Remember, your agent is your employee and possibly, if you're lucky, your partner, as interested in your career as you are because it's her career, too. I have the best of all agents, a goddess of an agent, an agent that other writers drool over, but she has threatened me with death if I put her name on the Internet. Lovely woman, but nobody to mess with. 5. We can see the little calculators behind your eyes dividing x by y to get an hourly wage. It doesn't work that way.
Some books take longer than others.
Some make more money for inexplicable reasons. So there's no specific answer to this question. But here's how the money usually works. When you sell your book, you're really selling the publisher the right to print it. In exchange for the right to publish, the publisher agrees to pay you a percentage of the purchase price of the book when it is printed and sold, usually about a year from the delivery of the finished book.