Writers Work Cheap
More excellent advice for authors from Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
Here’s something that has nagged at me since the start of the indie publishing revolution: writers—published writers—dismissing money as a factor in publishing their work.
The argument goes like this: Traditionally Published Writer A says she’ll never self-publish. When told that her $5000 advance is the only money she’ll make on that book, she shrugs and says, “I’ll sell more copies if I go traditional,” as if that’s a fact rather than a supposition. And even if she does sell more copies of the book through her traditional publisher than she would in the same period of time if she published the same book herself, the traditional publisher will take the book out of print after a year or two. The indie published book will continue to earn over years, maybe decades.
Americans have lost the ability to look long-term. Most Americans would rather take one cookie right now instead of a dozen cookies tomorrow. There’ve been a lot of studies on this: the most famous is the Stanford Marshmallow delayed gratification study. I don’t know if this trend is worldwide, because cultural differences do have an impact on our upbringing. But I do know that Americans, for the most part, believe getting something now is preferable to getting more later.
. . . .
When I started, a first-time novelist could expect an advance of $5000 for her book. That advance would be paid in two installments—on signing and on acceptance (please note that acceptance meant the same thing then as now: when the novel gets approved by the publishing house and not before).
Now the average advance that a first-time novelist can expect is $5000, which is often paid in three installments—on signing, on acceptance, and on publication.
I sold my first novel in 1989. I received more than the average advance. But let’s use my career timeline, and to make it easy, let’s assume Writer A got her $5000 advance in 1990, in two payments, selling North American rights only (because that was standard) and very few auxiliary rights like audio (also because that was standard).
In 2010 dollars, she would have made $8233.46. At least 3200 more dollars in purchasing power than if she sold the novel a year or so ago. And in fewer payments (two instead of three), and selling fewer auxiliary rights.
Publishers have not increased writers advances at all since I started in the 1980s. Not one thin dime. And compared to the 1950s, well, writers are getting miniscule advances. Compared to the glory payment days of the Great Depression, writers are getting next to nothing at all.
Recently, several writers with bestselling careers have received advance offers on their new books of one-half or one-third the previous advances. This trend started during the summer, and continues: I know of at least two writers in December who were told to take lower advances because their publishers “couldn’t make back the advance” at the higher level.
In addition to the lower advance, all of these writers were told they had to sell world rights to the publishers, as well as get 25% of net for their e-rights. And other auxiliary rights were usually in the bargain.
I got one of those so-called offers in August, and said no, quite emphatically. Why in the world, with the rise of indie publishing, would I take less money on all fronts from advance to royalty for the same amount of work?
Other writers simply don’t question this. Nor do they question their agents who tell them that they have no choice in this matter if they want a deal. “Publishers are hurting,” the agents say. “You have to accommodate them.”
Two mistakes in that sentence. Publishers aren’t hurting, and writers should never accommodate their business partners without consideration to the writers’ own business. But writers have had the attitude for years that it’s better to be published than to be paid.
. . . .
Somewhere in the 1920s, writers convinced publishers to give them advances on their royalty income so that the writers had enough cash to write the next book. Let’s not discuss how profligate many of those writers were with their cash—how F. Scott Fitzgerald blew through a small fortune in those years or how Ernest Hemingway always ended up short of cash. Let’s just assume that advances actually help writers write a book. Because that’s what an advance is for: to fund the writer while he is spending all of his time writing. Not part-time while teaching. Full-time.
So, you folks can live on $1666.67 a year? Seriously?
No wait! It’s not $1666.67. I forgot to remove the agent’s forever 15%. You guys are apparently so good at money management, you can live on $1416.67 per year.
Because that’s how a $5000 advance, divided into three payments minus agent, pays out. $1416.67 over three years.
And because no one is paying any kind of interest on savings accounts, you can’t even bank that money and have it earn for you. Yeah, you might get more immediate sales on that book—it might go out to bookstores at 7,000 copies or 10,000 copies, and on those at $6.99 you will get 55 cents per copy. But half of those books will come back as returns, meaning you have yet to earn out your advance.
