Author Advocacy Survey Results
Finally, results!
Hello again from Sarah and Kate! We are so excited to be sharing the results of our Author Advocacy survey. Data was provided on more than 175 contracts, which allowed us to see some interesting trends.
We want to reinforce once more that we put a premium on keeping everyone’s information anonymous. None of the answers were mandatory, and we cannot verify the reported information at all. So the data represented in this newsletter should be used only for informational purposes.
That said, thanks so much to everyone who participated in the survey! Please feel free to contact us for further information, or to suggest ways we could improve questions and sampling if we decide to stage a similar survey in the future.
Please feel free to share this with other KidLit authors and use it to kickstart conversations with other writers you know! The more informed, the merrier.
Sarah and Kate shared this survey with their networks, and that resulted in a significant bias toward debut contemporary Young Adult authors who sold to Big 5 publishing houses. Please keep that in mind when interpreting this information.
Most contracts (96.6%) in the survey were original works. (However, the wording of the question may have caused some confusion by not differentiating IP works from work-for-hire.)
Of the contracts represented in this survey, 94.9% were negotiated by an agent.
97.7% of writers who worked with an agent paid them a 15% fee. Another 1.8% of them paid their agents 20%. Important to note: Agents tend to receive 20% on foreign rights sales or translations.