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What do philosophers earn from their writing?

Brian Leiter

A philosophy graduate student writes:

How much do philosophers tend to earn through their publications? Until recently I had assumed that journal articles never yield any direct financial reward whereas popular books can be quite lucrative, with things like less popular books, contributed chapters, erudite newspaper articles and LRB reviews falling at various points somewhere in between, but I have realised that I actually have very little idea how these things work and in particular no concrete information whatsoever. As a graduate student currently making the transition to young academic, I thought it important to rectify this and am rather embarrassed by my ignorance – does everyone else already know this stuff?  If you don't think it suitable, thank you anyway for your time in considering my request and thank you very much also for your blog – it's brilliant, and the only one I read regularly.

My guess is most graduate students do not know much about this side of professional life, so it's worth opening up for discussion.

Here's the bottom line:  the only publication on which philosophers make significant income are very widely used textbooks (i.e, ones widely assigned in undergraduate courses).  Irving Copi's old logic textbook is a classic example (I am told he made hundreds of thousnads of dollars on it over the years), but there are probably other textbooks that generate 10-20K for their authors every year.

The amount earned on most other philosophical publications is very modest.  A philosophy monograph that sells 1,000 copies is doing quite well; standard royalty rates are 8-12% (usually increasing as certain sales thresholds are reached), so one might earn a couple of thousand dollars on one's book over three or four years.   "Popular" books in philosophy are pretty rare, and I am not aware of any big sellers, except Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, which wasn't even written as popular philosophy.  Even classics of philosophy in the modern era, like Rawls's A Theory of Justice, have purportedly sold only about a quarter-million copies over several decades, and one can count on one hand works in that category.

The Times Literary Supplement standardly pays about 500 GBP for an essay, and less or nothing for reviews (I am going on memory, I have not reviewed for them in awhile).   Philosophers rarely write for newspapers, but perhaps some who have can comment on what compensation is like: again, I'm guessing pretty modest.

Thoughts and additional information and anecdotes from readers?

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31 responses to “What do philosophers earn from their writing?”

  1. Tim

    UK-based philosophers who register with the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (http://www.alcs.co.uk/) can earn royalties on their work when it is used for teaching purposes, although I believe that such royalties are paid only on material that has been published by a UK press within the last three or so years. The amounts involved can be significant. In particular, it might be worth checking out if one's work is read outside of philosophy (say, in medicine).

    Reply
  2. Michael Kremer

    Very occasionally you might get a couple hundred bucks for a contribution to an edited volume.

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  3. Dennis Des Chene

    I once calculated the cost of producing my first book: labor (including mine), materials, etc. It was about $30K (I was cheap then). The dollar return on that investment was in the neighborhood of 5%, and my book has done pretty well by the standards of scholarly works (and this was back when the world’s libraries could be counted on for maybe 300 to 400 sales of any book in English by a reputable press). There were of course other, less tangible, benefits.

    On the other hand, I’ve been told that Kuhn had a sign in his house saying that this was the house that Structures built.

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  4. Michael Weisberg

    The Fugs nailed this one!

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  5. Ben

    You can also earn a few hundred dollars — often twice that in books — for refereeing book manuscripts.

    Reply
  6. Cynthia Freeland

    My But Is It Art? and the version of it re-published as a Very Short Introduction has done pretty well, certainly better than I ever imagined it would. Writing for a series like that and for a publisher like Oxford with a very good publicity arm and foreign translation negotiators can help your book do well. (Life sales of the two books together are near 90,000 now, I am proud to say.) This is not the kind of thing you can really plan on though, it just happens. My royalty checks for other books are more in the neighborhood of $32 a year.

    One thing you did not ask about but that is another source of philosopher extra income is honoraria and lecture fees. I know (from paying them) that a few big stars get over $10,000 for doing a lecture. The usual amount seems to be more in the $200-$400 range, but if you do several of these a semester you can have a nice little slush fund (Just kidding, though I do have a friend who uses his speaking income to buy antique art prints by the likes of Durer).

