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This post, from Editorial Ass, appeared on that site on 5/20/09.

My mother has read and loved a particular book I edited. Last week, she called me and asked, out of curiosity, how much money that favorite author of hers might make off the book. Well, I said, there’s an advance, I said, but really what matters is royalties, but you can’t just assume those are rolling in every six months, since there’s a reserve against returns, but then there’s rights sales that are straight pocket change, but there’s a fee for the…

As I spoke, her eyebrows came down into her nose and her mouth pursed fretfully as she tried to follow me. Watching these changes come over her face, I started listening to myself and the malarkey I spoke. I realized that royalty accounting must be SO mysterious to anyone unpublished. Or published. Or anyone. I realized even I didn’t really know what I was talking about.

So here is my imperfect attempt to describe to you an author’s possibilities for making money with her/his books. I don’t claim the final word, and I welcome amendments. But I think everyone deserves to know how they might profit from their work, because it might help them make good decisions about their writing and publication processes.

Let’s try to go in rough chronological order.

The Advance
What does "advance" mean: It’s money "advanced" to you against royalties, meaning it’s a loan the publisher gives you in a lump sum under the assumption that your book will make enough money for said publisher that the advance will be recouped. This means that you will start earning royalties when and only if your book makes enough money that your publisher’s advance to you it paid back, using your negotiated royalty percentage as a marker. If your advance is $10,000, your royalty is 10%, and your cover price is $25.00, you will need to sell 4,000 copies of your book before you start making additional royalties. This is called earnout.

How the advance is divided: Either in half of thirds–usually. If it’s a smaller advance (or your agent manages to force them to agree to this), your publisher might agree to pay it in two lumps, often half on signing, half on delivery and acceptance of your final manuscript. If it’s larger advance, you’ll probably get a third on signing, a third on delivery and acceptance (or d&a), a third on publication.

The Royalties:
What are typical royalty percentages: Standard royalties for new books are as follows: 10% for hardcover, 7% (or sometimes 7.5%) for trade paperback, and 5% for mass market. Often, publishers will agree to incentive escalators (usually only on hardcovers). Here’s a very typical hardcover example:

10% on the first 5,000 copies sold
12.5% on the next 5,000 copies sold
15% thereafter

When royalties are paid: As we mentioned above, you’ll only start earning additional royalties when your advance has earned out. Supposing your book has earned out, royalties are (at most companies) paid every 6 months, in statements that go directly to agents.
 

Read the rest of the post, which includes information about ‘reserves against returns’, rights sales and some what-if scenarios, on the Editorial Ass blog.

This post, from R.J. Keller, originally appeared on Publishing Renaissance on 2/4/09.

There’s been much debate recently – here at Publishing Renaissance and elsewhere around the blogosphere – about the advisability of writers offering their work online for free. This post is not intended to add to that debate. My book is already out there for free, so that ship has sailed. No, today’s post is intended to help those who have already made the decision to offer their books for free to make the most of it.

First of all, you must decide how to put your book online. Many writers post them either in their entirety or one chapter at a time to a blog, or, as it’s sometimes referred to, a “blook.” There are advantages to this, chief among them is that it’s FREE for the author. Also, the built-in comments box makes it easy to get immediate feedback, to interact with readers. The drawback is that it can look a little unprofessional if you’re not careful.

If you go this route, be sure to choose a template that’s easy on the eyes. Your readers will – hopefully – be spending hours staring at your book on the screen. Be kind to their eyes. If you decide to serialize your blook by chapters weekly, monthly, or as you write it, be sure to offer your readers an option to subscribe to a feed, so they know when you’ve updated it.

If you’ve got a little cash to spend, you can post your book on a regular website. This gives you more control over the look and feel of your online book, but it requires at least a basic knowledge of HTML and/or CSS, and is a lot more work. If you like that kind of thing (I’m getting to that point) and don’t mind the work, this is a good way to go.

