just out of curiosity, does anyone know how many books they sold for tabinof or dapgo? or what the advances were like for those? i'm currently down a book publishing rabbit hole and it doesn't seem like authors get paid a whole heck of a lot. unless you sell millions of copies, of course.
in a cursory search, it looks like advances are between $5000 US for a first book and then this dude got like £12,000 for his book (
https://www.theguardian.com/books/books ... al-finance). then like 10% of net sales after that (which you have to pay back your advance first).
it just seems wild to me that, potentially, dan made more money doing two 45 min stereo shows last week than he got as an advance for his book!
(Disclaimer: I'm in publishing, but I'm not an editor and I don't work in sales or contracts, so I have some info from our general database, but not as much info as you guys would like. Sorry!)
I can look up the inventory numbers for the US editions only (I'm sure it did quite well in the UK and worldwide as well, lol):
TABINOF: 414,563 net copies sold since 2015 (that means minus returns)
DAPGO: 138,001 net copies sold since 2016 (again, minus returns)
However, because I don't have access to how much their advances were OR how much it costs to print each copy of the book (and they're both hardcover, four-color books on nice thick paper, so it ain't cheap!!), this doesn't actually tell us how much money they have made. Though I would guess that even if they had a pretty high advance, with that many copies sold, they've probably earned out by now and do make royalties.
But the initial print run (meaning, how many copies they printed when it first went on sale) for TABINOF was 175,000; that is very high, esp. for first-time authors, which tells us that the publisher was EXPECTING the book to do well, put in lots of marketing money to make sure it would sell, etc. (So, that implies to me that Dan and Phil probably got a pretty good advance, higher than what you quoted. Though, again, not in editorial, so I don't have a great sense of the range myself. But I do know it can vary RIDICULOUSLY depending on how much the publisher wants to do the book, how well they think it will sell based on similar titles and who the authors are, etc.)
But overall, no, it would not surprise me at all if they make more money in a few stereo shows than from their books. Honestly, with the exception of repeated best-sellers like John Green, publishing is not really an industry where many people make lots of money. Editing, designing, proofreading, printing, SHIPPING (oh god, the shipping issues we've had this year) books takes a huge amount of money and the profit margins on books are often pretty damn slim. Fancy, important, expensive books often don't make a profit at all, and are subsidized by imprints like mine (kids mass market) where we make lots of books that sell well, very cheaply, with work-for-hire authors.
Career-wise, I would guess it was more about the creative challenge, the opportunity to develop their careers, etc. They can both say they're NYT best-selling authors now, for example, which looks good for any future career stuff they do. (I'm sure those high sales numbers for TABINOF are reflected in a commensurately higher advance for Dan negociated by his agent when they did the contract for YWGTTN, as well.)
Sidenote, I think I remember them saying (maybe in one of Phil's Draw My Life videos?) that they put all the money from the book advance into bankrolling the tour . . . gusty move, boys!