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  7. Andrew Janiak

    Actually, the folks who posted earlier were just joking: philosophy professors are all fabulously wealthy! And we barely work. Don't tell . . . .

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  8. V. Alan White

    As Ben mentioned, there's modest cash/books to be had from refereeing books. Considering the number of hours it usually takes–especially if you offer critical comments–it's hard-earned however.

    In my own career publications have made the most money for me by helping push my merit evaluations up, which were tied to decent base-salary raises (at least in the good old days pre-recession), early promotions, and the occasional special-recognition performance raise. All this is indirectly tied to writing–but since it accumulates in salary over the course of a career, it may well be the most significant way for most "non-star" philosophers like me to make money off publication.

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  9. David Velleman

    @Dennis Des Chene: Do you mean that you received $31,500 in royalties (%5 profit)? Or was it $1500?

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  10. Jeremy Fantl

    Textbooks should be distinguished from edited collections of previously published work. Such collections, even if they sell very well, often end up producing very little in real royalty income because the permission fees are often the responsibility of the editor(s). It's not that the editor(s) have to pay the fees up front; it's that they come off the top of the royalties, so that the potentially tens of thousands of dollars in fees have to be paid off before any real money comes in.

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  11. Ken

    Rumor has it that a very well known psycholinguist who writes books for popular consumption has made huge sums off those books. I mean huge! Not sure any philosopher has pulled of a similar feat. But don't really see why it can't be done. I know from first hand experience that people are willing to pay a fair amount to have a philosopher talk to a lay audience. A couple of years ago, I made a pretty hefty sum giving philosophy talk related lectures. Keep thinking that if I ever finish my main academic book projects, I might try to write a popular philosophy book based on the work we've done with Phil Talk. Have been approach a couple of times, but we're both just to busy with other projects and Phil Talk already takes enough of our time.

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  12. andrew

    One thing no one has mentioned: Translations. These seem to me to be quite a bit of work, what is the return like on these? There are here clearly two different categories – the translation of books out of copyright/never had one (Lucretius, etc), and translations of current works or works still 'owned' by a press or an estate or whomever. Anyone have experience with either?

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  13. Brian Ogilvie

    Not a philosopher, but an intellectual historian/historian of science here, and I think the disciplines are comparable in this regard. My first (and to date only) book has made about $3600 in royalties over five years, about two-thirds of which was within the first year of publication. With two exceptions, my other publications have resulted in little direct income: a couple of encyclopedia articles and a commissioned essay for a coffee-table book brought in a few hundred each. The exceptions were a 6500-word article for an Italian encyclopedia that paid 20 Euro cents per word, or about $1800 at the time, and an as yet unpublished article written in conjunction with a Norwegian research project that included an honorarium of NOK 5000 (about $900) as part of the grant funding.

    As Cynthia Freeland notes, lecture honoraria can be a small (for most of us) additional source of income. A book that wins a prize can also bring a windfall, both prize money and royalties from additional sales.

    But as V. Alan White observes, the real financial rewards for most academic writing in the humanities are less direct. In my field at research universities and many other kinds of universities and colleges, a book is required for tenure and promotion. My institution has a fixed raise of about $8000 for promotion to associate professor (now; it was about half that when I was tenured). In an important sense, then, the first book is compensated by a substantial annual raise that far outweighs any royalties it might earn. Similarly, a second book has become a de facto requirement for promotion to full professor, which now carries an annual raise of around $12000. The first two books and others are also rewarded with merit raises.

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  14. Michael Lynch

    Brian and V. Alan White are right: the financial benefit of writing books is generally indirect in my experience. My book True to Life did well about six years ago — at least by the usual philosophy standards. That was probably just because I had good luck: the book was reviewed in the NY Times, Wash Post and that, in turn, landed me on various NPR shows. But even when you are lucky, the truth is: don't quit your day job.

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  15. Pau Luque

    I do not know if this happens also in the U. S. or in U. K. – though I have some intuitions…-, but in Europe it is not unusual the case according to which you have to pay to the publisher to get published! So you people can imagine that the idea of getting paid for any philosophical publication it sounds to me like a genuine metaphysical idea.

