Congratulations, you just sold your first book! You’re getting an advance! You’re going to be published! Royalties are a thing now! Everything has changed!

Slow your roll, scribe. I’m here to talk about the thing nobody wants to talk about, and that’s money. More accurately, how you should approach the money you’re going to make as a writer.

Now, I’m going to guess that you’re getting an advance of some kind. It may be tiny; it may be huge. I’m guessing for 98% of you reading, it’s a number staggeringly less than a million dollars. Half a mil. In fact, I’d say for  98% of you reading, it’s 100k or less. (Any Stephen Kings and JK Rowlings can go get their money advice elsewhere.)

In any case, it’s still a chunk of change. It’s exciting. And it’s dangerous.

Quick background: you’re not going to get your advance all at once, you’re going to have to pay your own taxes out of it, and that’s the only money you’ll see unless your sales are good enough to pay your publisher back for said advance (maybe 30% of you will be so lucky.) This means for most authors, that advance is the only cash you’ll see for the book you just sold.

This is probably the hardest thing in the world to actually do, but it’s going to save your (financial) life: unless you signed a million dollar contract– and that’s literally a million, not figuratively– you now need to proceed as if absolutely nothing has changed in your financial life.

Do not quit your job.

Do not run up your credit cards.

Do not take out a mortgage or a loan.

Because here’s the deal. Let’s say that you got a fairly standard contract that pays 1/3 on signing, 1/3 on Delivery & Acceptance of your revised manuscript, and 1/3 on publication. In your head, you may be creating a timeline. By X date, I should have Y dollars– therefore, I can do Z, Q, and T now.

Don’t.

No matter how tempting it is to think about it that way, never, ever, ever rely on a timeline and budget as if that money will roll in as scheduled. I know you’ve just made your first deal and you’re super, super excited, but here’s the deal. That payment you get “on signing” is literal: they’ll release it after you signed the contract.

This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I know of no author who has gotten their vetted, fully-negotiated, ready-to-sign contract in fewer than three months. I know many, many authors who got the contract six months later. Nine months later. In fact, I know a handful of authors who didn’t get their contract fully signed and ironed out until after their book was published.

No, I’m not kidding. Yes, this does really happen. If your editor is particularly speedy, chances are you will get your first set of notes before you get your contract. You may well be working on your book under your handshake deal, and this is a weird but normal part of publishing.

But you’re still not getting your “signing” portion of your advance until you actually sign the contract. Nor will they be releasing any of the payments outlined in your deal until, you guessed it, you signed the contract.

So that’s the signing part of your advance. You probably won’t be getting it for at least three months. At least.

But the D&A part, that’s pretty controllable, right? Nope. It doesn’t matter if you’re the bestest, fastest revisor in the universe: you can’t do your revisions until you get your editor’s notes. Your book is not the only manuscript on your editor’s desk.

There are many editors who send speedy notes: I’ve had them in as few as six weeks. However, I’ve also waited more than a year for an initial ed letter. You get them when you get them– and the D&A payment will not be coming until you finish all your revisions.

Most books will have at least two rounds of revisions, and at least one round of line edits before they are officially delivered. This process tends to take around three months— but again, it will depend on how quickly you can turn around your notes, and how quickly your editor turns her side as well.

Sometimes, revisions don’t go as well as you might hope. They can take substantially longer while you and your editor wrangle the manuscript into submission. Sometimes, you and your editor don’t see eye-to-eye on revisions. There can be extended negotiations at this point. Your editor may seek out feedback from other people in their imprint– and those people, too, have other things to do first.

I know people who spent the better part of years in revisions before they finally got the manuscript to D&A. I also know people who never managed it to their editor’s satisfaction– manuscripts have been passed off to other editors, bought back, and cancelled at this point.

I don’t tell you these things to scare you. I tell you this because if you bought a house assuming that you would be able to make X payment by Y date because of Reasons, you may end up in deep mortgage trouble. If you ran up your credit cards, anticipating being able to pay them down, you may end up in default. 

