values the author’s labor at about $3,300 per year. That’s not a living wage. It’s not even close. And yet the publishing industry depends entirely on the labor of these writers, who are expected to produce the content that generates billions of dollars in annual revenue while earning less than a barista.

The Myth of the Starving Artist

There’s a persistent cultural narrative that writing should be its own reward. That real writers write for love, not money. That asking to be paid fairly is somehow crass or mercenary, a betrayal of the artistic calling. I find this narrative convenient for everyone except the writers themselves.

We don’t expect musicians to perform for free (though many are asked to). We don’t expect architects to design buildings without compensation. We don’t expect doctors to heal people out of sheer passion without a paycheck. But there remains a widespread assumption that writing is a hobby that occasionally becomes a career, and that writers should be grateful for the opportunity to be published at all. This is, to be direct about it, exploitative nonsense.

The practical consequence of this attitude is that professional writing is increasingly available only to people who have other sources of income. Writers with trust funds, working spouses, academic positions, or freelance side hustles can afford to write books for $5,000. Writers who depend on their writing income for rent and groceries cannot. The result is a narrowing of who gets to be a published author, which narrows the range of voices and perspectives in published literature. When only the financially comfortable can afford to write, the books we publish reflect a limited slice of human experience.

I’ve watched talented writers abandon fiction because they couldn’t justify the economics. Three years of work for $7,000 while raising two kids is not a viable plan. These are writers whose books deserved to exist, whose voices the literary world needs, but who made the rational decision that their time was better spent doing something that actually paid their bills. Every one of those departures is a loss for readers.

What We Do Differently

When I started ScrollWorks Media, I made a decision that some people in the industry thought was naive: we would pay writers more than the industry standard and structure our contracts to align the publisher’s interests with the author’s interests more equitably.

Our royalty rates are higher than the traditional model. I’m not going to share specific numbers publicly because they vary by project, but our rates are structured so that authors receive a meaningfully larger share of each book sold. The logic is simple: the author created the thing we’re selling. They should get the largest share of the revenue it generates. The fact that this is considered radical tells you something about how skewed the industry standard has become.

We also pay royalties quarterly rather than semi-annually, with shorter delay periods. The standard practice of holding royalties for six months or more before issuing payments is, frankly, difficult to justify in an era of real-time sales reporting. We know exactly how many copies we’ve sold at any given moment. There’s no legitimate reason to sit on that money for half a year.

Our contracts are shorter and clearer than the industry average. The typical Big Five publishing contract is 20 to 30 pages of dense legal language that requires an agent and a lawyer to parse. Ours are designed to be readable by a normal human. We spell out exactly what rights we’re acquiring, for how long, and under what conditions they revert to the author. Rights reversion, the process by which an author regains control of their work, is automatic in our contracts after a defined period. At many large publishers, getting your rights back requires navigating a bureaucratic process that can take years.

The Business Case

Some people hear our approach and assume we’re running a charity. We’re not. Paying writers properly is a business strategy with concrete benefits.

First, it helps us attract and retain talented authors. The publishing grapevine is real, and authors talk to each other about their experiences with different publishers. Word has gotten around that we treat our authors well, and that reputation brings us manuscripts from writers who might otherwise have gone to larger houses. Several of our authors have told us they chose us over publishers offering larger advances because they preferred our contract terms and our approach to the author-publisher relationship.

Second, authors who feel valued are more engaged in the publishing process. They’re more enthusiastic about promotion. They’re more willing to do events, interviews, and social media outreach. They’re more collaborative during the editing process. An author who feels exploited is an author who does the minimum required by contract. An author who feels like a partner does far more than the minimum, and that extra effort benefits both parties.

Third, higher royalty rates actually incentivize us to sell more books. Under the traditional model, where the publisher keeps most of the revenue, there’s a temptation to coast after the advance has been recouped. Under our model, where the author gets a bigger share, we have to sell more copies to make the same profit. That keeps us hungry. It keeps us marketing, promoting, and finding new readers months and years after publication, rather than moving on to the next title.