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  16. Jeff H

    Unless it's something like a print-on-demand operation, I would assume that anyone who demanded that *I* pay *THEM* in order to be published was running a scam.

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  17. Tamler Sommers

    I've made a few thousand from A Very Bad Wizard, which I published with McSweeney's. (Still available, get your copies now!). TLS pays 150 to around 400 for reviews, depending on the length. When I started doing interviews for The Believer and putting together the book, I was warned repeatedly that philosophers look down on publications in popular venues, that they could hurt my career–but that hasn't happened as far as I can tell. In fact, I've gotten some exciting scholarly opportunities because of them.

    My sense is that many publications are looking for people who can present philosophy in an accessible way, and university administrators are happy if you can do it as well. Unlike a prestigious publication in PPR or Phil studies, these venues pay a little money and different kinds of people read them. I'd urge people to give it a shot (in conjunction, of course, with their scholarly work).

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  18. lucky philosopher

    Given certain legal niceties, I need to remain anonymous. But I was approached by an on-line university to write (eventually) 3 texts for them, at $50k a pop. The texts actually turned out to look pretty good, and were professionally done. Subsequently, a few other curricular things came up (revising tests, study guides, editing a text that needed some work) for $1k here, $15k there. Turned out to be pretty lucrative. My guess is that I'm not alone in having done such things.

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  19. Steven Hales

    Brian is incorrect that popular books in philosophy are rare, and there have been big sellers. The Simpsons and Philosophy has sold on the order of a quarter million copies. It is definitely an outlier, though. More commonly philosophy and pop culture books sell around 5000 copies, which would be huge sales for a monograph. Nevertheless, you aren't going to open a Swiss bank account with those royalties. I have been told (by Wiley-Blackwell) that their total cost to bring out a book is between $40k-$50k. 20% of their line brings in 80% of the profits, so publishers are certainly keen on titles that will pay the bills. A sophisticated monograph on the Neoplatonist Influences on the Modal Logic of Duns Scotus is great for scholarly cred (and promotion), but don't count on your royalties buying you anything other than a bottle of scotch.

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  20. Jo Wolff

    One reason why books such as Copi's Logic have sold more than books such as Rawls' Theory of Justice is that with textbooks the publishers constantly bring out new editions, with new exercises, to kill the second hand market. Copi is now in its 14th edition. I don't imagine that sales figures are kept for the second hand market, but it would be interesting to know what the total sales are for Rawls including second hand copies.

    OUP asked me several times to produce a revised edition of my An Introduction to Political Philosophy. I resisted for a while, on the grounds that Plato etc haven't written much lately, but eventually they persuaded me that the Further Reading section needed updating. Later I was felt very guilty when I realised that university libraries that already had ten copies of the original version bought another ten copies of the almost identical revised edition.

    And to correct a point from earlier in the list, I still get photo-copying royalties from the ALCS for books published more than three years ago – one book was published twenty years ago. These royalties go up and down because of the sampling methodology for calculating them, but there have been years where my photo-copying royalties have been higher than my royalties on sales.

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  21. David Estlund

    There is an important distinction between royalty checks and advances. And another one between texts and collections. Some authors and editors will get money up front when they promise and deliver a book, be it monograph or edited collection. These are advances against later royalties, but the press can't take them back if sales don't live up. I've edited a couple of volumes in addition to writing one book, and there were usually modest (but welcome) advances involved (one to several thousand dollars). But some people edit a lot of volumes and they might get a few thousand dollars for each one delivered. And even if later royalties (after advances have been covered by sales) are small for each book, some scholars might have a dozen such irons in the fire and it can add up.(I am not one of them.)

    Notice that, of course, all the things mentioned here and above are, for some people, cumulative. So prolific scholars who write and/or edit a lot of books and are speaking somewhere several times a month and reviewing manuscripts for presses would not need to write any best-sellers in order to significantly affect their tax bracket.

