There’s a scenario most aspiring writers are likely to have fantasised about. They submit a stellar idea to a literary agent, who in turn contacts one of the ‘big four’ publishing houses. Everyone loves it and, after a bidding war, one lucky publisher immediately offers the plucky debut writer a six-figure sum on the spot.
But it’s only ever a fantasy because it’s based on a common misconception: that writers, especially those writing their first book, can make a lot of money with ease.
In actuality, advances tend to be much lower, and writers will often make ends meet by taking up secondary work, or will have taken unpaid leave from their day job in order to make the book happen in the first place.
When Irish author Liz Nugent, whose latest novel The Truth About Ruby Cooper hit shelves in March, first got her debut (Unraveling Oliver) published in 2013, she had almost zero expectations of making a living from it.
“My honest expectation was that I would get €5,000, because I knew that’s what a friend of mine had gotten for her debut novel,” she says with a laugh.
“I thought I would get €5,000, I’d be able to do a month off work, and then I’d go back and that would be it. I never thought about a second book, I never thought of it as a career … just €5,000 and a month off work.”
She said that is often how the cookie crumbles for new writers. This has perhaps been especially true in recent years, as the industry grapples with technological changes, the expansion of the pool due to the growing popularity of self-publishing, and the looming threat of AI.
“That’s what happens to an awful lot of people, and the advances have gone down,” Nugent says. “My original advance [on that first book] was €10,000, but debuts today would be lucky to get €5,000.”
Similarly, writer and illustrator Oisín McGann (Mad Grandad series, Small-Minded Giants, the Wildenstern Saga) says he was starting out as an author in a different time.
“In the early 2000s, I was coming into it at a point where the industry was on the up, particularly in children’s books," he says. “They were gaining credibility and we were seeing huge commercial successes. Advances were big and everybody was looking for the next Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl.
“It was quite different to what it is now. I was an illustrator before I was an author, so I’d been working in publishing for a long time and I didn’t have any illusions about the kind of money that is knocking around the industry. On that front, I had a fairly realistic attitude coming in.”
While he worked on getting published, McGann was also tied up with freelance illustration commissions, and the transition into life as a full-time author wasn’t an easy one.
“I’d had some good book advances from Random House, and it was big enough where I could say ‘I can make a full-time living as a writer’,” he says.
“That’s kind of a big decision. It’s a really tough one to make, particularly if you’re freelance because it’s taken years to build [your career] and you’re saying goodbye to clients.
“But I knew I could make money in writing. Whether I could make a living was another, and whether I could keep making a living… that was always going to be doubtful.
“Then, it did offer more promise, whereas now I think it’s harder for people to establish a career and keep going.”
Nugent, similarly, was faced with a professional turning point as her writing career took off. She left a job at RTÉ in 2013, before her book came out, which she says was “very brave or very stupid”.
“Jumping without a safety net for me was terrifying and I did go through some terrifying weeks, but then everything fell into place kind of quickly,” she says.
“I was very lucky and sometimes you’re not so lucky. Some people don’t even get advances anymore, they just write a book without an advance and then their royalties come in. If it does well, you’d do well out of the royalties, but it depends on your book.”
Self-published authors, for example, would have no access to an advance.
It points to a larger problem with the feasibility of writing as a full-time moneymaker: often, there’s a lot of unpaid labour involved – either in the publication process or later, when an invite comes in for an event that offers no fee.
“A publisher will never have to pay a writer a living wage,” McGann says. “That’s just not something they have to do. So that means if you spend months writing a book and you pitch to a publisher, and they get 1,000 pitches a year, they can pick one from 1,000. They have no obligation to the writer or to their financial security.
“That’s the business. I’m not having a go at publishers for this because that’s how it’s been set up. But it means that the emphasis leans more into basically free work from the writers that the publisher can choose from.
“When I started out, festivals regularly asked me to work for free, or you worked for a bottle of wine, and over time we have complained about it so much and raised this issue that eventually people were starting to pay us.”
McGann has long been committed to fighting that fight, having contributed to Match in the Dark, an author-led document on pay and treatment of writers in Ireland.
“I think there is a constant push to make art more professional and to see [the arts] valued,” he says.
“This is not a hobby, we do this for our job. We had to start doing it right; to get a base level and make the base level higher.”
“We tend to go, ‘I want the job. Please give me the job. I’ll work for free’, because you’re unstable and insecure and you’re willing to do more for less. And then you realise, ‘I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m good at this. I expect to get paid’.
