As you’ve likely heard by now, Jill Duggar published her debut memoir last month.
As expected, the book offered a candid look at Jill’s fundamentalist upbringing and portrayed her parents in a very unflattering light.
Equally unsurprising was the fact that Counting the Cost found an eager audience among fans who had been following Jill’s story since she was a child.
Jill’s memoir became an instant bestseller, and she’s been open about the fact that the book’s success has changed her life for the better.
“A huge thanks to y’all for making our book, COUNTING THE COST, a BESTSELLER in recent weeks in e-book, hardcopy and audiobook on Amazon, NY Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly!” Jill wrote on her Instagram page earlier this week.
Jill’s husband and co-author, Derick Dillard, was similarly ecstatic about the book’s success, revealing in a podcast interview that the Dillards are now out of debt thanks to their literary debut.
Derick offered some specifics about the financial rewards, revealing that Jill’s publishing company wrote her a check for $50,000 on the day the book hit stores.
That was just the beginning, of course, and while exact sales figures and the nature of Jill’s contract are unknown, it’s safe to say that the Dillards have pulled in a healthy sum from royalties in the five weeks since the book’s release.
Just how much have they earned?
Well, that’s a matter of some debate.
On the always-entertaining r/DuggarsSnark subreddit, one commenter argued that Jill is now a millionaire.
“For those not familiar with how book advances and royalties work: The author receives an advance which is essentially a signing bonus,” this person wrote.
“The advance is paid against future royalty earnings, which means that for every dollar an author receives in an advance, they must earn a dollar from book sales before they start receiving any additional royalty payments.
“Depending on whether the book sold is a hardcover, paperback, audiobook, or ebook, publishers calculate that the author earns 7.5% – 30% on each book,” this person continued.
“For example, if the contract specifies a $500,000 book advance, and royalties of 25% on each $16 ebook sold, then the author would have to sell 125,000 ebooks at a $4 royalty each to earn back the advance. The $4 earned on each ebook after that first 125,000 would then just be money in the author’s pocket.”
The redditor goes on to estimate that Jill has likely sold “hundreds of thousands” of books at this point, and has therefore earned seven figures.
It’s a nice thought — especially since Jill barely received any compensation for her years of work on her family’s reality shows — but it’s almost certainly not accurate.
For starters, Jill probably hasn’t sold “hundreds of thousands” of copies — in fact, very, very few books enjoy such robust sales these days.
On top of that, the redditor seems to have overestimated just how much publishing companies are willing to pay first-time authors.
“I work in publishing and I believe you are way over inflating these numbers. I would believe the 50k advance story,” one commenter wrote.
“Your math is off here. Jill’s book has sold well, but not hundreds of thousands of copies,” they continued.
“Publisher’s Weekly shows she has sold 54,000 hardback copies during the month of September, and she dropped off of their best seller list in October. She’s probably sitting around 60,000 copies sold of that book.”
In other words, between book sales and Derick’s job as an attorney, the Dillards are probably perfectly comfortable.
But it’s highly unlikely that Jill is a member of the seven-figure club.
Jill Duggar: Has Her Controversial Memoir Made Her a Millionaire? was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.