How much is your fiction worth?
From autor Deanna Knippling:
When you write a story, how much should you sell it for? Whatever the market will bear, right? It’s a capitalistic society, so we can make a ton of money! Huzzah!
Well, it turns out that a lot of writers (including me) will sell a story for whatever the market will give us, not what it’s worth by any reasonable standard of the work we put into it. Take a look at standard royalty rates: anywhere from 7-12.5% gross, right?
Why is it that low? Because as writers, we all know that what publishers do is at least seven times more important than what we do: without publishers, there would be no product! And we all know that most of us won’t make the publisher any money–we won’t earn out our advances. Poor, poor publishers, doing all this for…well, what turns out to be nice profits in 2010, and will probably be better in 2011. They’re so noble, giving us the chance to get published–not!
I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea to try to get published rather than doing it yourself. That’s a decision you have to make yourself; there’s a lot of cachet in getting published, and it does build a resume that will help with other freelance work. So I can’t say that I won’t be tempted by a low advance and crappy rates; I have been before, and I will be again. However, know that when you’re considering a publisher, even a big publisher, you may not be getting paid minimum wage to write.
. . . .
Novel (85K):
Time to write: 85 hours; time to edit: 34. Total: 119.
Minimum wage: $1751.68
HS graduate: $2975/$3915.10
College graduate: $4771.90/$6069
Again, not to pro writer level yet.Conclusion: assuming that writers are fast and work cheap, and the editors ask for no changes or help with promotions, an advance at a smaller publishing house should be $6K. Advances at large publishing houses should be proportionately larger. Advances for books requiring research should be proportionately larger.
But wait! The publishers are taking all the risk, right? No.
The writers are taking the risk that the publisher will ask for edits (and they will); they are taking the risk that the publisher will ask us to do promotions (and they will). If the publisher is taking all the risks, the writer should be paid hourly for those tasks–at $101/hour, for smaller publishing houses and more for larger houses.
If that work is worth nothing, then writers with platforms (or track records) are not worth more than writers without platforms or track records, and that is clearly not the case. The writers are also taking the risk that the publisher will screw up somehow on the book. The writer is investing in the publisher as well: if the publisher isn’t making money for the writer, why? Is the publisher incompetent? The publisher thought the book was good enough to make them money, or they wouldn’t have bought it. Or shouldn’t have bought it.
Link to the rest at Deanna Knippling
Or I’m not stupid enough to take a crappy advance, crappy royalties and a crappy contract. Hmmm… what a thought.
Editors don’t necessarily do a darn thing. The 3rd book of my Wish You Were Here series for Berkley was sent to them in 1st draft and came back as a galley. No notes. No edits. No communications.
This illusion that editors are doing what was formerly considered their job is just that–an illusion. That’s why they’re now called acquisition editors–they acquire books. They don’t fix ‘em (or even understand them) most of the time because they don’t have a clue how to. They may even be wrong when they try.
Same — no edits at all on either NY pubbed book. And the first went on to be nominated for a Best First Book RITA (a pretty high honor in the genre). Certainly made me quite leery of the whole “but you NEED a NY editor” argument.
I recently went through Deanna Knippling’s calculations for a visual artist renegotiating a work-for-hire contract. Baby, let me tell you, it’s a tough slog trying to convince any creative person they’re actually worth that much money.
In my opinion, this is a quite poorly reasoned post.
Let’s go through the points, shall we?
“Well, it turns out that a lot of writers (including me) will sell a story for whatever the market will give us, not what it’s worth by any reasonable standard of the work we put into it.”
If no one is willing to pay you a certain amount for your work, your work is not worth that amount. She is starting on the flawed assumption that she should be paid for the effort put in, not for the work produced.
By that reasoning, if I were to spend eight hours typing out “XXX YYY ZZZ,” I should get paid for the time and effort I put in, even though the resulting product is worthless.
