Recently, I wondered about how much a famous author makes. But, what does it acutally mean to be a successful author?
A “Successful Author” – 1st Definiton
For my own research I looked at authors, who I considered successful myself such as J.K. Rowling, Jordan Peterson or Tim Ferriss, but also German and Swiss authors such as Frank Schätzing or Martin Suter. Interestingly enough, all of them ended up having more than one million sold copies of books. The one exception was Alex Hormozi with his book ‘$100M Offers’, which sold about 400’000 copies, but even there is the number rising and compared to the other authors Alex is (yet) mostly known in the finance niche. So, a successful author by my own standards is one, who has sold over one million copies of his books. And how much does an author make, with so many sold copies?
Here an overview I made after some googling:
| The Holy Bible | 5 bil. copies |
| The Quran | 800 mil. copies |
| J.K. Rowling | 600 mil. copies |
| Stephen King | 400 mil. copies |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | 150 mil. copies (with ‘The Lord of the Rings’) |
| Stanislaw Lem | 45 mil. copies |
| Joel Dicker | 12 mil. copies |
| Martin Suter | 10 mil. copies |
| Patrick Rothfuss | 10 mil. copies (with ‘The Kingkiller Chronicles’) |
| Frank Schätzing | 8.6 mil. copies (in Germany) |
| Jordan Peterson | 2 mil. copies (with ‘12 Rules for Life’, ~3 mil. USD) |
| Tim Ferriss | 2 mil. copies (with ‘The Four-Hour Work Week’) |
| Ramit Sethi | 1 mil. copies (with ‘IWT’) |
| Alex Hormozi | 430k copies (with ‘$100M Offers’, July 23) |
Let’s talk money
I took JBP as an example and found this interesting quora post, where his profit for ’12 Rules for Life’ was estimated to be about 3.3 million USD after taxes. So, an author with 1 million sold sold copies makes about 1.7 million USD. Or in other words $1.70 per book for book that sells for $25 . That’s not too much, consindering it takes most authors 1-3 years for writing a book.
I cross-checked that my calculations on another website. They suggest that a writer with a publisher makes about $1.79 for a book that sells for $14.99. Assuming this is before taxes, my calculations seem to check out. Applied on JBP’s example with $25 a piece and an income tax of 33%, we get $1.97, which is close enough.
These findings are very enlightening to me. I mean, sure – these authors are not poor, but again they are the best of the best. Nevertheless, their salary is comparable to these of surgeons, corporate executives or hedge fund managers. All very good-paying jobs to life live more than comfortably, but it does not surprise me like the salaries of top athletes or movie stars.
2nd Definition of a “Successful Author”
I tried to define “successful author” a little bit differently from the perspective of how much money one needs to live comfortably. I’d say this is about 100k a year. Assuming you’d sell a book for $25 and get about $2 profit (after taxes), an author with publisher needs 50’000 sold books in a year or roughly 4’200 books per month. What’s worht mentioning, self-published author makes about 6 times more for each book, which means only 8’300 sold books in a year or 700 books per month.
Clout > Income
Compared to my first definition of a “successful author”, these numbers seem much more attainable and motivating to me. Also, we should not neglect the fact that a book is an easily scalable product and allows something like a “passive income”, once the work is done. Finally, I guess what’s impressive about authors is not the money the make, but the clout they have. I mean sure Kaley Cuoco made 900k per episode in in ‘The Big Bang Theory’, however she did not occupy my mind for several hours like a good non-fiction or a great story does.