E-book sales might be a lot better, but you’ll only get 25% of net, which some publishers never even define. I’ve been doing the math on every single royalty statement I’ve received since this whole ebook thing ramped up, and no disrespect to those who say that 25% of net equals 17.5% or 14.2% or whatever figure they’ve come up with (in the teens), but on all of my royalty statements, the actual e-book royalty rate I have received is less than 10% of the retail price for that book. And from the so-called Big Six publisher that also routinely underreports e-book sales by factors of 100 or so, I only received 8%. (And according to that contract, I should’ve gotten 50% of retail. Ooops.)
Math doesn’t lie, y’all. Most of you traditionally published midlist writers—you’ll never earn your measly $5000 advance back, y’know, the one paid in installments over three years? The thing you licensed most of your rights for to get 5,000 or 10,000 or maybe, if you’re lucky, 20,000 copies of your book into stores in the first six months of publication.
What happens after six months? The paper editions go away. Out of print, out of sight, out of mind. The e-book will remain in print, but you try earning back an advance with inaccurate sales reporting, and some kind of math that turns 25% of net into 8% of retail. Good luck with that. If you get any royalties at all, they’re years down the road.
You’ve licensed almost everything you could on that book for an extra 5,000 or 10,000 sales in a six-month period that is rapidly disappearing in your rearview mirror.
. . . .
“In nonfiction, the size of the biggest advances is also shifting, with significant deals ($250K to $499K) rising, and major deals ($500K and up) declining, at their lowest point since we started measuring in 2004. Our highest category fared better in fiction, though major deals declined somewhat. Children’s was even with 2010’s record 28 major deals.”
. . . .
I can tell you from my discussions with bestselling writers that they’re having the same problem as the rest of us: publishers want to pay less money for more rights.
. . . .
You will make a lot more money on a lot fewer sales if you indie publish. And your book will never go out of print. So you might not get those 5,000 or 10,000 sales in the first month of release, but you’ll have those and more in five or ten years.
And you give yourself a chance to have lightning strike. For example, my husband Dean Wesley Smith’s first novel, Laying The Music To Rest, was published in 1989. The novel is set on the Titanic, which wasn’t a big deal in 1989. But in 1997, when the movie Titanic came out, readers bought any and all Titanic-related books they could find. Dean’s book was six years out of print at that point. He would have had a flurry of sales, maybe even become a bestseller because of that lightning strike, but he didn’t even have the chance.
Nowadays, writers have the chance. I saw a significant increase in sales of my novelette G-Men when J. Edgarcame out, and that movie wasn’t a blockbuster by any stretch. Surprisingly, the sales of my short story Jackie-O, went way up when the release of those tapes came out in the fall. The sales of both pieces have remained strong ever since.
. . . .
So, you indie writers who’ve self published, you’re feeling pretty smug right now, aren’t you? You’ve read this post, you’re thinking, I’m glad I didn’t walk down that road.
And yet, how many of you have novels selling for 99 cents? How many of you have all of your novels priced at 99 cents? How many of you have a novel up for free somewhere, even though you’ve published fewer than ten novels? How many of you have nothing priced over $1.99? $2.99?
How many of you fled all of the other e-publishing platforms so that you could be in the Kindle Select program, just because they give you five days when you can market your book for free?
In some ways, you guys are much worse than the traditional writers. You have no vision and no understanding of business. Most of you are running around the internet, promoting your one novel, following some kind of crazy Get Rich Quick scheme. According to Michael Cader’s figures, only 20 self-published ebook authors made the bestseller lists in 2011. Only 20, out of the hundreds of thousands published.
You’re gambling on a wave that won’t ever reach you, wasting all your energy on one or two or three books rather than doing the one thing that will guarantee you more readers: Writing (and publishing) the next book.
And even if you’re one of the fortunate few for whom lightning does strike with your 99 cent ebook, you won’t make much money. The bestselling ebook published in 2011 was by a self-published author, Darcie Chan. Her Mill River Recluse sold 413,000 units at 99 cents, which means she made roughly one-third of that (because under $2.99, most e-book sites only pay 35% or less). In other words, she made about $143,000. Not bad.
But if she had priced at $2.99, and sold half of those 413,000 units, she would have made around $432,000. (206,500 units times $2.99 times 70%)
. . . .
