This article, from AL Kennedy, originally appeared on the Guardian UK Books Blog on 7/7/09.

Workshops are a delicate business, and calling them masterclasses is unlikely to improve them.

Workshops – I’ve mentioned them briefly in this blog before, but they are currently much on my mind. Increasingly such things are being called Masterclasses, which sound much more impressive and buzzy and vaguely as if they’ll involve an opportunity to be in an airless hotel function suite with a minor deity. I’ve been giving workshops – and now Masterclasses – in prose fiction for a period of time I will not mention for fear of feeling wrinkled and reflecting that I had a bloody cheek to try telling anyone anything for at least the first decade. Then again, giving workshops to people who can’t yet write while you can’t yet write either, is a traditional way for nascent writers to earn their crusts. And it means we can meet people we didn’t make up, and learn, and consider overviews, and be near the process in others and see how lovely it is and how a person can light up when all goes well and a penny drops and so forth …

Of course, having no time of my own and not being the sociable type, I rarely do anything that involves a bunch of strangers and a flipchart, unless I’m the one inhaling the delicious marker pen fumes. But, only last night, I was reflecting with a chum on a masterclass I attended which did absolutely make me reassess how I run my workshops.

First, let us think of the horrible temptations within the workshop scenario. There you are, alone with a largely or wholly compliant roomful of people who offer themselves up to your help, perhaps harbouring a curiosity about the writing life (such as that which fuels this very blog) and perhaps also a touching belief that there is a Golden Key that will make all well and effect immediate change in their putative vocation.

The workshop leader’s power can be huge, given that writing is so intimate. Although the scale is tiny, the possibilities for wrongness and corruption can be appallingly extensive: ideas can be mocked, weaklings can be bullied, tired or apprehensive participants can actively encourage the tutor to blather on about his or her self at revolting length and offer all the worst sorts of admiration. The nervous and self-critical (many good writers are both) may not express needs which therefore go unfulfilled, or problems which therefore continue to fester unexamined. Participants may have no idea what to expect and could be fobbed off with any old nonsense.

With the best will in the world it’s difficult to describe a mental process to someone usefully without requiring at least a tiny bit that they think like you – when they should ideally think like themselves, only more so – and that’s without mentioning the possibilities of technical failures, the restraints of time pressure and the intrusion of acts of God (I once ran a workshop during which a shrew ran up a participant’s leg. Things ended badly for the shrew, much to everyone’s dismay, including the owner of the leg).

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

This post, from NYT bestselling author John Green, originally appeared on his Sparks Fly Up site on 7/7/09.

Okay, quick background: Last week I wrote a post arguing against outrageously high book advances and in favor of better royalties for authors. I followed this up with a post arguing that the widely held belief that big advances cause big marketing budgets does not really hold up to scrutiny. (Big advances and big marketing budgets are obviously often correlated, but that does not imply any kind of causal relationship.)

Then I promised a mathy post explaining to publishers why this model makes more sense for them, after which I decided that my numbers were perhaps not as lock-solid as I previously believed them to be, so I decided not to publish that post.

For the record:

1. One thing that keeps getting overlooked here is that many big publishers would currently be OUT OF BUSINESS if they were not owned by gigantic media companies that can absorb the losses of their idiotic up-front gambling. It’s not like I’m fretting about some on-the-horizon crisis in publishing; the crisis is here. The model is not working, and it isn’t changing, which historically bodes poorly. (I’m looking at you, record companies.)

2. That said, my radical proposal was wrong enough to be relatively easy to dismiss. But if you lower advances and increase royalty escalations dramatically (at least according to my calculations which might be wrong because I am bad at math), over the last five years EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHER IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EFFING WORLD would either be more profitable or lose less money except maybe Hachette.* So I just want to make it clear that I am not backing away from that fundamental belief.