“Most arts venues and publications are on your side. They want to do their best. They’re dealing with the reality of funding and making a profit.
“It’s not an enemy situation. It’s more asking, ‘How can we make this work so everybody can actually stay in business?’.
Liz Nugent photographed with her books. Photo: Frank McGrath
“We lose people all the time. People fall out because it’s difficult to make a living from it. So I think everybody is of the view of, ‘How do we make this a sustainable environment for artists?’.”
Luckily, Ireland is a relatively good place to be a writer.
“I think Ireland is excellent at the way it treats writers,” Nugent says. “My English writer friends are incredibly jealous of our tax exemption, for example.
“The first €50,000 we earn is tax exempt for creative work. We’re very lucky.”
“There’s also a lot of literature bursaries on offer in the Arts Council, not that I ever won one. But you can apply for a bursary if you’re completely broke, but also for a bursary in order to take unpaid leave for a period.
“I wish I had known that when I was in work because I took the leap without it.”
The difficulty, in many ways, is that a book can do well and earn an author money to live on for the time being, but when is the next book coming out? Will it bring in as much money from the get-go? How is it that a price is decided anyway?
Literary agent Paul Feldstein says: “The primary factor is, of course, the publisher’s own estimates as to how much the book might earn over its lifetime based on, first and foremost, the writing itself, the work’s appeal to specific demographics, the author’s public profile, the genre and its current popularity, and the potential for rights sales to foreign markets.”
“Most writers, especially debut writers, are not in it for the money,” Feldstein says. “It is more important, especially at this early stage, that they get feedback for their work and, hopefully, are able to find representation.
“When we do take a writer on for representation, we discuss our commission and, sometimes, we are asked what kind of advance, if any, they might expect.
“But again, at this stage, and once we submit, writers are mainly just hoping that publishers will want to publish their work.”
It’s not uncommon, say Feldstein and Nugent, for there to be misconceptions about what writers in the country can and do earn, as well as when they actually see the money land in their bank accounts.
Nugent says: “People don’t realise that when you get your first advance, you don’t get 10 grand upfront. You get maybe €2,500 when you sign the deal, €2,500 when they approve your first draft, then you get €2,500 when they accept your final draft, and then you get the last tranche when it’s published.
“When you hear about these big deals, it’s not that they’re getting €500,000 straight up front. There can be several stages.
“It really works over a long term because, if you’re writing a book over the course of two years, I take two years and I’m paid in tranches rather than an upfront fee.”
Literary agent Paul Feldstein
According to Feldstein, “the average income for novel writers in Ireland is very low, with studies suggesting that more than half of Irish authors earn less than €5,000 a year from their writing”.
“While top-tier authors can make a comfortable living,” he adds, “the vast majority of writers in Ireland do not make a living solely from their books and often rely on other sources of income.”
Interestingly, it is these secondary income sources that may be most at risk from the rise of generative AI. It’s not that robot writers will push authors off the shelves, but rather that they might snap up the smaller stuff that helps keep lower-earning authors afloat.
“Particularly for people coming up, the small jobs you can build a career on, something simple like the local theatre doing a poster, it could be an artist starting out, but they might go off and use Midjourney or whatever it is,” McGann says.
“The small starter jobs, the gap-fillers, the jobs artists use as a way of building a career or maintaining it over a long period, those are the ones that start disappearing first.”
Because of the unreliability of an author’s main income stream, while it might be tempting to get spendy when an advance payment lands, it’s not often feasible.
“If you’re like most freelancers, there’s no separating the money out, McGann says. “Whatever savings you have get used up every time you have a dry period or you need to do a job in the house or something.
“Your accountant would say you need to put some money away for this or that, but you’re going, ‘I have no money for the next two months. I’m working on something that won’t get paid yet. The money I have now will be paying the mortgage and buying the food’.”
As McGann progressed and the essentials were covered, he could afford to look at the nice-to-haves. The first big purchase he remembers making with money earned through his writing was a car: “It wasn’t my first car, but it was my first car that I really liked.”
And Nugent? Her first big spend was an investment in the next book.
’
“I took a two-year leave of absence with the intention of writing another book in between, which I did,” she says. “And then I went back to work for about five months and I got a big American deal and then I quit work completely.
“I guess I bought myself time.”