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[Guesstimated numbers]
I’m not a fan of the methodology here, but I’m willing to go with it. She’s implicitly assuming that all writers went to college. She’s also using the average wage, instead of what they actually majored in and normalizing it by how many hours a week they work and the work experience they have.
From podcasts and blogs, my impression is that more writers than not majored in the humanities, so the college-graduate wage should be lower than what she gives. And if they’re young authors, it’d be better to use the starting salary out of college, not all college graduates.
But, for a first cut, this approximation isn’t too bad.
—-
”
Novel (85K):
Time to write: 85 hours; time to edit: 34. Total: 119.
Minimum wage: $1751.68
HS graduate: $2975/$3915.10
College graduate: $4771.90/$6069
Again, not to pro writer level yet.
Conclusion: assuming that writers are fast and work cheap, and the editors ask for no changes or help with promotions, an advance at a smaller publishing house should be $6K. Advances at large publishing houses should be proportionately larger. Advances for books requiring research should be proportionately larger.”
Bad bad reasoning. What this line of argument is saying is “It takes 119 hours of work to produce a completed product. If I was working for a company at these hourly rates, I would be paid this much. So I should get exactly that much for my book.”
Note that that is not an advance, that is a __lump sum payment__.
This line of reasoning supports an argument that authors should not get royalties.
—-
“The writers are taking the risk that the publisher will ask for edits (and they will); they are taking the risk that the publisher will ask us to do promotions (and they will). If the publisher is taking all the risks, the writer should be paid hourly for those tasks–at $101/hour, for smaller publishing houses and more for larger houses.”
She is using the ‘risk’ in a different manner than it is used in economics. The risk she’s saying writers are taking is not comparable to the economic risk that publishers take. She’s doing the same thing that creationists do when they say “Evolution is only a theory.”
—-
“The writer is investing in the publisher as well: if the publisher isn’t making money for the writer, why?”
Ah! Something I can reflect positively on. Consider this, if you will.
A writer has something (a novel) that they hand over to the publisher. The publisher then combines it with other elements to make a product that they can sell. Consumers buy the product, the publisher then takes money to cover their costs and splits the remainder with the writer.
What does that remind you of? Let’s try it again, but change some words.
An investor has something (money) that they hand over to a company. The company then combines it with other elements to make a product that they can sell. Consumers buy the product, the company then takes money to cover their costs and splits the remainder with the investor.
Looks pretty similar, doesn’t it? She is correct that one can considers writers to resemble investors. (From a certain point of view and neglecting that the publisher profits are split up later.)
But here’s the rub: Investors only get a split of what’s left after all costs are covered. This analogy directly answers her later question of “Then why aren’t writers making 50% net…?” (She defines net as what the publisher sold the book for minus the printing cost.)
—
“Because the publishers will pay us whatever we will put up with; that’s capitalism for you. They can make a ton of money! Huzzah!”
This is just a dishonest slam on capitalism and suggests that she really doesn’t understand the concept of how markets work.
—-
Look, I agree that the traditional publishing business model isn’t good for the majority of writers and isn’t really sustainable, as is, in the long term.
But this? This is just a series poorly reasoned (and that’s the nicest way I’m comfortable putting it) arguments that really support the opposite point that she’s trying to make.
In my opinion, some of the people that are doing the most damage to the portrayal of non-traditionally published writers are those that are going the independent and/or small-press route. And that’s because of arguments like these.
Dunno about the rest, but on This line of reasoning supports an argument that authors should not get royalties. — it may well be following the line of reasoning that authors “don’t earn out their advances” and therefore will not get royalties to speak of.
That is a separate issue all together, ABeth.
My point is that once you start talking about a minimum payment for work completed, you’re talking about pay-for-work, which is not a royalty-granting arrangement.
Given that that argument is one the record company is bringing up in response to demands that publishing rights revert to the artists, I also think it’s a dangerous area to get into.
