The Liability of the Advance

The history of the book advance and why advances are less appealing than they may seem

The evolution of the advance in book publishing, like a lot of things in book publishing, is a bit strange and often misunderstood. When book publishers first started giving advances to authors in the early 1900s, they were understood to be loans against future royalties earned, not “gifts” as the word giving might imply.

Today, no one talks about advances as loans, but they should be understood this way. True, you don’t have to pay an advance back if you don’t earn out, but writers who get advances should also never see them as a gift. Any author who hasn’t earned out knows the sinking feeling that comes with the negative number on their royalty statement. Advances come with strings attached, and authors who don’t earn out shouldn’t expect to be courted for a next book.

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In the history of book publishing, advances are a relatively new phenomenon. Leading up to the early twentieth century for nearly five hundred years, the only people who could publish were those who could afford to do so. There was no centralized publishing industry, and as such authors invested in themselves.

When printing became industrialized in the early 1900s, all of a sudden you could print a lot more books for a lot less money. Seeing an opportunity to get books to the masses, traditional publishers as we know them today came into being. As books were increasingly in demand due to higher literacy rates, publishers met the moment, but also competition. Now authors were the talent, courted by publishers, but also subject to being taken advantage of by publishers. The Authors League of America (what would later become the Authors Guild) was a response to authors’ desire to advocate for better terms with publishers. Agents, scarce in the late 1800s, could make a decent living by the early 1900s. One of the practices they put into place was negotiating money up front for their authors, changing the face of the industry forever. Soon, advances became the norm, so much so that by the 1960s many publishers wouldn’t even consider unagented manuscripts.

In a new book, The Untold History of the Book (just out as of July and highly recommended), author Michael Castleman writes:

When publishers began hiring authors, they vied to sign those who penned big sellers. Agents monetized the competition by demanding money up front. As the decades passed, they were able to extend the practice to other authors, most of whom garnered small advances. Early on, if books didn’t repay their advances, publishers wanted authors to reimburse them the difference, but agents insisted, You want my superstar client? Take the risk. Publishers weren’t happy, but they wanted big names and caved. This tilted the book business one small notch back toward author-centrism. Today, the major publishers don’t ask for money back if books don’t repay advances (but read your contract).

Fast forward to today. Publishing has shifted on its axis. Publishing is again more author-centric than publisher-centric. More authors self-publish or pay to publish via various entrepreneurial models than get traditionally published. But for many authors, the dream of traditional publishing, and getting paid to publish, is one that dies hard. There’s been a collective belief in our culture, stemming from the golden era of book publishing that existed from about the 1950s through mid-’90s, that a publisher paying to publish a book automatically bestows legitimacy.

But the reality is something more complicated. Many authors understand the strings attached with an advance. Some would prefer no advance, in fact, allowing them to start making money with the sale of a first book. Author horror stories circulate widely, shared by those who’ve become pariahs in the industry, who can’t sell their next book because they failed to earn out their advance. I’ve long maintained that authors face a real challenge where advances are concerned because it feels amazing to get offered a big chunk of cash for a book project, but if you lose your publisher money, that chunk of cash is suddenly a ball and chain. Too big an advance on a first book can actually sink an author’s career, and too few authors understand the consequences of not earning out when they excitedly sign their debut contracts, thinking they’ve made it and it’s all open skies from here.

I have a friend who got a giant advance for her forthcoming memoir—something to the tune of $300,000. This happened because she’s a desirable author for lots of reasons, and the book went to auction. Her agent served her well, and his efforts will earn him $45,000. Not a terrible payout, though he’s been working with her to shape the book for years. Together, my friend and her agent will earn their money out over four payments across more than two years. I’ve read her book proposal and I’m excited about the memoir, but from where I sit, knowing the genre as I do, I’m skeptical that she’ll be able to earn out the advance. This isn’t because I don’t believe in the book’s value or its merit, but because she’ll need the book to sell 200,000 or so copies just to break even. Below are Bookscan numbers on a few recent memoirs I love that have “broken out,” as we say in the industry. (It’s important to note that the year the books were published matters, since some of books are always in the process of earning out with existing and future sales.)

• Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful: 42K in hardcover and 7K (so far) in paperback
• Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know: almost 80K in both formats
• Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues: 11K in both formats

Some memoirs that have exceeded the numbers my friend will need to earn out include:

• Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart: 618,000 in both formats
• Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died: 1.1 million in hardcover
• Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me: 1 million in hardcover

I offer a few observations:

1. Book advances are still an industry staple. Agents are driving them, and still driving them too high (in my opinion). Auctions are alive and well. But the payouts are over such a long period of time, and most agents I know are feeling disillusioned, and like they work too hard for too little money.

2. Many books that are breaking out and selling well are still not selling enough copies to earn out their advances. Publishers justify this in all sorts of ways, and you can read up on the 2022 DOJ vs. PRH (Penguin Random House) for a crash course on how an industry justifies its perennial losses.  

3. The books that are exceeding (or meeting) expectations, you’ll note, are by celebrity authors.

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In The Untold History of the Book, Castleman notes something I’ve noticed as well, which is that the aforementioned collective belief around who decides what makes a book worthy to be published has been challenged so much and so often that we’re in a zeitgeist moment, a wave we’ve been riding for at least a decade.

“Listen closely, and you can hear the culture changing,” he writes. “Publishers no longer denigrate self-publishing as the last refuge of losers who can’t attract real publishers. These days they’re more likely to say, If authors won’t invest in their own books, why should we?”

Yes, publishers still give giant advances, but authors understand that the advance is not all it’s cracked up to be. Author investment is widely understood to be the norm. Even my friend who garnered the giant advance intends to put a lot of that money back into her publicity efforts. There’s a joke in book publishing that goes something along the lines of: “How do you sell a million books?” Answer: “Spend a million dollars.” Funny, not funny, right? But a lot of money gets spent to sell books. One of my authors (on She Writes Press) who’s a whiz at Amazon and Facebook ads has sold upwards of 40,000 copies of her novel, but she estimates she’s about broken even due to how much money she’s spent on ads. More food for thought, of course, on the efforts any one of us make to get our books out into the world and for what motivations (money vs. readership; earnings vs. sales).

I know that a lot of my posts showcase how confounding book publishing is, but if you’ve read this far, you probably find it equal parts vexing, challenging, and wonderful just like I do. There are few things we can do during our time on this earth as wonderful and fulfilling as publishing a book and having that book find readers. Does an advance make the experience of becoming and being an author better? More legitimizing? More fulfilling? Once upon a time I might have said yes. Today, I don’t believe that to be the case. The culture is changing, has changed, and if that means we are finding new and better ways to measure a book’s worth—thank goodness.