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Palin’s Profit (or Loss)

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At the beginning of October, in a post gnawing at the subject of ghostwriting, I wrote:

Will Palin’s book include shared credit with her collaborator? I don’t know, but I hope so.

The answer, apparently, is no:

Lynn Vincent, a senior writer for Christian World, is widely reported to have done the gruntwork on Going Rogue — proving so efficient that Palin’s manuscript was delivered early and allowed HarperCollins to move the publication date from spring 2010.

Vincent is not getting a byline on Going Rogue, and she’s not disclosing her fee.

My concern about ghostwriting, as previously noted, is that it is lying. In some cases these lies are killing people. I also don’t think it helps our political process to allow people to be credited with things they did not do, and I would say that about any candidate.

Regarding HarperCollins’ deal for Palin’s book, it looks like all the high-flying cynicism displayed in the production and marketing of her book may be for naught:

For Going Rogue, no publication has publicly stepped up to claim first serial rights — running the juiciest excerpts before the book comes out, which either kindles or extinguishes public anticipation for it. Such an excerpt deal may have been struck for The Oprah Winfrey Show, which features Palin in an interview the day before the book’s release; the public will find out on Monday.

…

Of course, the stars could still align in Palin’s favor. She could produce the hit she and her publisher are looking for. But the math suggests that it may be the readers who go rogue on Palin — and on HarperCollins’s plans to right the wrongs of its dismal book sales.

If the book stalls, I would like to think that the brute-force mockery of the authorial process had something to do with it, but I know that’s naive. It’s the recession.

— Mark Barrett

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

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

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 Ghostwriter Speaks

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A few weeks ago I went on a three–post rant against ghostwriting as an industry practice. I didn’t comment much on ghostwriters themselves because a job is a job.

(And we don’t have to wade into sex-trade analogies here, or references to slavery. I’ve been paid to write a lot of stuff that didn’t have my name on it, but there was no lie attached. In the publishing industry, it’s the goal of willful audience deception that perverts the honorable practice of writing for money into a for-profit lie.)

Today I ran across a new blog (via LisaCollierCool) called Ghostwriting Revealed, and it delivers on the premise:

5.Can you really make a living doing that?

Yes.

6.How do you get paid?

That’s the questions I often get next because nobody quite believes me when I say I make a living as a ghostwriter (and I do.) Often, I am paid directly by the author/expert (that would be the person whose name appears in big type on the book cover.) Sometimes, I negotiate for a slice of the royalties, but not always. Generally, the bulk of my payment is made before the book even hits the shelves.

Writer-for-hire agreements are common. Somebody pays you X dollars, you write Y words, they own the copyright when you’re done. There’s nothing wrong with it, or with ghostwriting as a concept.

Everything has a dark side, however, and it seems to me that a job that conspires to profit by paid-for silence probably has more than a few dark alleys. I’ll be interested to see if the blog author addresses the inevitable shenanigans, or the broader ethical issues that are of concern to me.

— Mark Barrett

It Isn’t the Recession*

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Lying is a part of doing business. When things are good, you leverage trust as long as it makes you money. When things are not good there’s no lie you won’t tell in order to survive.

The problem with the publishing industry is that I can’t tell whether the people in charge are lying or simply oblivious. Here’s a quote from an AP/WaPo article at the end of last year:

The economy has crashed on a supposedly recession-proof industry: book publishing. There is consolidation at Random House Inc., as well as layoffs at Simon & Schuster and at Thomas Nelson Publishers.

And here’s a quote from the Boston Globe a week ago:

“Historically, the conventional wisdom was the publishing industry was recession-proof, and if the adage was ever true it doesn’t remain the case,’’ said Gary Gentel, president of the trade and reference division at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a sponsor (along with the Globe) of the Boston Book Festival. “That said, this is the perfect time for a festival. What a great escape.’’

It’s hard for me to believe that people actually think constriction in the book business is being caused by (or primarily by) the recession. If the adage that publishing is recession-proof was ever true, it would make sense to look for other causes of trouble even if you were in the middle of a recession. There’s also the rather obvious point that the music business has been pulverized by the effects of the internet for the better part of a decade, and that the decline of newspapers has accelerated because of the internet, making it at least plausible that what’s happening in publishing has something to do with the internet.

Which would mean that these publishing voices, like all vested voices in a darkening market, are simply lying into the wind, hoping that enthusiasm, confidence, and bravado will shore up an eroded foundation. And if that’s all this is, I’m fine with it, in the same way that I was fine watching high-flying kamikaze pilots on Wall St. and in government smile as they blew up the foundation of our economy.

For the record, however, what’s hurting publishing is not the recession. It’s the internet.

* Apparently the recession is over, so we can all stop worrying and love the bomb.

— Mark Barrett

Theme, Literature and Money

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Nathan Bransford put up a post today titled Themes Schmemes. Here’s the gist of it:

I think the drive to write Literature/art sometimes leads some very talented writers, especially young ones, to write books that as an agent I can’t sell because there’s too much attention paid to the themes and the subtext and the meaning and other English-class-type concerns, rather than the narrative and the plot and the craft and other sausage-making-type concerns.

