Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Minor nit here:

Generally, publishers don’t just accept submissions from any aspiring author. They go through agents. So you must first convince an agent that you will be a lucrative investment. As a rule, agents take 15% of everything you make from a book.

Speaking as an author, I love my agent. My agent is on commission, on my side. A good accountant is supposed to save you more money than they cost you; a good agent will actually make you more money. The agent's job is to match your book with the right editor, or if there's more than one who's likely to buy it they run an auction: once they've got you a publisher they then squeeze as much money out of the publisher as possible -- publishers always low-ball the advance and terms they offer an unrepresented author -- and then vet the contract small-print for landmines. A survey an author of my acquaintance conducted about five years ago came up with statistics for agented vs. un-agented books in the SF/F field (which is what I write), polling professional authors on a mailing list; in general, the book advances of authors who go through agents are between 150% and 200% of those received by unagented authors.

The benefits of an agent are likely to be lower for a non-fic author who writes technical/business books on an irregular basis -- but still reasonable. But for a fiction author who eats or starves on the basis of pushing out at least one book a year, the agent's ability to market the author and push their career track is essential.

They are, after all, on commission. And the more they can earn for the author, the more they get to take home too.

That stands to reason, however, do I decide to read a given book because it is a 'find' of a given agent or published by a given publisher? Or do I read something because it is heavily promoted? More importantly, do women - as in those people that actually read a lot of books and keep the publishing industry afloat - do they care about those behind the scenes that have marketed a given book?

If a book comes from a word-of-mouth recommendation or if it is by a favourite author then that will be sufficient to make the purchasing decision. Reviews on Amazon are sufficient to make the purchasing decision. To a large extent a book sells on merit and someone taking the self-publishing route with something that people really do want to read and tell the world about can make a success of it. They were not able to do so before the e-book revolution came along, they were beholden to agents and publishers. Yes, people in the publishing trade secretly fear 'they don't need us...!'

Here is something:

http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rej...

A good reading list (Da Vinci Code and a few others excepted).

"do I decide to read a given book because it is a 'find' of a given agent or published by a given publisher? Or do I read something because it is heavily promoted?"

The former makes the latter more likely. A good agent will:

* get a better advance for the author, which makes it more likely the book will actually get finished

* be on the author's case to get the book finished and out (otherwise less money for them).

* negotiate better promotion with the publishers

* be on the publishers case to make sure that what was agreed actually happens

* etc. etc.

All of which make it more likely that the book gets published, gets promoted, and so seen, and so read, and for that word-of-mouth to kick off ;-)

As for the number of successful authors who were rejected. That's to be expected. Publishers are the VCs of the book industry. They say "no" a lot, and most of the people they say "yes" to aren't hugely successful. Every VC has said no to a successful company. Every publisher has said no to a successful author. They doesn't mean either group are necessarily failing as a whole.

To push the analogy - not everybody needs a VC. Some people can bootstrap. Some people are happy taking on the extra load of marketing, financing, producing, distributing, advertising, editing, admin, etc. etc. They find it fun and interesting and are happy to take the time to do it. Some market segments make that work considerably less than others do.

Other authors want to use that time to write.

I find the analogy to VCs interesting. In term of investing your own money (as in investing in a fund), I have seen graphs showing that VCs have a pretty bad ROI, if not the worst This is partly attributed to highly subjective decisions from a small number of like-minded individuals, which often end up in poor and mostly misapplied metrics. (I don't want this to be the debate, this is just something I have seen reported many times, and at least once on HN not too long ago, and most people seemed to agree with that, so lets assume that VCs are not a very sound way to invest your retirement money).

Is the same true for Publishers? Could make a comparison using data about this $15B revenue vs how much was spent?

Moreover, the best ROI for VC funded anything, seems to be an exit IPO. What would be the equivalent of an "IPO" for authors? A movie?

"Is the same true for Publishers? Could make a comparison using data about this $15B revenue vs how much was spent?"

Good question. I have no idea ;-)

I guess it might not even matter. If what you're interested in is the best way to get more good books into the world rather than make the most money. From my experiences the folk in the publishing industry I've met are more interested in the former than the latter.

The issue I was trying to highlight though is that many people seem to ignore the "invest" part of what publishers do and see them as just people who print books. The publishers advance + the publisher/agent network are an investment. And with new authors an especially risky investment.

"Moreover, the best ROI for VC funded anything, seems to be an exit IPO. What would be the equivalent of an "IPO" for authors? A movie?"

I'm guessing getting a Terry Pratchett or a J. K. Rowling. That combination of talent and public zeitgeist that produces wads of cash.

Alas, you can't gamble your company on getting a Terry Pratchett or J. J. Rowling -- or a Dan Brown. Those folks come along once a decade in the worldwide English language market. The overwhelming majority of works of English language fiction sell less than 100,000 copies (hardcover, ebook, and paperback, across the North American, and UK/Commonwealth markets, and in translation); indeed, many sell fewer than 10,000 copies.

Most folks have no idea how micro-targeted a niche business publishing is. The goal of a large publisher is to find a lot of these small fry and hope one or two of them will break through and make the big time; just one such author can float the rest of the midlist at a publisher for many years, raising the chance of another huge bestseller coming along.

Actually, looking at the size of investment with individual authors, I guess folk accelerator/seed folk like YC would be a better analogy than the average VC firm.... but I'm really pushing the analogy too far.

I would say that the list of rejections is very mixed. There are plenty of commercial successes there that aren't particularly good.

I disagree - consider real estate agents: the buyer's and the seller's take home a total of 6% of the purchase price. If you were an agent, would you settle for, say, 300k, and take your 9k in your pocket, or would you fight a great fight to get to 310k? Commissions should be, in this example, zero until 270k, and then a big chunk of anything above that, to really incentivize the agent to do your best interest. Same for book agents. I self published two books for this reason. To be clear, I'm not saying that agents are ALWAYS bad. I am only saying that commissions are not designed to serve the author's best interest.

It's a different kind of relationship.

Estate agents have many one off customers. Literary agents have many long-term repeat customers. It's worth their while to make them as money as possible and accelerate their career.

I admit it's a small sample - but the authors I know have made considerably more money post-agent than they did pre-. Which matches what cstross mentioned in his post.

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