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  22. Kathryn J Norlock

    The initial question was how much philosophers TEND to earn through their publications. There are thousands of us employed in higher education, and for most of us, the answer is very close to zero, so I think we ought to emphasize to the student that the statement, "the real financial rewards for most academic writing in the humanities are less direct" is an understatement.

    Most of the journal articles requisite for tenure pay zero, most book reviews pay zero (though you usually get a free copy of the book!), and since so many more of us publish scholarly books for tenure than exists demand for our pearls of wisdom, most of our books pay something rather close to zero.

    My admirable colleagues commenting here are swapping information about those times when publications have yielded remuneration, which is good information, but if your question is what usually happens, you'll find most philosophers produce a great deal for no compensation.

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  23. Matt

    I received a letter recently from the company the sells bound copies of dissertations, telling me that I needed to send them an I-9 form so they could process my royalties for the year. I'm still waiting for my check, but haven't quit my job in the meantime. If the check is for more than the postage it costs to send to me, I'll be modestly surprised.

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  24. AlexanderStingl

    There are different payments in different countries. Germany is a horrible example: To get your PhD, your doctorate thesis has to be published as a book or you do not get your title. As it is, publishers have build a whole industry around that charging PhD students up to 3000 Euros for a PhD and up to 6000 Euros for the Habilitation thesis (in Germany you can only become a full Professor by doing a second PhD, basically, and that is a must of you want to have any academic career past the age of 45 or you basically drop out of the university system marked as a failure with little chance of any decent job or income, which the majority of those trying will, because there are only 25% to 10% chances to find a professorial opening for those who get their Habilitation, and there are no other career tracks in Germany). With this industry having developed so, most academic books in German (mind you, smaller market)mean that the authors/editors will either have to pay for the whole enterprise with most publishers (exceptions are rare)and get reimbursed if their book hits a threshold, or they opt to find third party sponsoring. Academic translation is roughly the same. I been offered translation rights by English speaking philosophers and sociologists who ,in cases that they speak some German, liked my style but once it came to books, I pretty much gave up finding publishers for them because you have to find a publisher and external funding at the same time before you even translated a single line…. You do not get paid for journals either, but you do not have to pay to get published, German or internationally, most of the time. What's changing is that some journals now ask for a "processing fee" mostly because they have so many submissions (Remember "publish and perish" is still on) and no funding for staff to sift through it all, not to mention enough peer reviewers (which is a service we professionals do for the academic community, unless we do it for a book publisher as expert reviewers). I got paid fairly for a few articles intended for undergraduate teaching in the US by an Online Publisher, and I was promised payment (which I am still waiting for after having delivered two years ago) for encyclopedia articles, sometimes you are given a gift cert to buy from the catalog of the publisher of an encyclopedia or even off-percentages on your own book, if you want more copies than the promotional ones you been given (if any), but that is a practice common with publishers that fall under the category of vanity press… As for the processing fee for journals I mentioned, that one can vary between 20 or 40 dollars up to 1500 Euros or more. The latter is from one journal in medical philosophy which charges that much, unless you are faculty of a university that pays membership dues to this or that Association (this is the PubMed stuff and the likes)…. If you are one of the "big names" you get paid for books, depending on which field you are in. So a Stiglitz, Sen or Pinker will get more than a Sandel, perhaps, but Sandel will do well, I guess…. It's similar with speaking or presenting, a postdoc, you gotta pay all and be lucky if you get a sandwich and coffee for for free a keynote speaker gets between 5,000 and 10,000 depending, if you are a famous researcher/scholar and do a commercial one, e.g. a psychologist speaking to a group of managers, you can score up to 25,000 for a two hour session…. I know for a fact that people used to get royalties for books and articles for a good portion of the century past, having done research in archives I saw letters and cheques, in those days, they could even "forget" about them, as one of my most beloved anecdotes about Talcott Parsons (1902 – 1979) goes, that after he passed away, they found several royalty cheques never cashed in that he just put into a drawer and left there over decades…. Ok, that's my bit said.

