People were reading it, people were talking about it, people were talking about why people were reading it and talking about it.

In December of 2017, a short story published in the New Yorker set the internet on fire. Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This ($1.2 million) “One editor described it as the kind of book that is both ‘what women want to read and what they need to read.’” The novel, a fictionalization of the love story between Lee Miller and Man Ray, is slated for February of 2019.

In September of 2017, after receiving 13 bids on the book, Julie Barer sold Whitney Scharer’s debut to Judy Clain of Little, Brown for what EW called “north of $1 million.” “I think what makes Whitney’s novel so special is that it’s very accessible, so it has the commercial potential to reach a broad audience, but it is also gorgeously written with great psychological sophistication,” Barer told EW. Whitney Scharer, The Age of Light ($1 million +)

email me.) So now, without further ado, a brief history of recent seven-figure book advances, in reverse chronological order: Lots of deals are not reported in the public sphere, and for instance, while I’ve heard certain rumors, and while I’d wager that Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner and other big-name authors have gotten sizeable advances for recent books, I haven’t found any specific intel to that effect, and so I can’t swear to it.

Yes, the Obamas sold their books for “ well into eight figures,” but it’s hard to compare a deal like that to one for a highbrow novel or a story collection. I’m also limited to information that is publicly available-or at least available on Publishers Marketplace-so I’ll make no claims that this is anything close to a complete list. But who exactly is getting paid?įor the purposes of this list, I’m limiting the field to literary fiction sold over the last ten years-mostly because it’s the genre with the fewest, and therefore most notable, big-money deals (other than poetry, I suppose). Extremely lucrative, in some cases! Six-figure book deals used to be the gasp-worthy news in the literary world, but over the years, it’s been upped to seven. For most people, it is not a viable (or at least not a reliable) source of income, but for the lucky and/or talented few, it can be pretty lucrative.

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer