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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

How do you sell tens of millions of books and become broke not even twenty years later?

Suppose her publisher was absolutely and utterly ripping her off, only paying $1 per book, that's still burning through about a million USD per year.

Somewhere buried there lies the real crime. With which I mean to say either her publisher ripped her off beyond belief, or she's really bad with money.

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I think you overestimate both how much most authors earn as well as how easy it is to blow through $20m.

It's likely also "cash broke" rather than actually bankrupt; it sounds like she still has her house (albeit borrowed against) and other assets.

> I think you overestimate both how much most authors earn as well as how easy it is to blow through $20m.

I actually looked up what an average compensation per book sold is, and $1 is on the low end.

Also blowing through a million USD year-after-year is actually very hard. It's only easy if you really suck at handling money.

If you spent $1000 every single day shopping, you're still not even spending half a million per year.

> it sounds like she still has her house (albeit borrowed against)

Which means she basically already sold it, and is just still allowed to live in it until she either buys it back, or gets kicked out.

I think there's some potential for bias/skew there. The majority of books sold are published under large deals with established authors. There's a long tail end of books published by less well-known authors under less favourable deals. It's possible (and I haven't looked at these numbers myself) that statistics presented make the publishing industry look better. Anecdotally I've read many negative things about the publishing industry and compensation for less established authors. Additionally, if we're talking about averages and not medians, the outliers are going to significantly increase that (J.K. Rowling might earn $3 on a book sale for her books published in the last 15 years, and her books might constitute 1% of all books sold in that period, but that's very much an outlier)

And regardless of statistical truths, we don't know the specifics of the subject's book deal. Sara being an author who did not have as much clout before "Water for Elephants"[1], I wouldn't be shocked to learn she made more like $0.25 per book sold based on lock-in to a contract that included low royalties in exchange for ample marketing to drive book sales.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Gruen

I thought so too, until I read the part where she has been paying lawyers $20,000/month for many years, taking care of a retired husband, 2 children in college & 1 in high-school and having health problems of her own. And that's only the costs we know.

One party allowed to run up unchecked marketing costs, fully recoupable against the other party's royalty.

Is that actually how things work? If so, that's downright abusive.

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