You can also post your book to an existing website or blog as a downloadable file, usually a PDF. (Although I know there are other formats available.) This can have the advantage of putting your book directly into the “hands” of your readers, but it also takes control of your book out of your hands. This is a huge deal to some authors, not so much to others. If you do opt to go this route, be sure to format your book as professionally as possible and to include links to your website and/or blog.

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: you can publish your work online and make it available for free, or at a price, at Scribd or Smashwords as well.]

Read the rest of the post on Publishing Renaissance.

This post, from Devon Ellington, originally appeared on the Procrastinating Writers blog on 5/8/09.

It’s easy to stay on track for a contracted, deadlined project. You know when it has to be finished and to the client/publisher/editor/agent. You have a fixed date, and, whether you break it down into do-able bits or wait until the last moment for that adrenalin rush. It’s out the door on time if you expect to work for that particular person again.

But what about the pieces you write just for you? The novel you always wanted to start and finally “got around to?” How do you stay on track if a project isn’t under someone else’s deadline?

You have to apply some of the same tools, but modify them a bit. You have to make the stakes high enough to actually do it. And, most importantly, you have to want it enough.

For the purposes of this piece, let’s use a novel as an example. You want to try something new, it’s not contracted, it’s not deadlined. You might not yet know how long it’s going to be, what genre it’s in, or where it’s headed. That’s fine. You just have to really want to write this novel.

• Figure out what a comfortable daily pace is for your work. Something that makes you feel that you’ve accomplished something. I prefer to use word count or page count rather than time count. It’s easy to sit and stare at the screen for two hours and say, “Oh, that was my two hour session. Done.” And there’s not a word on the page. With a word count or a page count, you don’t get to end your session until you’ve hit your quota.

  I write my first 1,000 of fiction first thing in the morning, before I am “tainted by the day.” I get up, feed the cats, put on the coffee, do my yoga/meditation, and then write my first 1,000. If it’s going well, I keep going as long as possible. If it’s a slog to get through that first 1,000 words, at least, no matter how frustrating the rest of the day gets, I know I’ve written 1,000 that day. It takes off a huge amount of pressure from the rest of the day. Sometimes, it’s a deadlined project, such as my next Jain Lazarus adventure. Often, it’s a project with which I’m playing, where I’m still unclear as to what it will be when it grows up.

  Carolyn See suggests 1,000 of fiction “every day for the rest of your life” in her wonderful book Making a Literary Life. It’s four pages. Doable in most situations. But if two pages (500 words) makes more sense in the scheme of your life, then that’s your daily quota. What matters is doing them. Every day. If you miss a day because you’re sick or life gets in the way, get back to it as fast as possible. Don’t give up.Also, remember that every novel has its own innate rhythm. Some will have a quicker natural flow than others. It’ll take you a few chapters to figure out the book’s natural rhythm. Once you’ve found it, work with it, not against it.

Read the rest of the post on the Procrastinating Writers blog.

This post, from Nathan Bransford, originally appeared on his blog on 5/5/09.

One of the more unique aspects of writing is the way people associate themselves and their identities with their words on the page. People don’t just spend time in the evening reflecting on the capricious vicissitudes of life and/or zombie killers from another planet. It somehow becomes more than that.

You can see this in the way people talk about writing: some people compare it to oxygen, i.e. something that they can’t live without. They don’t say, "I like to write, it’s fun, I enjoy it." They say, unequivocally, "I am a writer. It’s who I am."

I’m going to be honest here and say that while I don’t judge people when they define themselves as writer, whatever their publication status, I find it a little unsettling when they make it an overly intrinsic part of their identity.

First of all, people just don’t tend to define themselves by what they do in their spare time. You don’t hear anyone shout to the rafters, "I AM STAMP COLLECTOR!" or "I AM A CONNOISSEUR OF REALITY TELEVISION!"

To be sure, there’s something about writing that’s a little different (to say the least) from stamp collecting. It’s more personal, even when it’s not a memoir or something that relates directly to someone’s real life. Putting thoughts on the page, any thoughts, means taking one’s inner life and putting it all out there for the world to see. Normally we’re at great pains to keep our emotions hidden, whether that’s concealing anger or love or nervousness. Writers do the opposite: they take their innermost thoughts and show them to the world. And there’s something scary/thrilling about externalizing what is normally kept hidden.

