The confessions of a semi-successful author
dir.salon.com
dir.salon.com
I thought long and hard before signing my trade print contract: my next-best alternative was self-publishing via Lightning Source, which would give me full distribution at Amazon and all Ingram-affiliated bookstores (without shelving, probably), no inventory requirements on my part, ~75% margins for each book sold, and full control over the process. I have enough technical and design skill to pull it off well, and my publishers know it.
I also have a list of ~14k people to sell to, which I established via my blog. Most of the early sales of the book will come from this list, trade contract or no, and most of the ongoing marketing for the book will be my responsibility.
I signed the print contract because my publisher made it worthwhile: six-figure+ advance for worldwide rights, and I retain multimedia rights so I can freely adapt the content for online courses and other programs. That was a good deal for me. If I want to write book #2, they'll have right of first refusal, and if they don't want it for some reason, I have other options I can pursue.
Book contract negotiation is like any other business negotiation: always have options, ensure you're holding the valuable cards before you decide to play, and be willing to walk away from a bad deal.
Book - "Print-On-Demand Book Publishing": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0972380132/
Excellent resources, and Morris is very generous with his experience and advice. Highly recommended.
This is insane. Can you imagine how little work I'd get done if, after being rejected by the New York Times, my marketing effort was going to little collections of teachers, giving a speech, and trying to persuade them to play bingo with their classes? And I make a lot more off a marginal sale than the average midlist author does.
Thankfully, some authors are finally starting to get clueful. They're doing things like having a blog and an email list. (I will bet you any amount of money that the anonymous author cannot identify her hard-core fans by name or contact them in any way. What the heck. Screw the New York Times, these are the people who you should be most worried about getting your next book to because you know they will love it and tell everyone they know about it.)
I think that is pretty much the way forward for midlist authors: do your own marketing, talk directly to your readers, cut out the middlemen wherever possible. Midlist authors don't make a lot of money or sell a lot of books in the status quo. You can probably do better just being a micro-celebrity on the Internet: beloved by the "thousand true fans" that know and talk to you, and selling to folks a bit wider than that social circle.
It beats sitting at the kitchen table waiting for rejection letters.
I suspect much of the problem, though, is counting on advances to write the book instead of just writing the thing in your spare time after something like a part-time job. Kind of like a startup wannabe who won't lift a finger until they've got funding.
It reminds me of a boyfriend of an old roommate of mine. He would introduce himself as an author, or aspiring author, something like that. Mostly he just sat around reading and smoking. I always thought 'if you're an author, just friggen write something - anything'.
* Lamenting that 'publishing is a business' or 'ROI is everything to them' inevitably sounds whiny. Authors seem to be very aware (probably even overestimating in order to preserve ego) that the "I" part is very important. As much as she seems desperate for an advance, she obviously knows that large advance = large promotion budget & wants both.
* Her books seem to have failed to make anyone money. It's not that everyone but the author got paid. She got a slice of a small pie.
* Authors get paid so little because of how badly they want to be writers. This is actually evidence of supply-demand at work in job markets, something that is hard to come by. Without knowing any numbers, one might predict that garbage collectors get paid more than writers, professors, etc. No one want to collect garbage & lot of people wants to write. Supply of writers is high, price is low.
* Apart from the financial consequences, I imagine it would be very frustrating for a writer to live in this world of gatekeepers where you need permission all the time.
* I think this frustration is what makes writers sound whiny. Since they are constantly trying to get over the gatekeeper barrier, it seems like this is what is standing between them & crazy success. This lets them avoid the sobering ratio: # of books successful per year/ # of books written per year.
* Writers need to play a different game. Seth Godin/ Tim Ferris/ 1000 True Fans/ Trent Reznor/ etc. inspired (depending on taste) direct promotion. Also, try to make money indirectly. The Author cites how being a published author is already being a mini-celebrity. It might be possible to capitalise on this some way that isn't just selling books.
That's not midlist; that's indicative of a publisher taking serious aim on the New York Times bestseller list.
Average first novel advances in SF/F fiction are on the order of US $7500. Average n'th book advances for agented authors are around $17,500.
Of course, there's a power law at work here; about 1% of the authors get 50% of the advances. But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it.
Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"?
It took Twain 8 years to write Huck Finn and it was finally published when he was 49. He wrote 100s of small stories under pseudonyms to make ends meet until then. Today, he wouldn't have ever finished it, and we'd be without one of the best books ever written.
Yes. In the eyes of your editor's boss, the VP (Marketing), you have blown it if your first book doesn't break even on P&E. Break-even comes some time before you earn out the advance, but even so: if you don't break even on your first contract they'll drop you like a hot potato. Especially if someone gambled $1.5M of the corporate turnover on you and lost!
Assuming an average royalty rate of 10% -- it varies from 6% up to 15% in commercial fiction, depending on print run, format, phase of the moon, elevator clauses, and so on, but 10% is about right for a big hardcover run followed by a metric buttload of paperbacks -- then you can multiply the author's advance by ten to get a handle on the amount of turnover the publisher was betting on her. Which in her case was on the order of a million dollars.