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  25. Dennis Des Chene

    @Velleman: I meant that from my $30K I have earned roughly $1500 over the life of the book (hardcover and paperback). Talk of $10,000 fees and so on is comparable to talk of NBA salaries in the universe of basketball players. Sizeable, yes, but limited to the top .1% . For the rest of us, our income class is determined, luck aside, by salary.

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  26. Nigel

    Writers of popular philosophy books who have agents can negotiate reasonable advances and published price royalties from some publishers. Without an agent, it can be difficult to get good terms from a publisher. Long-sellers can be more lucrative than some brief-lived bestsellers. From a combination of advances, royalties, translation rights, paid lectures and journalism I expect now to earn at least £30,000 per annum, though this fluctuates. None of my advances has exceeded my current academic annual salary. I'm sure some UK writers of popular philosophy books earn more than this, and command larger advances, though a number of these don't have academic jobs.

    Any UK author who wants to get advice about publishing contracts should join the Society of Authors – they give excellent advice. Also join ALCS (which distributes money from photocopying fees from books as well as from articles published in journals or magazines with an ISSN).

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  27. David Velleman

    @Des Chene: I just wanted to elicit a clarification to counteract some of the pie-in-the-sky comments earlier in the thread. Your analogy to college basketball is perfect.

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  28. Jeff H (Different from the first Jeff H)

    It should be said, since it appears to have not been said yet, that contributing to the Philosophy and Pop-Culture series brings in very little. This is surprising since the books sell very well and the general consensus above is that pop-books can be lucrative. The emphasis should be on "can." I have only done it twice now, and generally have enjoyed the experience for the freedom and whimsy allowed in writing the articles, but serving as a contributor, even to a well-selling pop-book, is not a road to riches. Perhaps authoring an original pop-book has the potential to be more lucrative, but it should be clear that the pop-philosophy movement isn't sending much money to individual philosophers just yet. Considering how well those books can sell, and how little the authors seem to be compensated (and how badly many of us need extra money) maybe a negotiation for some better pay is in order

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  29. Rob Tempio

    Of course, Dan Dennet and Simon Blackburn have made, I suspect, not financially insignificant publishing decisions. They have reached quite broad audiences to boot! Most recently Sean Kelly and Bert Dreyfus have reached similarly broad audiences and I suspect the royalties they have received reflect favorably the broad sales of their books. And let's not forget Michael Sandel's Justice which was a best-seller here and abroad. There is a healthy tradition of academics earning substantial advances and royalties for books published for broader consumption. I, also, believe the best of those are often not lightweights in their fields either. They tend to come from History departments though or be scientists with a popularizing bent, but I think it does worlds of good for the public face of their fields.

    Nigel makes good points about agents, but I would caution against getting an agent unless what you have is something likely to reach a broad audience and is actually the kind of book that will sell enough to merit a sizeable advance. In other words, most publishers would not be keen and quite unwilling even to deal with a an agent for a typical academic monograph. I think with some exceptions it's best not to expect much (which is not to say you won't receive anything) in the way of financial recompense from your publications at an early stage in your career, unless of course you count tenure (and in the vast majority of cases that is more than enough!). However, it is something to think about down the road once writing for a non-academic audience becomes something you can plausibly undertake without distracting (or detracting) from your tenure and promotion publications.

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  30. Richard Marshall

    I recall Jerry Fodor comparing unfavourably his book sales with those of Foucault – and he must be pretty succesful. The general point was that certain ideas sell better than others.

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  31. David Hyder

    My return on a single 1000 word book review for Nature (~US$700) still exceeds my lifetime royalties on 3 books, though over time the books will most likely surpass that sum.

    Translations actually pay a couple of hundred, but that is, far more than one's individual work, something that one does as a service to other scholars in the first place.

    I would add that there is (some) room for negotiation. Most academics, having never worked in the Real World, tend to take what they are offered, and with gratititude (let's not go into the question of salary negotiations here). But if your work is good, you can always negotiate. So after you get over the thrill of having the manuscript accepted, you have to pull back and play a little hard to get. I have never accepted the initial contract, except on small pieces with honoraria.

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