Jared, I typed out a long response and deleted it. Thanks for the feedback. I don’t hate capitalism, just getting screwed, and I believe the writers are getting screwed. If you have a better system for coming up with the relevant numbers, please provide it.
Pre-response:
The only comment I made about the numbers you used as that they weren’t really accurate, but they weren’t bad for a first cut. If that’s what you’re referring to, but here are some starting salaries by major. The issue I was really having was with the arguments you were making.
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Response:
What kind of system do you mean?
After reading one of the comments in your post, I was curious what the crossover point for indie vs. traditional sales is. So I wrote some code to calculate that. (Basically, a more complicated version of what Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith (is that ‘Smith’ or ‘Wesley Smith’?) do in their simple calculations.)
The conclusion I came to was that an indie publisher needs to sell between 2000 and 3000 units before they’d beat a $5k advance from traditional publishing.
[That means that regardless of how poorly one thinks traditional publishers pay out in advances, if an author doesn't clear that number, they still pay better than indie publishing per title sold. This does not take into account the faster time-to-market for indie, which is a whole other aspect to the discussion. Nor does it account for indie sales after rights revert, if they do.]
I don’t know what typical units-sold are, but Kris Rusch recently posted about 20k being Bestseller List numbers and Michael Stackpole (who has to sell far-and-away better than 90% of indie authors) hasn’t hit 5000 on Talion in the 2 yrs it’s been out.
As of October, Stackpole said it was half-way there. So let’s say 1500 sales per unit per year for him. For someone else, let’s knock that down by 10 and say 150 sales per unit per year.
That means it will take indie publishing 20 years to catch up to a[n assumed] $5k advance from traditional publishing (and that’s in nominal, not real, terms assuming that the price is held constant).
You can’t get away from that.
If you really want to show numbers for why indie publishing can (will?) beat traditional publishing, you have to start invoking the speedy time-to-market (like DWS did in a post a couple of weeks ago). You have start bringing in the recent revival in short stories. You have to argue that indie publishing lets you put more stuff out there and readers buy more from authors that have multiple titles (and multiple titles in a setting), so indie publishers can get more of a positive feedback effect than new traditionally published authors.
You can not say something like “We deserve to be paid more.”
In a market system, what people are willing to pay you in order for you to agree to do the work is what you deserve to be paid.
P.S. I’ve started cut-n-pasting my response into a text editor before I hit ‘submit’. It’s done awry for me too many times.
Jared,
I think you are mistaking where she’s getting that logic from. It isn’t her logic — she’s using the wrong-headed logic of the publishing industry and carrying it to it’s natural conclusions. It’s supposed to illustrate that not only is the logic wrong, but it doesn’t even lead to the conclusions it’s meant to support.
Camille,
Which section are you referring to?
The whole thing can’t be logic from the publisher’s side, as she introduces her payment calculation with the paragraph.
“I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea to try to get published rather than doing it yourself. That’s a decision you have to make yourself; there’s a lot of cachet in getting published, and it does build a resume that will help with other freelance work. So I can’t say that I won’t be tempted by a low advance and crappy rates; I have been before, and I will be again. However, know that when you’re considering a publisher, even a big publisher, you may not be getting paid minimum wage to write.”
The arguments that follow are then hers for telling the reader how much a writer actually makes per hour of work.
The publisher’s logic is given by her saying “But wait! The publishers are taking all the risk, right?” Her answer is “No.” My response is that her logic for the answer ‘no’ (and I don’t see how that can be the publisher’s) is flawed.
One bit of publisher-side logic (although this strikes me as a bit of a straw-man argument) is “Because as writers, we all know that what publishers do is at least seven times more important than what we do: without publishers, there would be no product!”
But I didn’t comment on that line.
First, I should point out that I didn’t say “publisher”, but rather “the publishing industry” — because I meant the writers even more than the editors and publishers.
This all reads to me as though she is appealing specifically to the traditionally published author’s point of view — showing them the math of their own ideas.