But an identity?

Here’s where that becomes problematic. Once someone makes the leap from writing as a fun, intense pursuit to something wrapped up in identity, it’s a dangerous road to be walking on. As we all know, the path to material success in the writing world is ridden with obstacles and rejections. And when people begin to wrap up their identity with the publication process, the rejections become personal, and a judgment on a book becomes intertwined, in the writer’s eye, with a judgment of self.
 

Read the rest of the post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.

This post, by Jeremiah Tolbert, originally appeared on his site on 4/22/09.

I have often written about a concept pioneered by Barry Schwartz called the paradox of choice.  Basically, the idea is that the more choices you give people, the more likely they are to be paralyzed with indecision.  It’s easier to make up your mind when you have fewer choices.  

In yesterday’s post, C.S. Inman asked the following question:

When I begin a story, I do a good job with characterization, with setting up engaging conflicts, with possibilities for compounded problems and solutions. From what they tell me, people generally want to keep turning pages.

Unfortunately, when I’m writing past the “beginning” I have difficulty choosing which plot options should take up those subsequent pages. The “middles” of my stories are a crossroads where I feel like no matter which path I let the protagonist take, I’m missing something better on one of the other paths. It doesn’t help when I sometimes finish a short story (or a chapter of a novel) and realize I have to delete 2,000 words and go a different direction because it’s totally awesome, and how didn’t I see it before I wasted all that time?

Do you have any ideas about how I can either 1. Stop being a pansy and just pick one and like it or 2. Discover which path is going to be the most satisfying BEFORE I write the wrong one?

Read the rest of the post on Jeremiah Tolbert’s site.

This post, by Christine Duncan, originally appeared on the Rule of Three blog on 4/27/09.

There are elitists in every area of life, and the mystery writing field is no exception. I thought I knew them all. I did know about the folks who thought you weren’t writing a real mystery unless it was (insert one) noir, a private detective novel or written in the style of the late great Agatha.

I didn’t think the people who were supposed to be my support system would turn out to be elitists–all under the guise of helping me. By now many of you know of some of the turmoil of the last year or so in some of the mystery groups to exclude from certain privileges those of us who are published by publishers who use print on demand print processes, or who do not give advances.

First we were told that our publishers had to be on some list of “accepted publishers.” To be truthful, I didn’t pay much attention then. My publisher is a legitimate royalty paying small press. They vet subs–taking only a small percentage, edit, use Baker and Taylor, take returns, the whole nine yards. And they were on the accepted list. I could have fought for the self-pubbed and excluded presses–but I didn’t. And now I’m sorry.

Then authors from print on demand presses were told we would not be on panels at certain conferences. When authors protested on the organization’s list, we were told that this wasn’t their decision, it was up to the organizers of the conferences.

When we pointed out the organization sponsored some of those conferences, they came up with a different excuse. This was done, or so they said, because people need to be wary of some publishers or even (Horror of Horrors!) self-publishing. The organization mustn’t seem to endorse these folks. There were other reasons, of course, but this is the one that stuck in my craw.

Apparently the organization doesn’t know that we’re all adults and can make our own decisions whether that be N Y press, small press or self-pubbing. Neither did they acknowledge that it used to be honorable to self-publish. Jane Austen, (see Michelle’s post last week) Mark Twain and Virginia Wolf all did and never suffered a stigma.

Then any discussion of the problem was banned from the organization’s listserv. It served no purpose they said. As my children would say with a roll of their eyes, “Whatever!” Many of us decided there and then not to attend [their] conferences and hope that our small (monetary) contributions would be missed.

Read the rest of the post on the Rule of Three blog. 

In The Truth About CreateSpace’s Free ISBNs, it was stated that if an author who has accepted a free ISBN from CreateSpace subsequently removes his book from CreateSpace, CreateSpace might reassign the ISBN that was assigned to his book (aka, "recycle" the ISBN). This is not true. 

