Payment Schedules for College Textbook Supplements and Ancillaries

Let’s examine the most common methods that college textbook publishers use to pay you for writing textbook supplements and ancillaries.

Half up Front, Half on Completion

This is my preferred method and what I get nearly all the time. However, you need to have a good track record in the business before editors will be comfortable with this. Editors are loath to give money up front to a supplement author. I’ve heard stories of editors who gave money up front to a would-be supplement author, and then never got a bit of work out of the imposter.

Payment upon Fractional Completion

This is quite common and most editors will agree to it. Typically the work is divided into halves, thirds, or quarters. With quarters, for example, when you finish the first one-fourth of the work, the publisher will process payment for one-fourth of the payment.

Payment upon Completion of Entire Project

This means you don’t get paid until the entire project is complete and acceptable to the editor. Avoid this if possible. I typically only do it for editors I know and for small projects that I’ll complete within a couple of weeks. That way the paperwork for payment only needs to be done once, and it’s not a large sum of money.

Typical Payment Time

Ask your editor for the typical amount of time it takes between the time you request a payment and the check lands in your mailbox. It typically ranges between two and eight weeks, and tends toward the longer estimate. I can happily report that I just finished a project for Cengage Learning and got paid in about three weeks.

What’s been your experience with payment schedules and payment times?

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