In talking about theme over the course of this past week, I tried to stay focused on the difference between theme as a useful literary technique and theme as a toxic analytical tool. I tried to stay away from the relative merit of theme as a technique or personal literary objective because I consider that an artistic choice. Saying that theme is bad when used by a particular author to create a given story would be like saying that reference photographs are bad for any artist’s painting. It’s not for me to decide.

Bransford’s post, however, changes the axis of analysis. Instead of the utility or merit of theme, he is focused — rightly, for an agent — on sales. And from that point of view I have no doubt that he’s right: theme and other literary tools are often completely unnecessary when crafting marketable fiction. The problem, of course, is that this is a slippery slope, and once you shove off you can’t stop the slide without exposing yourself to your own market-driven arguments.

I’m confident Bransford believes there’s a minimal level of storytelling skill necessary to write a bestseller. Still, if you found a trendy, charismatic writer who could riff on pornographic sex, gruesome, sadistic violence and pop-culture references, and you hyped the resulting title with a cutting-edge social-media marketing tour, you might end up with a bestseller on your hands. At which point that writer’s agent would point out that Bransford’s concerns about plotting and character and story are totally overrated, and the only thing that matters is whether you really can increase sales by taking a bus load of orphans hostage and refusing to free them until every American buys five copies of Risotto: A Love Story.

Which is why I tend not to make market-driven arguments about craft-driven processes. If what sells is what matters, then nothing else matters.

— Mark Barrett

Start Me Up!

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We all know there’s a cottage industry in making fun of Sarah Palin. Whatever your political bent, her appearance(s) on Saturday Night Live cemented that fact. Now that she’s written (cough) a book that’s due out shortly, people are trying to get more yuks out of the woman.

We also know that the whole self-publishing movement is saddled with a lot of baggage. If it isn’t the vanity-publishing industry ripping off customers, it’s the pervasive idea that self-publishing of any stripe is an admission of failure. Failure to succeed in publishing, failure to write good (sic!), failure to have been born into the right social circles, etc. I’ve even read snarky comments about use of the term independent author, although I can’t figure out how it’s anything but accurate.

Tonight, however, all that changed. Because of this:

Start-up publisher OR Books has announced plans to publish….

Start-up publisher…?

OMG!!! [Cue gender-neutral thrill-squeal.]

If perception is reality, then marketing speak is the plutonium that fuels cultural mushroom clouds. One day you’re a lowly self-publisher fighting industry scorn, the next you’re a start-up publisher driving technology and innovation to capture market share!

(See also micro-publishing for another marketing-friendly co-opting term.)

— Mark Barrett

May You Live in Interesting Times

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Two months ago — two months! — I started digging into the issues facing publishers and authors. Now, eight weeks hence — eight weeks! — I feel like I’m living in another millennium. Or having a dissociative episode.

Back at the dawn of time the Kindle was all that, with Sony trying to chip away at market share. Now, today, the Barnes & Noble reader (called the Nook) seems to have materialized out of thin air and projected itself into the role of New Sensation!

Kindle development time = 197 years. Nook = 2 minutes on High.

Back at the dawn of time Google was getting ready to lock up all written and yet-to-be written knowledge by conspiring with a little-known, self-absorbed bureaucracy that could not pass up the chance to do something important, even if that something was completely and utterly wrong. Now, today, the Internet Archive is doing something just as interesting, without all the lawsuits — and without aspiring to own things they don’t own.

By the way, I found this really interesting:

Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of information the “dead zone” of publishing.

Polarized positions are becoming even more polarized. Analog publishers hate digital anything. Bookstore owners hate volume discounts. Agents hate writers. And everybody hates independent authors ecause they’re not waiting in line to be hand-picked and validated by somebody else: “You’re cutting in line! You suck! You have no talent! You’re only able to find readers because of the internet, not because you survived our rigged system!”

Trying to project the lay of the land on New Years Day only evokes images of supernovae. Oh, and that Yellowstone caldera blowing up.

More here from Kassia Kroszer/Booksquare. And here and here from Nathan Bransford.

— Mark Barrett

Control Your Copyrights

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Regular readers know that I harp from time to time on the idea of authors retaining their copyrights. I’ve been doing this because there’s no clear metric other than raw dollars by which an author can calculate the value of a publishing deal compared with the value of retaining and exploiting copyright ownership themselves. And raw-dollar comparisons are hard to come by.

Which is why this post from Joe Konrath should be the first thing you read today, and tomorrow, and any day a publisher comes calling:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I’d be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I’m losing $15,762 per year.

It’s only one example. And this author is profiting indirectly from having had his books published by a publisher — including any editing, design work, previous marketing, etc., which helped attract attention to his name and stories. But he’s also being very clear: controlling his copyrights would be putting more money in his bank account.  [ Read more ]