According to Amanda Wilson, CreateSpace’s Public Relations Manager, CreateSpace does not, and never has, reassigned its ISBNs. If an author accepts the free ISBN and subsequently removes her book from CreateSpace, the ISBN assigned to her book will go out of circulation.

This post, by Jeff Gomez, originally appeared on his Print is Dead Blog on 5/30/07. Hard as it may be to believe, book review sections were already beginning to shrink and disappear even then—two years ago.

Last week, Art Winslow had an essay on the Huffington Post site’s Eat the Press section; entitled “The New Book Burning,” the essay revolved around the recent reduction of book review sections in a handful of major American newspapers.

Writes Winslow: “In the new book burning we don’t burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead.”

First of all, I think Winslow is being more than slightly hysterical when he tries to portray the disappearance of book review sections as being “the new book burning.” That’s not only a ridiculous suggestion, but a dangerous one.

Burning books is about the totalitarian eradication of what the ideas in books represent, whereas book review sections being slimmed down or phased out is about simple economics and the fact that, in our Internet age, things are rapidly changing and book reviews are no longer needed. But Winslow prefers to take a darker view, rhetorically asking, “How did we arrive at what seems to be a cultural sinkhole?” Instead of answering that, I’d like to ask Winslow a question: “Where have you been for the past ten years?”

But what I find most interesting about Winslow’s essay is that he’s a “former literary editor and executive editor of The Nation magazine and a regular contributor to Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Bookforum and other publications.” So it seems that Winslow, and many critics and writers like him, are really just clamoring to keep their jobs. In the end, they don’t want things to change because they don’t want to give up the power they currently have.

In the past, Winslow and the other book reviewers out there acted as the arbiters of literary taste: when they would write a good review of a book, their review had the power to propel that book into the national spotlight (and vice versa; a bad review could ruin a book, and sometimes an entire career). So while the importance of movie critics has lessened over the years (gore-fests like Hostel and Saw, which are routinely ravaged by reviewers, go on to make millions at the box office despite what any critic says), in the book world, reviewers have — until fairly recently — retained their clout. (As New Order put it in a song, “We’re not like all those stupid people/who can’t decide what book to read/unless a paper sows the seed”).

But with the Internet, blogs, the rise of “citizen journalism” and user-generated content, book reviewers are seeing their little corner of the world erode and fall into the sea, and they don’t like it.

Read the rest of the post on the Print is Dead Blog.

This article, by Damien G. Walter, originally appeared on The Guardian UK Books Blog on 9/24/08.

The future can be worrying to consider at the best of times. But with a global economic crisis looming, a war on terrorism and the continuing threat of climate change to ponder, the future looks bleak indeed. It’s at times like these that people seek escape in the pages of popular fiction. But anyone looking for a better future in science fiction is in for a shock.

Back in the golden age of science fiction, the future was a much brighter place. Pulp magazines gave readers amazing stories of flying cars, towering skyscrapers and the utopian metropolis. Legendary writers like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov predicted a future where science took mankind to the stars and beyond. And all this in the face of the Great Depression, two world wars and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. There was no lack of reason for people then to be very gloomy indeed about the future, but maybe because the times were dark, readers flocked to the visions of a brighter future offered by science fiction.

But for all its sense of wonder, golden age science fiction was guilty of a peculiar naivety in its depiction of the future. In its wake the character of the genre changed radically. The new wave movement, lead by writers like J G Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, reacted against the pulp roots of the genre, writing science fiction that drew heavily on literary technique and values.

Writers from Ursula K Le Guin to Octavia Butler saw the potential of science fiction for expression, but rejected the overwhelmingly white, male perspective that dominated the genre. Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors imagined futures so dark that even the human soul could be destroyed. Science fiction evolved into a sophisticated literature of ideas, offering dark warnings of the future to come.

Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK Books Blog.