But let’s say that your revisions roll along fine, everything is D&A, everybody’s happy, you have a release date, YAY! Surely now you can count on the publication portion of your advance coming in on time, right?

Nope. Books get pushed back on the schedule– maybe B&N hated the cover and your publisher wants to make a new one to get a better initial order. Or perhaps another book dropped on your editor’s schedule that is time-sensitive (for example, I had a friend whose book got bumped an entire year because their editor acquired a book during an election year, written by a candidate– that book had an expiration date, so it had to go out first.)

There could be delays anywhere along the line– your editor leaves, your publisher reorganizes, someone realizes that your book would sell better in X market if Y conditions were met, another, similar book didn’t do well and the publisher needs to change their strategy on yours…

The fact is, the publication date isn’t written in stone, but sometimes the season is. Rather than bump your book to the next month or the month after, sometimes they bump you to the next season. More often than not, that has been my experience: if you were supposed to be Spring 2016, and you get bumped, your book is now Spring 2017. That adds an entire year to your wait for your publication advance.

Here’s a short list of other things that can happen to delay any part of the process:

• There’s something wrong with your contract; it has to be fixed before anyone will agree to sign it.
• There’s something so wrong with your contract that you have to walk away from the deal.
• There’s something so wrong with your contract that your publisher walks away from the deal.
• Your editor leaves before you get your notes and your book is assigned a new editor. Clock starts over.
• Your editor leaves and takes your book to the new house– that’s an epic butt-ton of paperwork, and resets the publication clock like whoa.
• You and your editor do not see eye to eye on your revisions, and this needs to be negotiated.
• You realize that revising is a lot more intensive than you anticipated, and it takes you longer to complete than intended.
• Your editor finishes revisions with you, then leaves– your book is orphaned and has to wait for another editor to be assigned for the rest of the publication process.
• Your book gets bumped.
• Your book gets cancelled.
• Your imprint folds.
• Your publisher restructures your imprint out of existence.
• Your publisher merges with another, and now your book is in limbo until all the dust settles.
• Your publisher and a major online retailer get in a fight and your book is delayed until it can actually be sold online.
• Your agent turns out to be a scumbag who has mismanaged all of the author money coming into the agency, and disappears with your cash.
• Your publisher turns out to be a scumbag who has overpromised and now is going to under-deliver.
• You are not a scumbag but after going through revisions, you realize that you can’t do this, and you need to walk away before you lose your mind.
• You have a family crisis and you’re unable to meet your deadlines as originally planned.
• Some completely bizarre, random, fuxxed up shiz that I can’t even make up because reality is too weird to predict.

I tell you none of this to scare you. I tell you this because publishing is strange and uncertain. Pre-spending your advance before you have the cash in hand will get you into trouble every single time. It’s easy to make plans when everything is new, and everyone is optimistic, but you shouldn’t.

Just as you should never assume you will ever sell another book, you should never assume that you’ll get your advance until the cash is actually in hand. Don’t make big purchases and plan to pay them off later. Don’t change your lifestyle in a major and meaningful way. Treat your advances as if they’re surprises, every single time.

Oh, and even if you do sell another book (and you will, because you’re awesome) don’t count on definitely selling another book for the same advance that you sold the last one. Your advances can, and probably will, vary by project. The only way you can know for sure that the advance on the next book is the same as the first is if you snag a multiple book contract.

You just sold a book and that’s amazing. The advance is pretty freaking keen. But don’t buy financial trouble now by spending money that is yet to come. If there’s one thing that makes this very tough business even tougher, it’s trying to do it while you drown in debt you didn’t realize you’d have.

Treat your advances like the lottery: you won! You might get to win more than once! But don’t count on that money until it’s in your hot little hands. Trust me on this one; this isn’t a lesson you want to learn the hard way.