How do authors and illustrators get paid?
Authors and illustrators don’t get salaries like “regular business people”. We are paid royalties, which is a percentage of the publisher’s profits. So authors and illustrators are compensated based on how many books are sold, not how long it took to make the book in the first place. An author could work for a year or 10 years on a book, but it all comes down to how well it sells, which is yet another argument for doing your best work.