Maybe she does subscribe to their ideas too, but that’s irrelevant, because either way, she speaking to people who have certain beliefs. She’s not trying to convince you or me of anything. She’s trying to convince people who are utterly business-challenged.
And I disagree that her argument supports the opposite of her point. It’s a cloudy argument, but IMHO it hits dead center on what her target audience will understand.
The problem is that so few people (and I won’t just say writers here) have any concept of the difference between wages and capital. They don’t know the value of their work, and I agree with you that she doesn’t address that issue at all. And I agree that she probably doesn’t understand it either.
(And actually, Tuesday I’m starting a money series on my blog about this. I don’t know if I’m going to get to the difference between capital and wages in the first post.)
Bookmarked, and will follow with interest.
Regards,
Ric
Thanks, Ric. It’s going to start out for rank beginners, though. More about point of view and what folks don’t know this week. (It’s such a big subject — hard to know where to start.)
Actually, this conversation is kind of reshaping that post….
Actually, this conversation is kind of reshaping that post….
Cue dramatic organ music.
My point is: I think publishers have two options for showing authors respect.
1) Paying an advance. If the royalties are low and most authors don’t earn out their advances (or just barely earn out their advances, which is what I hear) and getting rights to your book back are extremely difficult (which is also what I’m hearing), then you’re essentially working for hire, and the publisher should pay accordingly. They don’t.
2) Paying royalties. Splitting profits implies a business relationship. So does a contract. If one partner can take expenses out of net, then both partners should. Rather than deal with the auditing nightmare of that, I’d say that it’s perhaps fair that neither partner should be able to claim those expenses out of net.
What you’re saying doesn’t quite work, DeAnna.
1) Paying an advance.
If they pay a small advance that an author can’t earn out, then the publishing company has lost money on that book. [Let's side aside for the moment that I'm sure advances are structured to give a small cushioning difference on the earn-out vs. break even point.] What you’re suggesting is that the publishing lose even more money so that authors get can more?
That would lead to even fewer authors getting signed. Or would kill the advance all together. Or both.
And (as I just posted above, which you haven’t had time to read yet) unless an author could have sold more books on their own (or fewer for a higher price), then they’re still coming out ahead of indie publishing.
First, I should point out that I didn’t say “publisher”, but rather “the publishing industry” — because I meant the writers even more than the editors and publishers.
Ah, sorry. We were working from different definitions; I’ve never considered fiction writers to be part of the publishing industry.
And I disagree that her argument supports the opposite of her point. It’s a cloudy argument, but IMHO it hits dead center on what her target audience will understand.
I think you and I may be partly agreeing here, I just tend to take a harsher stance. The cloudiness of the argument let it be read as being able to support a reversed argument.
Her audience would see “Look, publishers aren’t paying enough because the effective wage isn’t high enough.” But the publisher’s economic argument that (I’ll say ‘can’ here so you and I can find some common ground) follows is “You’re arguing that you should be paid an effective wage for the time you put in. That is a pay-for-service. I’m fine with that, but that changes the contract. No royalties, no reversion of rights. I own this lock, stock, and barrel.”
The effective wage argument is dangerous because it draws an analogy to a completely different economic contract in which the worker (author) owns no lasting rights to the work.
That’s what I was saying (trying to say?) by supporting the opposite.
The problem is that so few people (and I won’t just say writers here) have any concept of the difference between wages and capital.
I agree with this so much.
(And actually, Tuesday I’m starting a money series on my blog about this. I don’t know if I’m going to get to the difference between capital and wages in the first post.)
I look forward to reading that. Hopefully PG will link to it here, because I’m sure I’ll forget. … Wait, just clicked the ‘notify of responses by email’ box. If you could shout here when you post it, I’d appreciate it.
