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Following the Money

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What are the economics of being a professional author? I know how much I’ve made as a storyteller in various mediums, but the book business is still pretty much a mystery to me.

To the extent that I’ve been able to fill in any blanks I owe individual authors for having the courage to talk about their own experiences. While each story is different, they’re all adding up to a useful composite, and particularly so given all the forces at work and changes taking place in the industry.

For example, today I ran across a follow-up post by Lynn Viehl on Genreality, talking about The Reality of a Times Bestseller:

So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8% of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40% of my advance. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

Is that a sobering reality? Easy money? I have no idea. I don’t know how many hours Lynn put into that title, so I can’t do the workaday math. Still, if you didn’t live a big city or have any consuming vices you could probably squeak by on that money, provided you had the same amount coming in next year…but then that’s not a given, is it? (Speaking of givens, Lynn blows up a number of myths in the post, and in the prequel.)

In a previous post I noted Joe Konrath’s sales figures for both traditional publishing and self-publishing of his novels, and that’s also worth a look.

For pure self-publishing numbers I’ve been relying on posts by Dan Holloway writing as a pair of shoes. You can read his initial accounting here, and his latest here.

If you’re a literary fiction writer, how many books do you have to sell to call yourself a success? 7,000.

If you’re an online fiction writer, are there ways to monetize your content? Sure.

Update: Publishing your own RPG? Here’s what it cost someone to do just that.

I’ll post more as I find it. If you’ve already found it, let me know.

— Mark Barrett

Chrono Trigger

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You’ve probably never heard of this game, and even if I gave you a copy you probably don’t have a Super NES in your closet to play it on. If you did, however, you’d get a first-class lesson in storytelling for the video game market. A lesson I assumed was lost to the always-receding hardware horizon.

Today, however, I ran across a wonderful write-up and analysis of Chrono Trigger by Michael Brannan, who was participating in a contest in association with the IGDA Game Writers’ SIG. Here’s a sample:

Chrono Trigger’s story is a massive, sweeping story that spans a world consisting of several kingdoms across five distinct time periods (not counting the Day of Lavos in 1999 and the End of Time). In a nutshell, Chrono Trigger follows Crono’s journey through time, beginning the morning of the Millennial Faire celebrating the beginning of the year 1000 AD and follows Crono and the allies he meets on a quest to stop the Day of Lavos from occurring in 1999 AD.

If you’re interested in interactive entertainment, or in the history of the industry, or you were lucky enough to play Chrono Trigger back in the day, take a look. In an industry that often can’t be bothered to remember yesterday’s games, let alone the techniques that made them great, this kind of reference work is shamefully rare and desperately needed.

— Mark Barrett

Andrew Sullivan: Going Rogue

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In late summer I noted that Andrew Sullivan was preparing to release a book via print-on-demand (POD). That day is now here:

The Dish is very psyched to announce that the first edition of “The View From Your Window” is now available for purchase. You can preview the book here at Blurb.com, the print-on-demand company that is publishing the book. It’s 200 pages of window views, selected from all the submissions sent in over the past three years, with the front image and the back one picked by you, the readers of the Dish.

If that’s not smart enough, Sullivan and his team are leveraging Sullivan’s platform (his built-in audience and online presence) to improve things for his customers. This is not simply another retail opportunity, it is a community gathering and co-operative effort:

$29.95 is not a bad price for a 200 page, four-color coffee table book/toilet-browser. But new technology can bring this price down. Here’s how:

If we order a mass offset printing, each unit costs a lot less (just like in old-style publishing). It will take a little longer than ordering the book yourself right now, but the savings could be considerable. The Dish is not looking to make money off this – we’ve decided to forgo any profit to get you the book you created at the cheapest price possible. So if 1,000 of you pledge to order the book, we can slash the price; if 2,000 do so, we can slash it some more. The goal is to bring the price of the book to under $20. Perhaps well under.

A few years ago, this book would have been published by a traditional publisher, on the publisher’s terms, or it would not have been published at all. Today Sullivan’s team is determined to push the envelope:

No old-media publishing house would give you those options. The combination of a blog and print-on-demand publishing can. And if this model works, it could help launch a whole new wave of books created with user-generated content and priced with crowd-sourcing efficiencies. We hope the Dish will help pioneer this, and help do to the book publishing industry what blogs have helped do to MSM establishment journalism. A four-color 200 page book is an ambitious place to start, but, as always at the Dish, our attitude is: why the hell not?

Why the hell not, indeed. We all profit by watching how this project unfolds. Whether you want to buy a copy of the book or not, take note of what’s happening here.

This is what you find when you walk a ditch.

— Mark Barrett

The Interactive Difference

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Whatever you think about interactive entertainment (commonly referred to as video games or computers games), and whatever you think about the long-term potential for interactive storytelling, there is one critical and indisputable difference between interactive works and all other forms of entertainment. Movies, books, television, theater and even live-action sports are all witnessed, while interactive works are participatory.

