Most books make little or no money for their authors. For good authors who are starting out, publishers usually pay an advance in the range of $5,000 to $10,000. Pin On Writing Tips According to the us bureau of labor statistics, the answer to the question of average into for ‘writers and authors’ in 2016 was $61,820 per year. How much do authors earn per book . With a 10 percent royalty, an author who writes a book that costs $10 and sells 20,000 copies makes $20,000. However, if we consider that a good author sells an average of one million books per year, the amount can easily range between $4.5 million to $5.5 million per year, for a book which sells at $9.99 a copy. A typical example of the latter would be a $200 freshman calculus textbook that is adopted at hundreds of colleges and universities. However, royalties aren’t the only way authors make money per book. Royalties are typical in traditional publishing, where authors sell the. Like all other authors, i earn no...