And I would love it if you left heads-up links here to better numbers and explanations
I agree in principle that people should be aware of what their work is worth and not settle for less. However, I hate the argument of, “I worked hard on this so you should pay me more for it.” Well, no. You get paid what the market supports. I could spend 10 years building a giant teddlywink sculpture, and if nobody will pay me for it, that’s my problem, not theirs. That’s actually a rant stemming from my friendship with some visual artists, not a direct reaction to this post.
Also, the comparison to college graduates assumes — wrongly, IMHO– that most beginning writers have sufficient skill to write at a professional wage. Whether you go indie or traditional, you’ll probably have to go through some low-wage training years. Just as it would be presumptuous for a first-year medical student to walk in and demand a cardiologist salary, it’s putting the cart before the horse to say that your writing deserves X amount of money.
Quibbles aside, I do agree with the underlying message of the blog post that writers should choose the path that is most profitable for them. If you can beat the advance their offering by self-publishing, by all means, do that. But be informed, and make your choices based on actual data and numbers for your own situation.
As an outside interested party, I am really starting to wonder if anyone in the publishing industry is a rational actor, in the economic sense. When an author is selling a story, she is in a negotiation. The effort she put into that story is a sunk cost. It is irrelevant to the negotiation. The writer should be focused on her best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). In the past, her BATNA was trying to sell to the story to someone else. The publisher’s BATNA was pick another story from the slush pile. Because it is pretty clear that publishers have no idea whether a new author’s story will be profitable, they have almost no incentive to give an inch in that initial negotiation. That is why authors used to take what seem like crappy deals. The weird part is that publishers consistently screwed up the subsequent negotiations with mid-list authors. But that is another rant.
The relevant point to this discussion is that now authors have a new BATNA, self-publishing. It is difficult to evaluate for individual authors, but it should, in a rational world, do one of two things. Either publishers will give authors better contracts or authors will move to self-publishing. All the actions of publishers (HarperCollins v OpenRoad, Harlequin’s royalty amendment letter, etc.) suggest that they know this and are hoping you do not.
The relevant point to this discussion is that now authors have a new BATNA, self-publishing.
I would caution that the sunk cost fallacy holds for writers as well.
If they feel that they must do something, then they are not necessarily rational actors, either. They’d be overlooking the possibility that the work wasn’t good enough to publish and, by self-publishing, they’re hurting their long-term prospects (because people could read it, hate it, and remember the author’s name).
People seldom finish books they hate, nor remember who wrote them. It’s just not worth their time.
Heck, they seldom remember the author of books they LIKE without a lot of supporting interactions (like other books, or having heard the author’s name a lot).
And heck, if your writing changes that much, use a pen name.
There really is no down side to self-publishing, as long as you don’t spend foolish amounts of money into it.
People seldom finish books they hate, nor remember who wrote them. It’s just not worth their time.
Heck, they seldom remember the author of books they LIKE without a lot of supporting interactions (like other books, or having heard the author’s name a lot).
I remember my list of authors and book series I will not pick up again. I remember them more than those that I liked and forgot.
Maybe not always the exact name off the top of my head, but Amazon makes my holding a grudge easy. They show me the other books an author has written. I remember covers very well.
And yet, if you look at the long-lived literary greats, so many of their early works were horrible. Or at least disappointingly different from their later work.
The other thing is: are those writers you have personally blacklisted still in print? Do they have fans? If so, your blacklist is irrelevant. You’re not one of their fans. (You want to know who’s on my “blacklist” – Joe Konrath. The fact that I seriously don’t like his work hasn’t hurt them one little bit.)
If work is horrible — actually horrible and has no enthusiastic fans — it won’t sell. It won’t have word of mouth. It’ll just sink.
There are hundreds of thousands of books you don’t want to read for every one you DO want to read. Even if you like to keep a grudge, there just isn’t time for anyone to do it effectively.
“However, I hate the argument of, “I worked hard on this so you should pay me more for it.” Well, no. You get paid what the market supports.”
