October 20 – 23, 2022

Pasadena, CA

How Authors Go From Fingers on Their Keyboard to Dollars in Their Bank Accounts: Four Ways Book Authors Make Money From Publishers

In this session, I’m going to discuss four ways authors make money from book publishers. When I give lectures to beginning writers, I find that they have very little idea of how they can go from slaving away on their keyboards at night and on weekends to actually quitting their day job.

I’m going to discuss here only ways in which authors make money from publishers, and also ways publishers try not to pay, or try to postpone paying for as long as possible, monies which authors are owed. Of course, there are other ways in which authors make money from their books by being paid by third-parties other than their publishers, such as the “sale” of movie and television rights to their books to “Hollywood,” but that’s the subject of another session.