Royalty Statements: July 2026
Aug 03, 2026It's that time again!
Summer royalties for my YA novels have landed, which means it's time to take a look at how my backlist is selling 5-7 years after their initial publications.
If you missed previous posts, you can check them out here:
As ever, a huge shout out to Jason June, who is the first trad published author I saw regularly sharing transparent sales numbers like this.
This current royalty statement covers the period of October 1, 2025 - March 31, 2026. Let's dive in.
My July 2026 Royalty Statements
Compared to January's statements (which, again, you can check those out here), royalties overall are up a tiny bit (about $185 total across all titles).
I was honestly a bit surprised to see the increase, especially since the paperback for The Coldest Touch got remaindered recently. I guess the spooky season bump continues to help with sales?
Overall, I am thrilled that these books continue to find new readers despite being fairly old by YA standards. (Many of my initial teen readers are full fledged adults now! Some are even my agent siblings! It's wild!)
Here's the financial overview from the PRH portal for this period:
In total, my publisher will send $1,524.58 to my previous agent (who sold these books). After she takes her 15%, she'll send the remaining $1,295.89 to me. Timing-wise, this will likely land in my account before August 15th.
Combined with what I received back in February for January's royalty statement, that means I will have personally received $2,433.13 in 2026 for the North American editions of my books.
While that's obviously not a ton of money, it is money that I didn't have to do anything to earn during that six-month period. Sure, I did a few events throughout the year, but the work on those specific books has been finished for YEARS, which is fun.
So, How Many Copies is That?
Let's break it down. (I'm only including my full-length novels here, not the prequel novella.)
These Witches Don't Burn (2019 release, $20k advance)
- Total Copies Sold: 71,736
- Copies Sold this Period: 588
- Fun fact: I sold fewer copies this period but earned more in royalties -- more on that below!
This Coven Won't Break (2020 release, $20k advance)
- Total Copies Sold: 25,205
- Copies Sold this Period: 199 (up 18 from last time)
The Coldest Touch (2021 release, $35k advance)
- Total Copies Sold: 14,923
- Copies Sold this Period: 189 (up a grand total of 19 copies from last time lol)
Altogether, that's a total of 976 copies sold in a six month period.
Here's the graph from those approximate dates (it's hard to get a perfect sample here):
Obviously, these are relatively small numbers each week, but I will forever emphasize that these books are OLD in YA. These Witches Don't Burn came out more than 7 years ago at this point, and the "newest" of these, The Coldest Touch, is about to hit its 5th anniversary this December.
And as always, I like to remind authors - those numbers are REAL ACTUAL HUMANS who bought our books. Every single person matters.
Selling Fewer Copies but Getting Paid More?
Something I noticed when pulling the data above is that I actually sold fewer copies of These Witches Don't Burn on my July statement yet earned more in royalties.
So, I decided to do some digging and see how that happened. Let's take a look at the royalty statement itself:
January 2026 Statement
Based on some basic math, the per-format average royalties on the January statement were:
- Paperback: $0.54 per book
- Audio: $2.28 per book
- eBook: $1.64 per book
July 2026 Statement
Then in July, the per-format average royalties were:
- Paperback: $0.54 per book
- Audio: $2.43 per book
- eBook: $2.76 per book
The biggest discrepancy here is obviously in the eBook earnings, and if you looked at the January statement, there was a big boost in ebook sales in July 2025, where it sold nearly 90 copies in one week.
My guess is that was probably a $0.99 sale, which obviously affects my royalties (since ebooks are 25% of net). So instead of averaging $2.76 per book, I got an average of $1.64 per book during that six month period.
Now, here's the thing: I am 100% fine with that.
eBook sales are a great way to capture new-to-me readers, and if they like the book, that then becomes someone who might go buy the rest of my backlist, or will pay attention and buy the new books I'm releasing.
(This is why the best thing you can do for the longevity of your career is to write more books instead of spending countless hours on social media.)
Earning Out Doesn't Guarantee Anything... Except Royalties
To wrap things up, I want to address one of the major fallacies I see with newer authors, and that's the belief that earning out your advance "guarantees" that your publisher buys more books from you.
I am a pretty solid example of this NOT being the case.
Let's do some math, shall we?
Over the lifetime of my YA books so far, my cumulative earnings across all titles is $148,793.58
And that's just the portion I get.
As I talked about in this post, authors receive between 6-12% of suggested retail price for printed books and 25% of net for ebooks.
Those are pretty small percentages, and while publishers take on the costs of paying editors and sales & marketing people and printing the books, etc., they're still making a solid profit. I obviously don't have exact numbers, but I'd be willing to bet they profited more than $140k off my books at this point.
(And to be clear - I'm not mad about that! Publishers need to make a profit off the books they publisher in order to have money to invest in new books. Could it be more equitable? Probably, but that's above my pay grade.)
Most new authors would look at those numbers and assume my publisher would continue to buy books from me.
But that's not what happened.
Not only did they not buy anything new from me, they also canceled the final book on my contract. (I did a whole podcast episode about this - you can listen here.)
There were lots of reasons for this, (getting orphaned by my editor, Razorbill getting folded under Putnam, timing issues, etc.), and I don't want you to panic and think this is something that happens all the time.
It also wasn't the end of my career. I landed happily at another Penguin imprint for my adult debut (With All My Haunted Heart Berkley is out next month from Berkley), and I've had a wonderful experience with them so far.
I've also since sold another YA to a different Big 5... which will hopefully be announced very soon!
I don't say any of this to downplay what an amazing accomplishment it is to earn out your advance.
If you did that, you deserve to be so so proud.
I simply want to dispel the myth that there's any predictable correlation between earning out and getting another book deal.
Plenty of authors never earn out and continue to sell new books to publishers.
Plenty of authors do earn out and need to pivot when their publisher passes on an option.
As with basically everything in publishing, it depends. Try not to stress too much and focus on writing the next thing.
Final Thoughts
I am very curious to see how the release of With All My Haunted Heart impacts (or doesn't!) my YA titles. Unfortunately, the next statement in January will only have a month of overlap, so I probably won't really know if there's an impact until this time next year.
Still, if you made it this far, thank you for nerding out about numbers with me! If you have any questions or aspects of royalty statements you'd like me to dive into in a future issue of Real Talk for Writers, DM me on Instagram and let me know!
Happy writing,
Isabel
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