In early June as conversations around police brutality and racial disparities across industries hit a fever pitch, book publishing came face-to-face with a significant indicator of its own shabby treatment of BIPOC writers. During a Twitter conversation with fellow YA author Tochi Onyebuchi about unfair treatments of black authors, L.L. McKinney created #PublishingPaidMe to encourage authors to share the advances they received from publishers.
Even for those of us who’ve been around the publishing block long enough to expect disparity, the results were pretty mind blowing.
Just as a refresher, here’s how a book advance works. An advance on royalties in the big lump sum an author gets when a publisher buys their book. It’s calculated by the editor making an educated guess on how many copies a book might sell by looking at what similar books—or the book’s comp titles—have sold and then working backwards from there.
For example, say you think a book can sell 10 thousand copies based on what other books like it have sold. If the author’s portion of each book is one dollar, then you can confidently offer that author a ten-thousand-dollar advance and expect to make that money back. The author gets the advance upfront— usually in three to four installments—and that’s all they make until the book has “earned through” meaning the book has sold ten thousand copies, thus making back the advance. Any additional books sold will earn the author an additional dollar in royalties.
Acquiring editors put together a profit and loss (P&L) statement to present when buying a book to demonstrate these calculations. Sometimes there are other numbers such as the author’s previous book sales, but comps weigh heavily especially if it’s a debut. If this sound like a pretty subjective, inexact way of determining what a book is worth, it is!
I love this quote from Vox’s Constance Grady in her piece about the hashtag
“Sales projections are based on real numbers, like the sales history of comparative titles. But publishers decide which books are similar to which, and hence which monumental successes should be taken into account and which failures should be ignored, through hunches and guesswork and educated bullshitting.”
It’s worth nothing that only thirty percent of books earn through their advance. Which isn’t to say that editors don’t know what they’re doing, just that it’s very hard to guess what a book will sell roughly two years before it hits the market. Imagine being back in 2018 and trying to predict how the market might receive literally any book this year. Exactly.
So, obviously advances matter because for the majority of authors, that’s all they’ll be paid for a book. A big advance can mean an author can set aside more time to promote their book, write a follow-up, or just, you know pay bills and live their life. But advances also determine how much of a publisher marketing resources a book will get, meaning they can be self-fulfilling prophecies.
Okay, on to the hashtag.
Authors across a variety of genres and identities showed support by disclosing what they made for their books. Some shared publicly and some added their information to an anonymous spreadsheet. To understand what a big deal this outpouring was, it’s crucial to understand just how secretive publishers can be about advances. Even our industry’s major trade publication, Publisher’s Weekly, has a kind of secret code that use to denote the range of the advance for a book when the deal is announced: using “nice deal” (or no adjective) to indicate under $50k, “very nice deal” $50-$99k, “good deal” $100-$250k, “significant” $250-$499, and “major” for $500+.
Obviously, data collected from a hashtag is going to be incomplete but it’s still telling. The New York Times crunched the spreadsheet data and found that of the 122 writers who said they earned at least 100k on an advance, 78 of them identified as white, seven as black and two said they as Latinx.
Yikes.
What got even more people talking were some of the big names who shared. Roxane Gay—who I think of as a household name—received 15k for Bad Feminist, which went on to become a NYT bestseller. Meanwhile white author Mandy Len Catron was paid 400k for her debut How to Fall in Love with Anyone, which sold on the basis on one viral essay. That’s a little more than 26 times what Roxane Gay made.
Jesmyn Ward—the preeminent American writer who has won the National Book Award twice—got 20k for Salvage the Bones and revealed that she had to wrestle to get 100k even AFTER winning the National Book Award. Contrast that with white author Chip Cheek who shared that that he received 800k for his debut novel Cape May. That’s nearly forty times as much if you’re counting.
It should be said that both Catron and Cheek seemed also horrified by the disparity and were good sports about the many follow up tweets wondering who they even were.
These were far from the only such examples. And though I wasn’t shocked by the fact of the disparities—and its worth noting that six-figure advances are rare regardless of race—I was still taken aback by just how wide they were.
What this shows us is the downstream effect of the disparities in the industry itself. It’s easy to see how an industry where 86% of the key decision makers (acquiring editors) are white, and the vast majority of the books being used as comp titles to make those decisions are by white authors (around 95% according to Stanford’s Laura B. McGrath) BIPOC authors wouldn’t be treated equitably.
As liberal and progressive as publishing likes to think it is, it’s an American industry and it carries all the history of systemic oppression that every industry in this country does. None of us should be shocked, but we should all be angry.
L.L. McKinney summed it up best:
“I want black authors to be paid what they’re worth. I want publishing to shift its idea of what a universal story is. White stories are seen as universal. Black stories are seen as niche. Why is that?”