How much money can you make writing a book?

Casting around for a topic for this week's newsletter, I asked what the good folks on my twitter feed were wondering about, and all the responses were all about how much money an author might make from writing a book.

Maybe this question was occasioned by Bernie Sanders telling us that if we write a bestseller we would become a millionaire, too, which is patently untrue. You could, of course, become a millionaire from writing a book. You could do it two ways: 1.) get a million dollar advance against royalties. These are offered! It is possible! 2.) sell enough copies of your book so that you receive a million dollars in royalties. This also happens! But to hit the bestseller list, you only have to sell about 10,000 copies of a book in one week (note this is probably not true, what I just wrote. There is no one answer to how to hit the NYTbestseller list, which doesn't actually count the books that sold the most, and 10,000 may not be the number even if they do count yours). No matte…