Sorry Livia, but I’ve got to say: NO NO NO NO NO.
A small lesson in capitalism –
“What the market will bear” is not a good argument to make with IP products. IP is not a commodity. It’s not even an item.
Intellectual property items are CAPITAL. They’re like bonds, not goods – but they’re special magic bonds which never mature, and have variable returns. Writers are not wage workers. They are investors.
You are correct that when you’re buying and selling an asset, you may take a loss — but that doesn’t mean that what you invested isn’t a prime consideration. You only sell something at a loss when you some compensating reason to do so. (A great rule of thumb is that you only sell if you have a better place to put the money.)
You absolutely must consider your cost (i.e. wages) when you decide a price, and if it’s a bad deal, let the deal fall through.
DeAnn’s advice is a good starter for the writer who doesn’t understand investment. It is the way to consider the rock bottom value to you. If the value to others does not match the value to you, then get out of that market, because it’s unsustainable.
Whenever I hear “oh, it doesn’t matter how much work you put it into it, you have to take what the market will bear” I hear sucker talk. That’s what people say to get you to take a bad deal. Sure there are businesses which work on that model, but it’s only one model, and it’s a very sophisticated one — not a good one for IP work, and not a good one for beginners. (It’s a sucker’s game for beginners.)
Camille —
We can discuss this without bringing in sarcasm right? I’m all for lively debates, but I prefer to do it without talking down to each other. If I misinterpreted your tone, then apologies.
Your argument holds if you’re making the decision *before* you write the novel. That is, you can decide whether it’s a good deal or not, and whether or not to sell it. If the price is not good, your only choice is to go somewhere else.
What you *can’t* do is stand on a street corner and say “I have a brilliant novel. I worked hard on it. Give me $10,000 because I deserve it.” I mean you could, but nobody will pay for it *unless* the market supports it.
Not being sarcastic, Livia, just literal and honest.
And your example shows you missed the point. It doesn’t matter whether you decide something before or after writing it. It’s an asset, not a product. You don’t need to sell it at all. That’s the cool thing about assets.
As I said, they are not products, they’re capital. The way to handle capital is to acquire it and hold it — and never sell it unless you get the price it’s worth.
If you treat it like a product, you are begging to be taken advantage of. And yes, I am being literal and honest when I say that the idea that you have to accept what the market will bear is a con game. It’s designed to take advantage of beginners.
Maybe this will help clarify: If you make a deal for less than costs, it doesn’t matter if the product is crap. Such a deal is not a deal, it’s a going-out-of-business sale.
So many writers put themselves out of business in traditional publishing. And they put other writers out of business too.
Camille — I still don’t understand. So if a novelist writes a something, gets a crap offer from a traditional publishing house, and also can’t sell it at an acceptable price by self publishing, she should just never sell the novel at all?
“Maybe this will help clarify: If you make a deal for less than costs, it doesn’t matter if the product is crap. Such a deal is not a deal, it’s a going-out-of-business sale.”
If you’ve written the novel already, there is no marginal cost. You should definitely decide not to write the next novel, but for this novel that you have, your choices are to get something, or get nothing. Note that I never said your only choice is to take the bad traditional offer. You could self publish it if you want to. In either case, you’re still getting paid what the market will support, and you’re still better off selling it than using it as a door stop — even if you only make $50 bucks.
And yes, that would be a going-out-of-business sale, because your writing is unsustainable. But there is a reason why businesses have going out of business sales. They’re choosing to make some money from their failed business and recoup some of their losses, rather than tossing all their goods into a furnace because it’s not a good enough price.
Again, I’m not saying that writers like this should keep this up. It’s just that the reality is, not all writers write well enough to get paid a decent wage for their writing, and all counting of hours spent won’t change that.
