New Island is committed to fairness and transparency in our payments to artists and we support the Arts Council’s Paying the Artist Policy. We value the work of authors and other artists as originators of the content we publish and we are acutely conscious of the precarity of income suffered by most writers. We will always do our best to advocate on behalf of our authors and to ensure that we ourselves offer them the best remuneration we feasibly can.

We respect and protect authors’ copyright and their right to earn from it. We will always issue a formal publishing contract, which is subject to negotiation, when engaging authors and illustrators, which sets out the remuneration, territory, term limit and other terms of publication. 

When we commission cover designs, we issue a brief outlining the expectations for the job, fee structure offered and where the design will be used. We commit to crediting cover designers, photographers and other artists where their work is distributed by us.

We will never require (or encourage) authors to do professional speaking engagements for free, and if authors or guest speakers need to travel to a book launch we have organised, we undertake to cover reasonable travel and accommodation costs.

In addition to our own payments to authors, we seek to maximise their book-related income by promoting them to literary festivals and other event organisers for paid speaking engagements.

As part of our commitment to the Arts Council’s Paying the Artist policy, we have substantially increased minimum advances for Arts Council-funded fiction and literary non-fiction over time. As of 2023, our minimum advance for such Arts Council-funded books is €3,000. In most cases, we would not expect such an advance to earn out in the first year, but if sales expectations are substantially higher, we can adjust the advance offered accordingly. We respect an author’s right to negotiate. 

A considerable part of our publishing list is not funded by the Arts Council or other public body, and in such cases, advances are calculated on the basis of expected sales within the first 12-18 months. 

Generally advances are paid in instalments (on signature, manuscript delivery and publication). In all cases, once an advance has earned out, the author will start to earn royalties, which are payable twice yearly.