*On Thursday April 2 at 11:31am, Liz Nugent’s quote on the Artists’ Exemption was amended for clarity.
But it’s only ever a fantasy because it’s based on a common misconception: that writers, especially those writing their first book, can make a lot of money with ease.
In actuality, advances tend to be much lower, and writers will often make ends meet by taking up secondary work, or will have taken unpaid leave from their day job in order to make the book happen in the first place.
When Irish author Liz Nugent, whose latest novel The Truth About Ruby Cooper hit shelves in March, first got her debut (Unraveling Oliver) published in 2013, she had almost zero expectations of making a living from it.
“My honest expectation was that I would get €5,000, because I knew that’s what a friend of mine had gotten for her debut novel,” she says with a laugh.
“I thought I would get €5,000, I’d be able to do a month off work, and then I’d go back and that would be it. I never thought about a second book, I never thought of it as a career … just €5,000 and a month off work.”
She said that is often how the cookie crumbles for new writers. This has perhaps been especially true in recent years, as the industry grapples with technological changes, the expansion of the pool due to the growing popularity of self-publishing, and the looming threat of AI.
“That’s what happens to an awful lot of people, and the advances have gone down,” Nugent says. “My original advance [on that first book] was €10,000, but debuts today would be lucky to get €5,000.”
Similarly, writer and illustrator Oisín McGann (Mad Grandad series, Small-Minded Giants, the Wildenstern Saga) says he was starting out as an author in a different time.
“In the early 2000s, I was coming into it at a point where the industry was on the up, particularly in children’s books," he says. “They were gaining credibility and we were seeing huge commercial successes. Advances were big and everybody was looking for the next Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl.
“It was quite different to what it is now. I was an illustrator before I was an author, so I’d been working in publishing for a long time and I didn’t have any illusions about the kind of money that is knocking around the industry. On that front, I had a fairly realistic attitude coming in.”
While he worked on getting published, McGann was also tied up with freelance illustration commissions, and the transition into life as a full-time author wasn’t an easy one.
“I’d had some good book advances from Random House, and it was big enough where I could say ‘I can make a full-time living as a writer’,” he says.
“That’s kind of a big decision. It’s a really tough one to make, particularly if you’re freelance because it’s taken years to build [your career] and you’re saying goodbye to clients.
“But I knew I could make money in writing. Whether I could make a living was another, and whether I could keep making a living… that was always going to be doubtful.
“Then, it did offer more promise, whereas now I think it’s harder for people to establish a career and keep going.”
Nugent, similarly, was faced with a professional turning point as her writing career took off. She left a job at RTÉ in 2013, before her book came out, which she says was “very brave or very stupid”.
“Jumping without a safety net for me was terrifying and I did go through some terrifying weeks, but then everything fell into place kind of quickly,” she says.
“I was very lucky and sometimes you’re not so lucky. Some people don’t even get advances anymore, they just write a book without an advance and then their royalties come in. If it does well, you’d do well out of the royalties, but it depends on your book.”
Self-published authors, for example, would have no access to an advance.
It points to a larger problem with the feasibility of writing as a full-time moneymaker: often, there’s a lot of unpaid labour involved – either in the publication process or later, when an invite comes in for an event that offers no fee.
“A publisher will never have to pay a writer a living wage,” McGann says. “That’s just not something they have to do. So that means if you spend months writing a book and you pitch to a publisher, and they get 1,000 pitches a year, they can pick one from 1,000. They have no obligation to the writer or to their financial security.
“That’s the business. I’m not having a go at publishers for this because that’s how it’s been set up. But it means that the emphasis leans more into basically free work from the writers that the publisher can choose from.
“When I started out, festivals regularly asked me to work for free, or you worked for a bottle of wine, and over time we have complained about it so much and raised this issue that eventually people were starting to pay us.”
McGann has long been committed to fighting that fight, having contributed to Match in the Dark, an author-led document on pay and treatment of writers in Ireland.
“I think there is a constant push to make art more professional and to see [the arts] valued,” he says.
“This is not a hobby, we do this for our job. We had to start doing it right; to get a base level and make the base level higher.”
“We tend to go, ‘I want the job. Please give me the job. I’ll work for free’, because you’re unstable and insecure and you’re willing to do more for less. And then you realise, ‘I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m good at this. I expect to get paid’.
“Most arts venues and publications are on your side. They want to do their best. They’re dealing with the reality of funding and making a profit.
