2016 Novelist Income Survey Final Results and Data
I’ve compiled the 2016 Novelist Income Survey results into a single pdf report. I added a few things and corrected a couple of errors and omissions. You can download that report at the following URL:
http://www.jimchines.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2016-Novelist-Income-Results.pdf
You can also check out the anonymized data at:
http://www.jimchines.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Results.xlsx
This has been a lot of work, but I think the results were worth it. Thanks one final time to everyone who contributed in any way, from sharing your data to spreading the word to offering suggestions and critique on my analyses.
If you see any mistakes, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m gonna go take a breather…
Alexander Claxton
March 8, 2017 @ 11:40 am
Thanks for the anonymized data! I may poke at it some and I will be sure to link any analyses here!
Also it will be a nice change of pace for my students to have real data instead of fabricated data sets! 😀
Jennie Nash
March 8, 2017 @ 8:05 pm
What fantastic work you did, Jim! Thank you for sharing it. My students will find this very interesting indeed.
Deborah K. Frontiera
March 9, 2017 @ 8:44 pm
Your work is greatly appreciated. Nice to know where I stand in the over-all picture. Not as bad as I thought.
Carol Gyzander
March 22, 2017 @ 12:26 pm
Fascinating info – I’ve seen your stuff but not read through the summary before. I’d also suggest that it appears you have a typo in the section of the PDF about Number of Books Published in 2016 on p. 15.
It says:
“But most fascinating to me is that for large press authors, the line is essentially flat. The authors with 8 or 10 large press novels in 2016 made roughly the same as the average author with 1 or 2 large press books. Excellent news for the one book/year folks with big publishers.”
Did you mean to say that INDIE authors made the same money with 8-10 books as did large press authors with 1-2?
The amount of data crunching you’ve done is astounding, and your effort is much appreciated!
Jim C. Hines
March 22, 2017 @ 2:08 pm
Carol – Nope, that’s actually correct. We had a couple of large press authors who published 8 or 10 books in 2016. Their income was roughly the same as the average of those large press authors who only published 1 or 2 books.
Which is…not what I would have predicted. And since we had relatively few large press authors with lots of books published in 2016, I wouldn’t draw any strong conclusions. But it’s still fascinating to me.
And thanks! 🙂
Carol Gyzander
March 22, 2017 @ 5:06 pm
Wow, my apologies and that is indeed fascinating! And my hat goes off to anyone who is publishing 8-10 works a year.
Jim C. Hines
March 22, 2017 @ 5:10 pm
No worries. I had to go back and reread it a few times to make sure I actually meant what I wrote 🙂
And yeah… If I could start doing better than one a year, I’d be happy!
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