so you want to be an author?

I had planned to write about the events I attended at Sydney Writers’ Festival last week. But, as technology would have it, the laptop got a virus and has been getting serviced. The info was too good not to share with any other prospective writers, so here goes:

One of the events I attended was on Friday 1 June, 2007 and hosted by Jeremy Fisher, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors: "So You Want To Be An Author?". Here’s a few sobering points he made about the chances of getting published.
* Book price components:
40% bookseller discount
10% profit
9% printer
12.5% editing
12% shipping
6.5% warehousing
10% royalty
* $11,000 is the average income for authors
* Most first novels sell less than 1000 copies
* In 2006, 95 million books were sold in Australia of which 0.73% were literary books (or 258,197 copies).