This may seem like an obvious point, and perhaps even trivial, but it isn’t. It’s not only central to what makes interactive entertainment compelling, it’s a revolutionary change in the relationship between entertainment product and intended audience. Because players/users make choices instead of witnessing other people’s choices, the meaning inherent in an interactive work is heightened and intensified, both personally and culturally.

To see this clearly, imagine any gripping or emotionally-charged scene you’ve ever experienced in a passive form — a great moment in a novel, a thrilling scene in a film. Now translate that experience from one you’re witnessing to one you’re participating in. Instead of reading about the gunfight, you’re shooting. Instead of watching the heroine slip past the mob, you’re doing the sneaking. Instead of witnessing Sophie’s choice, you have to make Sophie’s choice.  [ Read more ]

Book Tour Dreams

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Looking forward to your first book tour? Well, after reading the ravings of Bill Simmons (ESPN’s Sports Guy and all-around humorist), I’m not so sure being a New York Times best-selling author is all it’s cracked up to be:

My body clock is so screwed up that, on consecutive nights, I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea where I was. My right thumb has swelled to 140 percent the size of my left thumb. My back is crumbling like blue cheese. My immune system might turn me into Patient X of Swine Flu 2.0 before everything’s said and done.

Because Simmons is a celebrity of sorts, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. He may have had to grind it out, but he was grinding out a nation-hopping, flight-plan-driven barnstorming tour with various people in tow. This was not your covered-wagon book tour where the lone author’s nineteen-year-old Isuzu breaks down outside of Grand Forks in the dead of winter.  [ Read more ]

A Book is a Book

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A few weeks ago I entered a short essay contest at Backword Books. The Grand Prize was a copy of all eight works on the site. Second prize was a single book to each of eight second-place winners, and the contest rules asked each entrant to include mention of which individual book they might like to receive with their entry.

The book I chose, and the book I won with this entry, was Waiting for Spring by R. J. Keller.

How did I choose which book I was interested in winning? Well, a combination of factors. I read all the summaries, so content was probably the most important filter. Then there was subject matter: I like Maine, and I thought it would be interesting to read something by someone from Maine. Third, the cover interested me, because I like snow and cold. The more snow in my world the better, and if you want to drop -50° F on top of the white stuff, I’m down with that. So barren trees tends in a field of white tends to draw me in.  [ Read more ]

Online Fiction Format

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Two well-thought-out posts from Eli James at Novelr on the formatting of online fiction. Part 1 here, from August; Part 2 here, two days ago.

As noted previously, character blogs in particular and online fiction in general haven’t taken off as I would have thought they might, given that the internet is itself seems a viable new medium. The points Eli raises clearly speak to part of the problem, and I hope to contribute to this issue as well in the near future.

— Mark Barrett

One Person’s List….

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…is another person’s tool:

By winnowing the literature of anthropology, Donald E Brown collected a list of some 200 ‘human universals’. Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” includes an alphabetical version of the full list, but I think trying to re-sort it in ‘evolutionary’ order should be more instructive:

…

environment, adjustments to
binary cognitive distinctions
pain
likes and dislikes
food preferences
making comparisons

The list goes on like that for hundreds of lines, and on that point alone it deserves notice. But consider the implications here for creators.

If you’re telling a story, any mix of these traits would allow you to develop a convincing society. If you’re working in interactive, figuring out which of these traits you can simulate would give you a subset of useful traits, and a logical way to create machine-controlled races/species.

Too cool.

— Mark Barrett

The Beatles

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I know The Beatles: Rock Band is all the rage, but when was the last time you actually listened to their music? If it’s been a while you should treat yourself , and particularly to their later (post-George Martin) work.

The Beatles aren’t just the historical sum of their hits songs. They’re the origin of an entire way of thinking about and enjoying music that didn’t exist until they came along. Part poetry, part soundscape, part unfettered genius and part storytelling, the studio work of The Beatles ranks as the single most definitive musical advance in my lifetime.

I put it on a par with Cubism, Impressionism, Expressionism, and any other Art-ism you care to mention. It’s that impressive, that important, and that influential, even today.

When I hear I Am The Walrus or A Day In The Life I hear Beck, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, and on and on. And I mean I really hear them: the connection is visceral.

What does this have to do with storytelling in the digital age? Nothing…and everything. Computers and the internet have changed the world forever. Yet Abbey Road still sounds current.

An interesting conundrum.

Update: A week later I’m listening to I Am The Walrus again and it’s just genius. It’s over forty years old and it’s as relevant and good and insane and perfect as anything anyone is doing today. It’s not just holding up. You can’t name a better song. There are no better songs. Goo goo gajoob.

— Mark Barrett