Aldo’s first royalties

What is 'earning out'?

Welcome to the newsletter of David (D. V.) Bishop, author of the Cesare Aldo historical thrillers set in Renaissance Italy. This time I’m pulling back the curtain on contracts, author advances and royalties…

But first: Swindon

This weekend I an in Swindon for a new event, The Bloodshed Crime Fiction Festival. It runs Friday 18^th October to Sunday 20^th at Delta Hotels Marriott in Swindon, and I’ll be there this Friday and Saturday to talk about historical thrillers and serial killers.

The festival has a cracking line-up of authors including bestsellers and award-winners like Tom Hindle (Murder on Lake Garda), Emma Styles (No Country For Girls), and Chris Lloyd (the Eddie Giral series set in occupied Paris during WWII). You can find more info and book your ticket here.

Aldo makes royalties

Twice a year traditionally published authors receive a royalty statement which tells them how many copies of their work sold across a six-month period. Last week I got the numbers for January-June 2024, covering sales for my Cesare Aldo series in all its formats: hardback, paperback, audiobook, ebook and trade paperback.

I also got a lovely surprise: my first payment of royalties for the books one and two in the series, City of Vengeance and The Darkest Sin. It wasn’t a huge amount, but getting royalties is a significant moment because this means my first contract has earned out. That piece of publishing jargon might not be familiar, so I’ll try to explain it.

When an author signs a contract with a publisher, they agree an advance. That’s a sum of money paid for the right to publish particular books. (Most contracts are two book deals for reasons I won’t explain here.) News media sometimes have stories about authors getting big six- and seven-figure advances, but these are the exception.

Most advances are much smaller, thousands or tens of thousands of pounds. That still sounds good, right? Being paid – and having your books published too. But the real story is more complicated. An advance is paid out in portions, not all at once, and it can take years before the writer gets all their money.

How advances work

I signed my contract for the first two Aldo novels in 2019, and get the signature fee for both books, which was a quarter of the total advance - yay! Of course, I had spent two and a half years writing and revising the books by then, and spent twenty years researching Renaissance Florence, but let’s set that to one side

When the manuscript for City was accepted in 2019, I got another part of my fee for that book, which was an eighth of the total advance. The next payment - another eighth of the advance - arrived when City of Vengeance was published in hardback, but this wasn’t until February 2021. That meant I got no money at all during 2020 when I was writing the second book of my contract, The Darkest Sin.

During 2021 I got the hardback publication payment for City, and Pan Macmillan accepted The Darkest Sin manuscript so I got another eighth of the total advance. In 2022 I got the final payment for City when it came out in paperback, plus the hardback publication fee for The Darkest Sin. And, finally, in 2023 I got paid the last eighth of my advance when The Darkest Sin came out in paperback – phew!

That means it took four years to receive all the payments of my advance, as agreed in the contract I signed back in 2019. This is pretty standard in traditional publishing. It’s why many authors write a novel a year as it keeps the advance payments coming in while they wait for the initial books in their first contract to start earning royalties.

What are royalties?

For every hardback, paperback, audiobook, ebook and trade paperback sold an author is usually allotted a percentage of that money. If you buy an Aldo hardback, it earns me more than a paperback, because the sale price is higher. But paperbacks usually sell in far greater volume (especially in supermarkets), so are very significant.

All of those individual sales earn the writer a royalty, but that money goes to the publisher first who deducts it from the total advance mentioned above. Only when royalties from those books have exceeded the author’s advance – when the contract has ‘earned out’ - does the publisher start paying the writer royalties.

Here’s a harsh truth: most books never earn out. They usually sell sufficient copies to break even and make the publisher money, but not enough to clear the advance. The good news is authors don’t have to pay back unearned advances. When I was writing licensed tie-in books, several never earned out but I didn’t have to return my advances.

More good news: once a contract earns out, the author keeps receiving royalties for those books while people keep buying them. When readers discover the Aldo series they often go back to the start and read from there. To everyone who does, grazie! I now make royalties every time someone buys City of Vengeance or The Darkest Sin.

Some hard numbers

If you’ve read this far, you deserve some real numbers. For every Aldo hardback sold, roughly £1 is set against my advance or added to my royalties if the book has earned out. But hardbacks are only on shelves a year or less, so most sales are in other formats. Each Aldo paperback earns roughly 50p, audiobooks and ebooks a little more.

City of Vengeance is the bestseller in the Aldo series; that’s no surprise as it has been on sale longest and new readers often start there, as noted above. Across all formats – hardback, paperback, audiobook, ebook and trade paperback – it had sold roughly 28,000 copies in total, while The Darkest Sin has sold nearly 18,000 copies in total.

Both were boosted by being sold in Sainsbury’s supermarkets when their respective paperbacks came out. Supermarkets discount books to half price, if not lower, which means they sell high volumes but the money going to the author may be less. If you can buy from an independent bookshop, please do – it helps them and writers too.

Lastly, the ebook for City of Vengeance is just 99p at Amazon UK this month. That’s a loss leader, where something gets heavily discounted to encourage newcomers into buying and trying it. Hopefully some of those bargain-loving readers will enjoy their first Cesare Aldo historical thriller enough to purchase other books in the series!

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