What Needs to Change Industry-Wide

Our approach works for a small publisher with a selective list. I’m not going to pretend that the same model can be directly applied to a Big Five house publishing thousands of titles a year. The economics are different at scale. But I do think there are changes the broader industry could make that would improve author compensation without destroying publisher profitability.

E-book royalty rates need to increase. The standard 25% of net for e-books was set when digital publishing was new and publishers were uncertain about the economics. That uncertainty is long gone. E-books have minimal production costs (no printing, no warehousing, no shipping, no returns), and the current royalty rate doesn’t reflect that cost savings. Authors are effectively subsidizing publishers’ transition to digital by accepting rates that are lower than the economic fundamentals justify. The Authors Guild has been arguing for 50% of net on e-books for years. I think they’re right.

Advance transparency would help too. Right now, advances are negotiated individually with very little publicly available data about what constitutes a fair offer. This information asymmetry disadvantages authors (especially unagented and debut authors) who don’t know what comparable books received. Organizations like the Authors Guild and Codex (a group that tracks publishing deal data) are working to increase transparency, but there’s a long way to go.

Royalty accounting needs modernization. The semi-annual royalty statement, arriving months after the sales it covers, is an artifact of a pre-digital era when sales data was genuinely difficult to compile. Today, publishers know their sales figures in real time. There’s no technical reason why authors can’t have access to a dashboard showing their sales and accrued royalties at any time. Some publishers have started offering this, but it should be the industry standard.

And rights reversion should be streamlined. When a publisher is no longer actively selling a book, the rights should return to the author automatically, without the author having to navigate a complex process to request them. Too many books are held captive by publishers who aren’t doing anything with them, preventing authors from seeking new publishers, publishing independently, or making their work available in other ways.

The Reader’s Role

Readers can influence this, and I think many readers want to. When you buy a book from a publisher that pays its authors fairly, you’re supporting a model of publishing that treats creative work as valuable labor. When you buy directly from a small publisher’s website, the author usually receives a significantly larger share of the sale than when you buy from Amazon. When you attend author events, recommend books to friends, and leave thoughtful reviews, you’re increasing the audience for a book, which increases the author’s income.

I’m not asking anyone to make purchasing decisions based entirely on author compensation. Buy the books you want to read from wherever is most convenient. But if you have the choice between two equally convenient options, and one of them puts more money in the author’s pocket, choosing that option is a small act with real consequences.

Libraries are worth mentioning here too. Some authors worry that library lending reduces their sales, but the opposite is usually true. Libraries expose readers to authors they’d never have tried otherwise, and library patrons are among the heaviest book buyers. Plus, authors and publishers receive compensation for library purchases. Advocating for strong library funding is one of the most effective things a reader can do to support writers.

Why This Matters Beyond Economics

I keep coming back to a question that’s bigger than royalty rates and contract terms: what kind of literary culture do we want? One where only the independently wealthy can afford to write books? One where talented writers abandon their work because they can’t pay rent? One where the people who create the content that powers a multi-billion-dollar industry earn less than the people who stack that content on shelves?

Or one where writing is recognized as skilled, valuable labor and compensated accordingly? Where a mid-career novelist can make a middle-class living from their books? Where a debut author’s advance is enough to buy them the time to write their second book without taking a second job?

I don’t think this is a utopian vision. The publishing industry generates enough revenue to pay its creators better than it does. The money exists. The question is how it’s distributed, and right now, the distribution heavily favors everyone except the people who write the books.

At ScrollWorks, we’re trying to prove that a different model works, that you can pay writers fairly and still run a sustainable publishing business. We’re small, and our influence on the broader industry is limited. But every successful small publisher that treats its authors well makes it a little harder for the big houses to argue that the status quo is the only way. That’s worth doing, regardless of scale.

If you want to support this philosophy with your next purchase, browse our catalog. Every sale goes directly toward building a better model for the people who write the books you love.