Also, you seem to have the underlying assumption that if you hold onto a book long enough, its value will go up. And current trends say that the value of books is going down. This is true whether you look at the traditional market (advances going down), and the indie market, where the average price of books has been steadily dropping as more writers upload books. If you’re holding onto a manuscript in the hopes that you’ll make more money later, you will likely be disappointed. (The one exception to this is that electronic royalties for traditional houses will probably go up in the future, so some writers may choose to self publish in today’s market.)
Decreasing value also holds for an individual book. Over time, the writing style and worldview goes out of style. Yes there are exceptions, but if I had to bet, I would say that a newly finished novel will be less relevant 10 years from now than it is at the moment it’s finished.
Livia, the idea that books expire is a new concept — and only entered into publishing in the last 20-30 years or so. Traditionally, books increased in value over time, as long as the writer continued writing.
The problem is that booksellers (or more specifically Barnes and Noble) started killing off author’s careers after a couple of books if the books were not best sellers. And they stopped carrying backlists. So what is the natural bread and butter of the industry — the midlist and backlist — were artificially destroyed.
But it had one other side effect on writers. Writers stopped seeing slow steady returns as good. They just can’t imagine it, and so they see it as a disaster.
Camille, I’m getting the feeling that we’re talking past each other and arguing against points that the other is not making. It’s probably better if you just put your thoughts in your post. Speaking for myself, I would find it helpful if you included some concrete examples and case studies, since abstract economic concepts are so easily misunderstood.
I do not understand your point. There are markets for capital and they work exactly like markets for products. Sunk costs are sunk costs. The amount of effort you put into creating your story does not create value for a publisher. It just doesn’t. Just look at James Patterson. He does not work any harder than most other fulltime writers, but his work is worth more than yours and every other writer alive. I think his writing is crap, but millions of other people disagree. That is what gives him leverage with publishers.
The price you get for an asset is not determined by what you paid for it and the price can fluctuate wildly. Many U.S. homeowners have discovered that in the last few years. The market does determine the value of assets. If many people are willing to sell similar assets below your cost of production, you will take a loss. That is the situation in the publishing world for most writers.
“It doesn’t matter whether you decide something before or after writing it. It’s an asset, not a product. You don’t need to sell it at all. That’s the cool thing about assets.”
You may consider your unsold books an asset, but I guarantee no one else on the planet earth does, because an asset has to have an intrinsic value of some kind. An unsold manuscript has ZERO intrinsic value, unless it’s an unsold manuscript by Shakespeare or Hemingway.
EVERY WRITER sees his or her book as a product to be sold to a reader. If they don’t, they’re simply hobbyists uninterested in an audience and can be excluded from the discussion.
“As I said, they are not products, they’re capital. The way to handle capital is to acquire it and hold it — and never sell it unless you get the price it’s worth.”
It’s not capital. It’s just not. A book is a product. It’s the output of work. If you want to slap a different economic label on books, then use durable goods. Like a car, or a house, or a toy, or a phone.
I think the terminology might be getting a little muddied. People are referring to just ‘books’, but there a couple of different things present. Here are the terms I might use.
Intellectual property (e.g., your secondary world) is capital. It’s a durable good that is used to produce novels.
A novel (the finished and polished manuscript) is capital. It’s a durable good that produces a consumable.
A book is a semi-durable consumable. It is the thing that reader will purchase and use.
I think that Camille is referring to the IP and novel, not to the book (she can correct me if I’m wrong).
I do think economic labels and principles are unnecessarily muddying the conversation here. It might be helpful to discuss some concrete examples.
Exactly.
William sort of got it up above, but he missed the point too.
You CAN buy and sell investment instruments — turn them into commodities — but that’s not their central purpose. (And buying and selling such things as if they were products is exactly what nearly crashed the economy.)
Most Americans understand a paycheck — even when they look at investing, they see _traders_ and not investors, and they miss the whole concept of capital investment.
However rather than respond incompletely again and again to various comments, I’m going to fold this into tomorrow’s post.