This piece, by Jim C. Hines, originally appeared on his blog on 4/29/09. In it, Mr. Hines looks at what it takes for a mainstream author’s book to "earn out" its advance—and why big advances aren’t necessarily a good thing for authors.

Publishers and authors tend to keep actual numbers under wraps when it comes to print runs and books sold. As a result, new authors are often clueless as to what’s normal.

I know I was completely lost the first time I saw actual numbers for Goblin Quest. Was my book selling well? Was I going to get dumped if I didn’t sell 100,000 books in the first year? How many books did my publisher actually print?

I don’t actually know what my print runs have been. I have some guesses, but nothing from the publisher. But then I got to thinking…

We know the median first novel advance for a SF/F author is probably around $5000 or so. That’s the boilerplate first offer I got from Baen (which then fell through, but that’s another story). Average is a little higher than the median, but I’m going to stick with $5000 for ease of math.

We also know not all novels earn out their advance, especially first novels. $5000 is a best-guess on the part of the publisher as to how much they should invest in your new book.

Sticking purely with mass market paperbacks for the moment, let’s say you get royalties at 8% (fairly standard but not universal for an original mass market, I believe) and a cover price of $7.99 (also standard U.S. cover price for mass markets). So you’re earning $.64 per book.

Juggle the numbers, and a $5000 advance means you’re going to need to sell roughly 8,000 books (7,812.5) in order to earn out. In my case, I’d guess the publisher probably did a print run between 10,000 and 15,000 books, but that’s a total guess, and hopefully more experienced publishing folks can speak to that piece.

(ETA: ramblin_phyl points out that there’s also a break-even point in the cost-efficiency of first print runs, which might mean the numbers on that run were a little higher.)

Hardcovers and e-books add more variables, as the royalties are different, but I’m trying to keep things as simple as possible for this example.
 

Read the rest of the article on Jim C. Hines’ blog.

This piece, by Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 4/15/09.

We spend a lot of time focusing on our core conflict, and rightly so since that’s what driving our novels. But what about the subplots? Those pesky side stories that either deepen our novels or side track them to dark alleys and bang them over the head.

With my first novel, the subplots ruled. Every time I got a cool idea for a character, no matter how important they were, I ran with it. That’s probably why I had eleven POVs and couldn’t tell you what the dang book was about.

The next novel, I kept a tight leash on the subplots. The book was pretty flat, because nothing beyond the main story ever happened to shake things up.

Finally, I found a balance that worked for me. Core external conflict, core internal conflict, handful of subplots.

But there’s a catch…

They all have to be connected.

The core conflict is the bulk of my story. Protag needs X, and will do anything to get X. But constantly reading about, oh lets make up something… Bob being chased by zombies … is pretty boring after a while. We all know how stories go. We know that Bob is going to be thwarted by zombies at every turn until the end of the book, where he’ll pull something out of his, um, hat and save the day. (or get eaten if that’s the kind of story you’re writing).

Bob’s core conflict: Zombies are trying to eat him and everyone around him.

His goal: To survive and kill off the zombies.

Yawn.

We need subplots to spice this up so it isn’t as predictable what will happen. I could give Bob another threat to deal with, say crazed renegade bikers taking advantage of the chaos, who are also trying to kill him. But really, two "trying to kill you" threats are basically the same thing. The stakes are still the same, and the story is still going to follow the same path as with the zombies. There’s nothing new to offer the reader in terms of a problem to overcome.

What I need to do, is give Bob a problem that has totally different stakes than getting eaten. He has to risk something else that matters to him. End of the world stories need a little romance, so let’s give him Jane.

Jane is the love if his life, but he’s been afraid to tell her that. They’re running from zombies together, and he’s working up the courage to profess his love for her. He has something beyond himself at stake now, and bad things could happen to either. Worrying about Jane is an additional worry for Bob. But what might happen to Bob can easily still happen to Jane, so the stakes are only marginally raised. We need a different threat. A personal threat, since the other threats are all impersonal.
 

Read the rest of the article on Janice Hardy’s The Other Side of the Story blog.