At one point or another most of us have thought about scribbling down a story on a few napkins, making it Harry Potter big and living a life of leisure and luxury.

Sure has worked for the likes of Stephen King and James Patterson, the latter continuing to churn out novels and earning $89 million (R1,25 billion) in 2015 alone.

But what about local authors who publish a book, often the culmination of years of hard work – can they expect to make some proper dough?

Not if you ask The Good Book Appreciation Society, a ‘secret’ book club on Facebook with around 6 000 members, who have found some rather troubling sales figures for those writing in English.

Author and columnist Paige Nick started putting the pieces together (HERE), and they don’t paint a pretty picture.

South Africans bought 10,5 million books last year, but that’s not good news for your everyday rooinek author. From Paige again:

…local [English] authors are lucky if they sell more than 1,000 copies of a novel…

80% of that [10.,5 million] figure came from non-fiction sales…

Adult fiction only makes up 2.5 million of the 10.5 million (20%), and only a fraction of those sales come from SA fiction, the society said. Sales mostly go to the likes of international authors including J.K. Rowling, Lee Childs, John Grisham, and Gillian Flynn.

South African based fiction sold 525,000 copies in 2015, and 450,000 of those were Afrikaans novels, meaning that only 75,000 English novels left the shelves.

“And this is where we get to the sad part of the story. Your average SA novelist writing in English, only sells 600 – 1,000 copies of a novel in their lifetime. This in a country with a population of more than 55 million people,” the Appreciation society said.

There is the odd success stories – take Spud, for example – but just two traditionally published South African English novels sold more than 2 000 copies last year.

According to PublishSA an author receives around “10 – 12% of net receipts (the amount the publisher sells to the bookseller for, i.e. retail price less VAT less discount)”, so even if the book retails for R200 they will only see a tiny percentage of that money.

Not meaning to scare anyone off putting pen to paper here, but if you’re hoping to strike gold by doing so you’re in for some hard truths.

Any local authors feel like sharing their stories with us? We’d be interested to hear from you, so drop us an email at editor@2oceansvibe.com.

Remember that local is lekker peeps, so let’s try and show a little love for our own authors too.

[sources:businesstech&paigenick]