The Paycheck Part

Or, An Open Letter to Publishing

Dear Publishing Industry,

Please, please, please stop looking to Bookscan to decide how many copies a novel has sold. If an author already has a book under their belt, ask to see the royalty statements instead. You’ll have a more accurate scale with which to weigh your decision about making an offer.

Take myself as Exhibit A. Here’s what my author portal, which is connected to Bookscan, says I’ve sold across three novels.

You can’t see the entire scroll down because my screen wouldn’t allow it, but you can see that number at the bottom: 19,387. I like that number. It’s a nice number, divided by three books (averaging 6,462.33333), in an industry that often struggles to sell much more than 5K copies per novel. Unfortunately, that number is wrong. Here’s is what I’ve actually sold:

For the sake of clarity, 51,797 is bigger than 19,387. In fact, it’s 32,410 copies bigger!

Publishing, I’ve heard that you offer advances based on what you think a book will sell in its lifetime, and now that we’ve crossed the line into royalties for my first two books, we are both making more money than expected. Go us!

All I request now is that when considering my next project, you ask me or my agent for the real numbers before taking Bookscan at face value. Sure, maybe Bookscan is great if you’re just using it to compare authors’ sales, but if you want up-to-date, accurate figures, we’ve got them and are happy to share.

Sincerely,

Me

Okay, now back to the originally scheduled post. Here is my most recent royalty statement figures for Jan-March 2025:

The Night She Went Missing earned $1024.05

I Love It When You Lie earned $1147.36

Even though Watch It Burn got me on the USA Today Bestseller list, it has yet to earn out, and I’m wondering if part of the reason is because I’m no longer with MIRA (my new publisher is Storm). Perhaps they aren’t pushing this final book as much as they did the previous two, but I can’t know for sure. Either way, I’m grateful they published me for three novels in a row when it’s hard to get more than a one-book stint at an imprint these days.

Let’s break down the numbers a bit.

Photo by StellrWeb on Unsplash

TNSWM had an audio sale throughout the month of January, which helped boost that title, and for whatever reason, my audio has always done relatively well with this novel. (Shoutout to my audiobook narrator Megan Tusing!). In fact, I’ve sold 14,606 copies of the audio and only about half that with print.

For ILIWYL, the reverse is true with 14,437 print sold and only about a quarter of that sold in audio. WIB has also sold more than twice as many copies in print as audio.

Altogether, I’ve sold 25,802 copies of TNSWM, 21,236 of ILIWYL, and 4,759 of WIB. Thankfully, I’m mostly through the return stage of the first two novels (a little known fact of book selling is that bookstores can return books indefinitely, but most do so within a year if they are going to send them back), which is a relief, and by the time I receive my next royalty statement at the end of October, I should be through the most-likely-to return window for WIB.

I would be remiss not to try to sell you on reading one of my first three novels, so let me give you a quick elevator pitch for each one (remember, authors, you always need to know your elevator pitch—Ruth Ware once asked me for mine during a signing of her novel, The It Girl, and I stumbled through a word salad trying to explain ILIWYL, which she read on the airplane a couple of years later when I was interviewing her! :) Full circle moment):

In The Night She Went Missing, a missing 18-year-old reappears ten weeks later, floating in the Galveston harbor. She is alive but unconscious, and the mothers on the island must figure out who did this to her.

In I Love It When You Lie, three sisters return to the Appalachian foothills for their Gran’s funeral, each bringing a problematic man with them. By the end of the weekend one of those men will be in the grave with Gran. (This one was fun because it’s kind of a reverse mystery where you know—or think you know—who the main perpetrators are from the very beginning, but you don’t know which man they killed.)

In Watch It Burn, a cultish right-winged organization springs up on the banks of the Guadalupe River, and three old friends must dismantle it from the inside, even if it means burning their tiny town to the ground and rebuilding from the ashes. (I just saw that there’s a $1.99 sale on the ebook of WIB right now!)

Thanks for reading along on this journey through publishing! I’d love to hear from you if you have any disparities with Bookscan as well.

As ever, happy writing—or not!