“It’s not an enemy situation. It’s more asking, ‘How can we make this work so everybody can actually stay in business?’.
Liz Nugent photographed with her books. Photo: Frank McGrath
“We lose people all the time. People fall out because it’s difficult to make a living from it. So I think everybody is of the view of, ‘How do we make this a sustainable environment for artists?’.”
Luckily, Ireland is a relatively good place to be a writer.
“I think Ireland is excellent at the way it treats writers,” Nugent says. “My English writer friends are incredibly jealous of our tax exemption, for example.
“The first €50,000 we earn is tax exempt for creative work. We’re very lucky.”
“There’s also a lot of literature bursaries on offer in the Arts Council, not that I ever won one. But you can apply for a bursary if you’re completely broke, but also for a bursary in order to take unpaid leave for a period.
“I wish I had known that when I was in work because I took the leap without it.”
The difficulty, in many ways, is that a book can do well and earn an author money to live on for the time being, but when is the next book coming out? Will it bring in as much money from the get-go? How is it that a price is decided anyway?
Literary agent Paul Feldstein says: “The primary factor is, of course, the publisher’s own estimates as to how much the book might earn over its lifetime based on, first and foremost, the writing itself, the work’s appeal to specific demographics, the author’s public profile, the genre and its current popularity, and the potential for rights sales to foreign markets.”
As to whether or not an author gets much of a say in what they are offered, it’s not often top of a writer’s list of priorities.
“Most writers, especially debut writers, are not in it for the money,” Feldstein says. “It is more important, especially at this early stage, that they get feedback for their work and, hopefully, are able to find representation.
“When we do take a writer on for representation, we discuss our commission and, sometimes, we are asked what kind of advance, if any, they might expect.
“But again, at this stage, and once we submit, writers are mainly just hoping that publishers will want to publish their work.”
It’s not uncommon, say Feldstein and Nugent, for there to be misconceptions about what writers in the country can and do earn, as well as when they actually see the money land in their bank accounts.
Nugent says: “People don’t realise that when you get your first advance, you don’t get 10 grand upfront. You get maybe €2,500 when you sign the deal, €2,500 when they approve your first draft, then you get €2,500 when they accept your final draft, and then you get the last tranche when it’s published.
“When you hear about these big deals, it’s not that they’re getting €500,000 straight up front. There can be several stages.
“It really works over a long term because, if you’re writing a book over the course of two years, I take two years and I’m paid in tranches rather than an upfront fee.”
Literary agent Paul Feldstein
According to Feldstein, “the average income for novel writers in Ireland is very low, with studies suggesting that more than half of Irish authors earn less than €5,000 a year from their writing”.
“While top-tier authors can make a comfortable living,” he adds, “the vast majority of writers in Ireland do not make a living solely from their books and often rely on other sources of income.”
Interestingly, it is these secondary income sources that may be most at risk from the rise of generative AI. It’s not that robot writers will push authors off the shelves, but rather that they might snap up the smaller stuff that helps keep lower-earning authors afloat.
“Particularly for people coming up, the small jobs you can build a career on, something simple like the local theatre doing a poster, it could be an artist starting out, but they might go off and use Midjourney or whatever it is,” McGann says.
“The small starter jobs, the gap-fillers, the jobs artists use as a way of building a career or maintaining it over a long period, those are the ones that start disappearing first.”
Because of the unreliability of an author’s main income stream, while it might be tempting to get spendy when an advance payment lands, it’s not often feasible.
“If you’re like most freelancers, there’s no separating the money out, McGann says. “Whatever savings you have get used up every time you have a dry period or you need to do a job in the house or something.
“Your accountant would say you need to put some money away for this or that, but you’re going, ‘I have no money for the next two months. I’m working on something that won’t get paid yet. The money I have now will be paying the mortgage and buying the food’.”
As McGann progressed and the essentials were covered, he could afford to look at the nice-to-haves. The first big purchase he remembers making with money earned through his writing was a car: “It wasn’t my first car, but it was my first car that I really liked.”
And Nugent? Her first big spend was an investment in the next book.
’
“I took a two-year leave of absence with the intention of writing another book in between, which I did,” she says. “And then I went back to work for about five months and I got a big American deal and then I quit work completely.
“I guess I bought myself time.”
*On Thursday April 2 at 11:31am, Liz Nugent’s quote on the Artists’ Exemption was amended for clarity.
