I have never had a book advance. Not a penny, not a fiver, not so much as a book token. I publish through my own imprint, Inchgate, which means my advance negotiations consist of me asking myself for money and me, quite firmly, declining. So when I read about the sums the big publishers hand over before a single copy sells, I feel a bit like a man watching Premier League wages from the touchline of a Sunday league pitch, where the changing rooms smell of Deep Heat and quiet regret.
For the uninitiated, an advance is money a publisher pays an author up front, set against royalties the book has not yet earned. The author keeps it whether the thing sells ten copies or ten million. The publisher then claws it back out of sales before the author sees another bean. It is, in plain terms, a bet, with the publisher’s chips stacked on the author’s table and the author cheerfully spending the winnings in advance of the race.
The numbers that make your eyes water
Let us start at the very top, because the figures up there stop sounding like money and start sounding like the GDP of a small island nation.
In 2009, James Patterson signed a deal with Hachette to deliver seventeen books by the end of 2012; eleven for adults and six for younger readers. The price tag came to a reported $150 million. That remains the biggest book deal in publishing history. To put it in perspective, the man committed to writing more books in three years than most novelists manage in a lifetime, for a sum that would buy you roughly fifteen thousand of my paperbacks per book, assuming you bought them all yourself and stored them in a warehouse, which I would gently discourage.
Then there are the Obamas. In 2017, Penguin Random House won a bidding war for the joint memoirs of Barack and Michelle, agreeing a reported $65 million for the pair. Split down the middle, that lands somewhere near $32.5 million a head. Most authors celebrate a deal by telling their friends on Facebook and buying a slightly nicer bottle of wine. The Obamas could have bought the vineyard, the wine merchant, and the road leading to both.
The single-book heavyweights
Multi-book deals are one thing. The truly eye-watering trick is persuading a publisher to part with a fortune for one volume.
The record there belongs to Bill Clinton, whose 2004 memoir My Life reportedly earned him a $15 million advance, the largest ever paid for a single book. Not a series. Not a trilogy with merchandising rights and a Netflix option. One book. Fifteen million dollars.
Musicians have done rather nicely too. Bruce Springsteen reportedly banked around $10 million for his autobiography Born to Run, the biggest advance ever handed to a musician for a memoir. Which feels appropriate, somehow. A man who spent decades singing about working-class people scraping by, finally handed a cheque large enough to buy a large slice of Philadelphia.
And it filters down from there. Tom Wolfe sold the rights to a novel to Little, Brown for close to $7 million in 2008. The same year, Carlos Ruiz Zafón sold a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind for more than $4 million. Lovely sums, all of them. Sums you could retire on, see out your days on, and still have enough left over to never once check the price of the petrol before filling up.
The bit the press release tends to leave out
Here is where it stops being a fairy tale. An advance is not a prize. It is a loan the book itself has to repay in royalties before the author earns anything else. And the inconvenient truth, the one publishers very much prefer to keep off the dust jacket, is that most books never manage it.
The figures vary depending on who you ask, but the consensus across the industry is grim. Estimates suggest that only around a quarter of books ever earn out their advance. Which means seventy to eighty per cent of them do not. The author keeps the money, the book underperforms, and the publisher quietly writes off the difference as the cost of doing business in a trade where nobody — not the editors, not the agents, not the bookmakers — can reliably predict what the public will actually buy.
It is a peculiar arrangement when you sit with it. Imagine a world where four out of five footballers never justified their transfer fee, the clubs all knew this going in, and everyone agreed to keep doing it anyway because the one in five occasionally turned out to be Lionel Messi.
When the cheque outshines the book
Which brings us, inevitably, to the flops. The advances so vast, so confident, that the book underneath them never stood a chance of climbing the mountain.
The cautionary tale most often wheeled out is Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoir Hard Choices. Industry speculation put her advance at $14 million, and Simon & Schuster shipped a million copies in anticipation of a juggernaut. What they received instead landed closer to a damp Tuesday. Second-week sales fell by 43.5 per cent to around 48,000 copies, and the publisher faced the dawning realisation that it would likely never recoup the advance, nor shift the mountain of hardbacks it had already trucked to the nation’s bookshops. A solid performer by ordinary standards; a quiet catastrophe against a fourteen-million-dollar yardstick.
The lesson the industry keeps relearning, then forgetting, then relearning, is that a famous name and a colossal advance guarantee precisely nothing. Fame does not always translate to sales. A person can have millions of admirers, every one of whom would happily watch them on a screen, follow them on their phone, queue in the rain for a glimpse of them, and not a single one of whom can be persuaded to sit down with four hundred printed pages of their reflections.
And yet
And yet there is a strange mercy buried in all of this. When a book fails to earn out, the author doesn’t have to repay the money. The advance is theirs, kept, banked, spent on the vineyard. The loss sits with the publisher, who calculated the odds, placed the bet, and lost it like a grown adult.
So the writer with the eight-figure flop walks away wealthy and the writer who self-publishes a quiet little novel that finds its readers walks away with something else entirely: the knowledge that every reader who bought the book actually wanted it. Nobody shipped them a million copies on a hunch. They chose it. Which, when you have never had an advance in your life, turns out to be a rather comforting thought to fall asleep on.
Money up front is a wonderful thing. Wanting what you end up with is a better one. I have spent a good deal of my writing life circling exactly that gap, the chasm between the windfall you dreamed of and the life it actually delivers.
If the idea appeals, I wrote a whole novel about it. Terms May Apply follows Kyle Hammond, who makes an idle birthday wish, watches it come true three days later, and then meets the gaunt old man who has turned up to explain that wishes, like advances, always come with a price attached. And if you prefer your what-ifs with a side of nostalgia, The ’86 Fix hands Craig Pelling the one thing every flop author and lottery loser secretly craves: a chance to go back and do it all rather differently.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a book advance?
A book advance is a sum a publisher pays an author up front, before the book goes on sale, set against the royalties the book is expected to earn. The author keeps the advance regardless of how the book performs, and only receives further royalty payments once sales have repaid that initial sum.
What is the biggest book advance ever paid?
The largest single book deal on record belongs to James Patterson, who signed a reported $150 million agreement with Hachette in 2009 to write seventeen books. For a joint memoir deal, Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly secured around $65 million from Penguin Random House in 2017, while Bill Clinton’s $15 million for his 2004 memoir is widely cited as the largest advance for a single volume.
What does it mean for a book to “earn out” its advance?
A book earns out when its royalty earnings finally equal the advance the publisher paid the author. Only after that point does the author start receiving additional royalty payments. Industry estimates suggest only around a quarter of books ever reach it, meaning the majority never earn out at all.
Do authors have to repay an advance if the book flops?
In almost all cases, no. If a book fails to earn out, the author keeps the advance and the publisher absorbs the shortfall as a business loss. This is why a famous author can be paid millions for a memoir that sells poorly and still walk away with the full sum.
Does Keith A Pearson receive advances?
No. Keith self-publishes every novel through his own imprint, Inchgate Publishing, so there is no publisher paying an advance and no advance to earn out. He earns from royalties on books readers actually choose to buy, which suits him rather well.