Her final tally: 10K hardcovers and paperbacks sold. Even if those 10K sales were 100% hardcover at undiscounted list, they didn't turn over $0.24M (and more likely they broke down into something like 2500 hc and 7500 mmpb, in which case total turnover for the book was more like $100K). Actual profits for the publisher are typically about the same as the author's advance (a lot of money goes into the pockets of the distributors and retailers). So they were looking to make about $150K in profit, and instead made $10K and lost $150K on the advance (not to mention another $100K on the unsold copies they pulped).
If they'd given her a $10K advance they might have patted her on the head and said "there there, dear, let's try again, shall we?" But you don't get a second chance if you lose big right off the block. The usual response is to bury it deep (before someone higher up notices the oopsie and fires the responsible party).
In today's publishing industry, you're only ever as good as your last book. And if Mark Twain was alive and writing today he'd be an embittered blogger.
Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for.
Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished prior to the book that you enjoyed. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html
The point I was trying to make was it's unfair to place a higher standard of success on an industry just b/c it has a finished product it has to ship.
Twain wrote many novels b/f his breakout success, whichever book it was. Why? Because when he started he wasn't as good as he was in his 40s/50s... just like when you launch a webapp it's not as good as it will be after you've iterated on it for 2 years.
Anyway, I'll try and stick to a subject matter I know a little better next time ;)
As an aside, I was reminded, when I read the chronology, of all the money he lost as a wanna-be venture capitalist. He lost his fortune, dumping it into printing press designs that the engineers could never get the bugs out of. Too bad he didn't abandon that at some point...
I guess I'm asking how many authors we really need. I still haven't gotten around to reading The Brothers Karamazov.
Even though it's a subject that interests me greatly, I found this nearly impossible to get through on account of the fragmentation.
It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days, but if twice as many people want to write as 20 years ago, how does that work out? Do average sales halve? Is it possible to write a novel that is in some absolute sense better than a novel of 20 years ago, so people change their priorities and read a book instead of going bowling? I doubt it. The author is on friendly terms with her fellow authors, but it seems likely that they are in zero-sum competition with each other and all the other authors out there.
She gives the impression that it has got harder to earn a living as an author, which makes me guess that more people are trying to earn a living that way, but she leaves me to guess. How many competitors does she have? With inelastic demand, supply becomes the key number. I think that Charles Brown said "God loves authors, he made so many of them" with bitter irony.
Yeah: see Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-pub... .
The value of her advances? That she liked/ didn't like editor A or agent B, the names of whom you would need to do detective work to find out? Her opinion of the industry?
They don't buy what you'd like them to buy, or what you think they should buy, or what you yourself would buy. They buy what they want to buy. If you can line that up with them, you can sell to people.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/echoman/3883032294/
Also, "Revenue reality of a book on the NY Times best seller list" was about a Vampire genre author
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949044
50 Cent (Vitamin Water) on Business:
> Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply
Something has to change.
My biggest take away from this is that the traditional publishing industry is no longer the route to go.
Basically, if you want to be a writer today you should keep your day job and just blog. If you blog is successful you'll have a much easier time turning it into a book (almost as simple as sorting posts by most popular and sending to a publisher).
Lulu.com is a great option as well for self publishing. You've got to self-publish (blog, lulu.com, etc) until you're successful. Only after you're successful should you look at traditional publishing I think.
John Dies at the End was originally published in a serial form online, though it has since been taken offline. It's been published, and is going into its ... second printing, I think, soon. From what I've heard, the fanbase is quite devoted (at one point, copies were sold for >$100 because of how hard it was to get them - the first printing was fairly small).
Ichor Falls, a blog collecting short stories about the titular town, and the weird stuff going on around it, has a book - though that's recent enough that I don't know if it's successful.
I also recall a zombie novel, which was published in serial form online before being published in physical form. Quite good, as I remember. Might have been called Empire - the plot synopsis fits what I remember, but the online serial version doesn't seem to be available any more. Once again, I don't know if it's what you would call successful.
... actually, what's the definition of successful? I would say that it's simply being published, after already been released online for free and building up a fanbase; however, I expect that most others would tie it to sales, or the amount of money the author gets from it.
David Wellington (http://www.davidwellington.net/) has written a number of zombie novels that were first published in serialized form online and subsequently in print.
My first drafts are decent, but the first stage of editing is vital to add coherence and fix plot holes. (Imagine if the season 3.5 of BSG had some sort of planning; it would have been much, much better.)
Also looked at 150000 advances but that didn't really get me anywhere either despite bringing up that the author of "the g-spot" got that advance but that's the wrong year.
Her friend "Patty" is a sort of lead but I don't want to know that badly ...
My Google-fu is waning.
one of her lessons learned was that, yes, there is a downside to having a large first advance. it sounds like the publisher lost money on that book, so after that they were probably thinking of her project as an expensive flop. if she'd taken less money upfront, they might have instead thought of her as a promising author that didn't quite live up to expectations on her first outing.
having said all that, i think the whole thing is moot, because it sounds like a broken racket. there's another regular at salon.com, patrick smith, who has similarly convinced me that becoming a commercial airline pilot is also being part of a broken racket. ditto signing to a music label, trying for tenure at most universities, and so on. i'd advise all of those people to try to find a way to realize their dreams with a more hands-on, iterative approach.
Won't talk about? If only.