Jun 07 2011
How much do comic book writers make?
One financial planning website (!?) reports comic book authors are usually paid about $80-$150 per page. I’ve never handled any financial details for any publishing company (and wouldn’t publicly discuss any numbers if I had), but that strikes me as plausible. I would, however, guess that really small comic houses typically pay less than $80 a page.
In comparison, novelists make much less than $80 a page. Novelists typically earn an advance of ~$6000 for their first-published novels if they have agents and ~$3500 if they do not. If your novel manuscript has 80,000 words (about 275 pages), that’d work out to $21 per page if you have an agent and $13 otherwise. Theoretically, you might make additional money if your novel sells well enough to clear the advance, but that is highly unusual for debut novels.
