Personal income histories - Author Video Transcripts
Video 1 Transcript
Hey, my name is Heather B. Moore. As an author, I do have multiple streams of personal income. This includes writing for a traditional publisher that gives advances, so I'll get paid when I submit a manuscript, but I also have to earn out that advance before I start getting royalties down the road. I have another publisher that just pays straight royalties, and so after the book is out, I'll start earning money on whatever sells. I also indie publish, which means that I get paid directly from distributors such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, Google Play, and those pay basically on a monthly basis. I also produce my own audiobooks, and I get paid from those books, and I have an agent who will sell audio rights to some of my other books or foreign rights to some of my other books. And I also do some freelance editing, and so it all kind of adds up to getting a pretty healthy career going after you've been doing that for a while.
Video 2 Transcript
I would say your average author does not write books for a living as in their only source of income. Your average author does it on the side while they have another job or have a partner that has another job while they do this, right? It's just really pretty average that you can make some good money on the side and then you keep doing that until your authoring kind of gets in the way that you can't do that full-time and that then you have to kind of move on to thinking, hey, do I take the jump to that? Which is tough to do, right? Because your book sales could be good for a little bit and then maybe they dive down a little bit. So it is something you want to keep practicing but not count on maybe being all at once.
Video 3 Transcript
Hi, my name is Michael Head. I am a six-figure author. I write for a company called Mountaindale Press and I just wanted to take a minute to come on here and first off apologize for the terrible, terrible quality of my camera. I have no idea why it's so blurry, but I just wanted to say that it is entirely possible, it is entirely feasible to become a full-time author with a realistically positive income level. You can make the kind of money that it becomes possible to write full-time and support a family. I have a wife and three kids and writing is my full-time job and it did not come instantly and it did not come easily, but if you can put forth the effort, you can do it. It is possible.
Video 4 Transcript
Personal income, this is a tricky one. In this industry we sign contracts that are non-disclosure which means I can't tell you how much I make off my books. I can tell you big broad ideas. If you self-publish you will probably make anywhere between zero dollars a month because like Amazon gives, pays you monthly to a hundred thousand. People are crazy. They can do this. If you publish, you know, with like a publisher that number changes to probably more like 500. Your contract should be somewhere at least at 500 or a thousand something in that range up to like a hundred, two hundred thousand. So, and that's not a month. I'm so sorry. That's per book for for traditional but a month for for the other kind. So, there you go. You could make money or not.
