What is the average salary for amateur author?

Question

More specifically what is the income from a sale of an amateur authors book?

Answer 1

Zero - $0 = amateur

making money = professional!

Answer 2

Ha! Most books never make more than the original author's fee. You see, you might have a contract, as a professional, for 15% of the cover price, minus expenses. Most books will never cover that fee. So for a non-best seller? Figure on an average salary of zero dollars per hour.

Answer 3

a very small amount of money... lol, most have to have a second job... first you have royaltys and then a percentage of however many copies of your book is sold... it really depends on your popularity.  

Answer 4

Someone who is an "amateur" is someone who does something for the love of it, without getting paid for it.  Therefore, an "amateur" author, by definition, would make no money from his or her writing.  

Once they start getting paid for their work, they are no longer "amateurs".

Now if you're talking about UNKNOWN authors, that's a different story.  The author's income from royalties depends on how well the book sells -- they get a percentage of the selling price.  If the book catches the attention of the reading public and becomes a best-seller, you could potentially make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even more if a Hollywood filmmaker wants to turn your novel into a movie and offers to buy the movie rights.  If the book doesn't do well, you might not make very much money at all.

Most unknown authors's books don't sell that well; think of all the novels that get published every year (thousands of them if you count the ones that go directly to paperback without ever being published in hardcover) -- and then think about how few of them end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

OTOH, JK Rowling, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and every other well known author you can name, was at one time an unknown author.