3. The comments to these posts have been fascinating and wonderful and I am deeply grateful to all of you for them.

4. I wanted to pull one comment out and respond to it in pieces, because it raises a lot of important questions and also brings forth the obvious but as-yet-unstated fact that I am writing from a particular POV. So okay, from commenter writeon:

"If (like most authors) the only money you’d be making from a book is the advance (since most books don’t earn out their advance or stay on shelves long enough to make royalties) why on earth would an author want to turn down money?"

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing against advances. My beef is not with $30,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back. My beef is with $500,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back.

The reason to take less money upfront and get more in royalties is pretty simple, I think: Your publisher is owned by a company that wants to make money. So long as you make money, you make sense. If you don’t make money, you don’t make sense.**

"Authors don’t have a crystal ball where they can see into the future and say, "Well, in three years I’ll come up with this Book X which will make me money, so, for right now I can sell Book Y and Z for pennies."

Again, I’m not proposing you sell any book for pennies; I’m proposing that you sell a book for a reasonable five-figure advance and the kind of escalating royalty that allows you to share fairly in the profits from the book, if there are any.

"Most authors don’t know if they’ll get the chance to publish another book. They can’t count on publishers doing anymore than putting their book in a catalogue as their ‘marketing.’ You want THAT author to turn down money?"

Probably not, because that author probably hasn’t been offered a huge advance. But I think that author is mistaken if s/he thinks that an antagonistic relationship with publisher will help get the book to its audience.

Read the rest of the post on Sparks Fly Up.

* Twilight.

** But to expand on that a bit: You have to begin with the (reasonable) assumption that your publisher wants to make money and would not have acquired your book if they did not feel that it could be profitable. It may be that they think it can only be profitable if they don’t pay to hand out galleys at ALA, which is disappointing and annoying and etc., but it’s irrational to assume from the outset that your publisher wishes to lose money on your book.

This post, from mainstream-published author Shannon Hale, originally appeared on her Squeetus website.

Before going through the process myself, I was pretty clueless about the route a book takes to get to the shelf. Here are the major phases of traditional book publishing, based on my own experience.

Offer—When an acquiring editor finds a book she’d like to buy, either from an agent or the slush pile, she then calls agent or author to make an offer (huzzah!). The offer details how much money the publisher will pay the author as an advance on royalties (for a first book, generally $2000 – $10,000), the percentage of royalties the author will get (for a children’s author, generally 10 percent on hardcover, 6 percent on paperback), and the rights the publisher wants to buy (i.e. North American rights, World English, or World. Bloomsbury bought World rights from me, meaning if any of my books are sold for translation, Bloomsbury gets 50 percent of those royalties).

The Counter Offer—Often a counter offer is made, wherein the author/agent negotiates a slightly higher advance, percentage, or asks to retain more rights. This can be brief or haggling might go on for weeks. The actual signing of the contract can delay for months, but once the offer has been accepted, business goes forward.

Editing—For me, this phase lasts six to nine months. See Working with an Editor for more details. After several revisions under my editor’s supervision, we decide the book is ready to go. Such a good feeling! Sometime during the process, my editor is also shopping for cover art, running different artists by me, deciding on a feel and design. Bloomsbury is good at consulting with me, but ultimately the decision is theirs. They send me initial sketches of the cover art for input and accuracy. Eventually, I get a jacket proof in the mail and I go over the front, back, spine, and flap text. That’s always very exciting and makes the book feel more real.

Copy Editing—Now the publisher sends your manuscript to the copy editor (inhouse or outsourced). My editor will send me a xerox of the ms with copy edited notes and I often have just a weekend to go over it. I usually find a couple of errors she missed (though those copy editors are incredibly thorough and very good) and find some changes she made that I don’t want made. I also find adverbs I wrote but now hate and other minor changes. When I go over these corrections with my editor on the phone, our call can last three hours. It’s quite an intensive process, but the ms is so much cleaner for it.

Read the rest of the post, including Typesetting & Proofing, ARCs, Printing, The Release, and Now What? on Shannon Hale’s Squeetus website.