I found some extremely helpful info for writers from fellow writer and blogger, Brenda Hiatt on her site where she invites you to “Escape into Sparkling Romantic Adventure.”
If you’re a writer and want to know how much you might earn from traditional publishers, you can see it all summarized here.
If you are considering self-publishing, now most-often called indie publishing, you can read about your potential earnings here.
Here’s a quote from the summary of the indie info Brenda gathered through surveying many generous authors who provided their financial figures:
“Out of 593 titles (so far), 219 were frontlist and 320 were backlist. (They don’t add up to the total because a few authors didn’t specify, while others had boxed sets including both frontlist and backlist, which counted as additional titles for sale.) The sixty authors responding had an average of nearly ten titles available by the end of 2012. 2012 indie-only earnings per author averaged $137,940 (yes, you read that right) with the median earnings figure at $51,211 per author. Responses ranged from the low three figures to the low seven figures (yes, you read that right, too). The average 2012 earnings per TITLE came to $13,957. I can’t compute a median figure per title, since I didn’t ask for book-specific earnings from my respondents, but it’s probably lower than that. The highest earners are spread across several genres, but romance (various subgenres) and mystery are heavily represented.”
Many thanks to Brenda for doing the grunt work.