Music to write by: “Just Because” by Jane’s Addiction

First novels advances are notoriously low these days, yet new authors still have dreams of being able to quit their day jobs. Story of six figure advances abound, but how much, really, are new authors making? Tobias Buckell has compiled a list of first novel advances and nicely categorized them into sections (such as agented and unagented) and genre. He’s been doing this for a couple of years and amassed a pretty accurate picture of the kinds of advances being doled out. He’s currently soliciting more stats, so if you’ve recently recieved your first advance, drop by his blog and let him know.

According to Tobias, the average first novel advances break down thusly:

Career Advances are a little better:

*Extrapolated

Brenda Hiatt has done virtually the same thing for romance novels, but she’s broken it down by publisher. She’s got a clever trick which prevents me from deep-linking to the list, but it’s highlighted on the left side of her blog under the title Show Me the Money.

Looks like Pocket and HarperCollins are tops in Romance at 15,000 and 13,500 respectively with advances ranging all the way down to zero (Wings E-Press).

What does this mean for us? Don’t quit your day job. Of course, you could always hope you get lucky. Stephen King’s “Carrie” sold for 200,000 back in the 70s. Who knows? That could be you!