You are correct that when you’re buying and selling an asset, you may take a loss — but that doesn’t mean that what you invested isn’t a prime consideration. You only sell something at a loss when you some compensating reason to do so. (A great rule of thumb is that you only sell if you have a better place to put the money.)
Another point for your blog post: The music industry analogy.
Musicians can sell the publication rights to songs for lower levels because of related revenue streams. Concerts, t-shirts, mugs, and so forth. [Although the music industry has gotten wise to this change in revenue proportions and is now writing contracts to get cuts of everything. Recent Planet Money podcast on it.]
I’m not saying that authors should be giving concerts or necessarily selling t-shirts (I think Dan Wells discussed his decision to sell his shirts for just cost in a recent Writing Excuses podcast), but they do get a larger-than-on-paper return on their investment via readers finding their other published works and via their ability to do tie-in short stories (if the publisher allows it; I had read that many contracts stipulated no competing novels or novels set in the same world, leaving the door open to short stories, but Pip Ballentine and Tee Morris recent said [I think] that they had to get special permission from their publisher to do the Tales from the Archives for their Ministry series).
85 hours?
Oh my, still laughing at that one. 85 hours. Wowser.
Alexander – I was thinking that too. It took me at least 170 hours to write my first novel, which clocked in at 65,000 words. That’s not counting time spent daydreaming or thinking about the novel either. All told, I probably spent more like 300 hours “writing” it. Of course, this was my first novel.
Are you saying you think that’s too long or too short? If you can average 1,000 words an hour, then it’s right on the money. She’s talking actual writing time in that figure, not research or daydreaming or angst time.
Obviously, I think it is too short for me. But that’s at my present skill level. Sometimes, I squirt out over a 1000 words an hour, but for every one of those days I have two 150 word an hour days. With practice, I believe I will improve.
If you’re going to try and break the time down anyway, one probably should include daydreaming and research. The 1000 words an hour probably wasn’t truly spontaneous, although some writers may do this. I know I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what I was going to write before I wrote it.
Look, the idea of 1,000 words an hour is (IMHO) ludicrous. You’ve got the whole Dunning Kruger thing to factor in here.
If you can write 1,000 words of quality narrative without that text requiring massive editing, then you have something wonderful the rest of us lack. It’s a mad word-rate.
IF you can consistently produce 1,000 words a day of quality prose (angst etc spread over the day), then you’re doing well.
A book is not ’85 hours’. It’s a… well, a book. Whatever it takes. Writing, considering, editing. My first serious effort took four weeks to write, seven years to edit. Currently, I can create a book in about seven months.
Note ‘create’ – think up, outline, write, edit. On a good day I’ll work two straight hours on it. On a bad day, I’ll just think about it and waste my time commenting on blogs.
And we haven’t even started to talk ‘promo’ time!
I try to break my writing down into “sittings”. A sitting typically lasts one to two hours. At each sitting I try to crank out 500 words. Mostly I’m successful at hitting that goal – other times, not quite so successful. Sometimes I’ll go on a tear and hit 1000 or more words during that sitting.
I work full time, so I can’t imagine having 8 straight hours to write — Currently, I doubt I could use such a big block of time in one shot effectively. I find the time in between sittings is critical for me to digest what I wrote already and think about what I need/want to write in the next sitting.
There are so many permutations for the statement, “I’m a writer,” it’s bound to cause difficulties when trying to make an argument that the creations of **all writers** ought to be given more intrinsic worth by their creators, in order that a particular subset of writers can demand higher advances from one — albeit major — market for those types of creations.
Okay, the post is up:
http://daringnovelist.blogspot.com/2012/01/money-making-jump-to-full-time-writing.html
The topic is too big for one post, and I was trying to split the difference between setting up my money series for my regular readers while addressing the issues raised here. I hope I don’t lose all my readers with it….
(Since this is going to be a regular Tuesday feature for a while, I will be able to get to more specifics in future posts.)