deirdre: (Default)
2014-02-13 11:32 pm

Author Earnings Survey: Initial Glance

There’s a lot of interesting information in the Author Earnings survey that Hugh Howey and others are working on. Hugh’s posted a preliminary link on Twitter, and you can watch the live data coming in.

I decided to do some breakdowns of the really early data: self-reported 2013 income.

  Trad Self
Median 6,000 3,000
Mean 37,000 67,000

Let’s look at the self-published percentile numbers a little more (and the clever plug for a forthcoming book that neatly echoes the graph’s shape). (Click to embiggen)

AuthorEarnings.001

Above 97.5%, everyone’s over $200k, and the top 5 reporters are over $1M, with the tippy top at $13M.

Me? I’m still at the “carryable number of lattes” phase and I haven’t yet entered my data. Soon.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.