It’s as if writers stand on a street corner with a sign in front of them. That sign doesn’t even say Will Write For Food. It says Will Write For Acclaim. Whatever that means. To some writers, it means being “validated” by the traditional publishing establishment. To others, it means hitting some kind of bestseller list. To others, it means getting 5-star Amazon reviews.
Writing is a business. You should be building a career, working on a profession, and building your brand. You should have a long-term view, not a short-term one.
Link to the rest (and well worth your time) at Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Another really great perspective from Kris. I was especially struck by the comparisons between what writers were paid in the past and what they are paid now…basically that there has been no increase for inflation. And in today’s “my body is a temple” teetotalling mentality, it’s not even fashionable to request payment in liquor anymore. 5000 bottles of my favorite brand–note I don’t even demand top-shelf–is a helluva lot more useful (not to mention valuable in real terms) than $5000 dollars.
I am also curious to see where we are in 5 years. PG didn’t quote this part, but Kris states that right now the only deal she would consider would bea “major” deal but even then she’d have to think very hard about that 500K+ payday, and in 5 years she suspects she won’t have to consider (would just turn it down). At this point that’s about what my feeling is, not that I’m in ANY danger of getting offered a deal like that.
But I’d rather bet on myself than a publisher. If I fail this way, I have no one else to blame, and if I meet or exceed my personal goals then I have no one claiming either credit or cash out of the deal. Yeah…That seems fair.
Everyone talks about indie publishing these days (often with the overt or implied view that anyone wanting to be traditionally published is some pathetic life-form desperate only for someone in supposed authority to pat them on the head and hand them a cookie) and then go on to talk about e-books as if the printing press no longer existed.
Does anyone know how feasible it is, these days, to self-publish in print? Is it traditional publishing or self-published e-book, or do the benefits of self-publishing still count if you have a book as well?
Many Indies are also using POD for print and doing very well at it. Even the big publishers are utilizing POD to cut down on overhead. Dean Wesley Smith showed how Indies can even get their paper books into independent book stores, if they are willing to do the legwork.
Print isn’t gone. It’s just that ebooks are where the incredible month-to-month and year-to-year growth is.
Carrie: I think it is much more feasible to self-publish now than it ever has been. With print on demand you can set up your own press without anywhere near the expense. But you need to be a very fast writer to do it alone: you need to publish a lot of books before you will be able to promote them to book stores.
Alternatively, a writers co-operative would work very well, if you could get enough writers interested. People have been publishing their poetry and literary fiction that way for years.
Thanks (and J A as well): all things I’ll have to find out more about.
I’d recommend going to CreateSpace’s site and poking around a bit. I’ve been VERY happy with the whole process of POD with them. The quality of the end product is excellent, too. Sure, I’m sacrificing a lot of print bookstore distribution, but my local indie bookstore will carry the book – and host my booksigning in two weeks, too.
Besides, after 2-3 months most trad published books won’t be in stores and need to be ordered online anyway. I’m just ahead of that curve, right?
Rusch’s advice is ridiculous. You can’t expect to self-publish one book and have a hit. So far, I agree. So, Rusch advises writers to write several novels. And what do you do for an income while you’re writing those novels, especially since you won’t be getting even the admittedly small advance doled out by traditional publishers? Rusch doesn’t say. I also find it amusing when she advises that Darcie Chan would have made much more money if she’d priced her book at $2.99 instead of $.99. Did it ever occur to Rusch that one of the reasons Chan’s book was so successful was because a $.99 ebook is an impulse purchase for readers and presents little or no sales resistance.
Kris points out that Darcie Chan could have sold fewer copies and STILL made a lot more money… Are you aware that at .99 cents Amazon gives a 35% royalty, but when you step the cover price up to $2.99 or above, they give 70%? That makes a big difference in the math.
And I’m sorry to say that most authors can’t live off NY publishing advances – and haven’t been able to for a long while. I speak from experience. Also, getting a monthly check for a few hundred dollars is a LOT more livable than getting a check every six months for $1,200. Actually, my last trad pub royalty check was $245. I made more than that in December from Amazon off a single, self-published short story.
I personally don’t find Kris Rusch’s advice to be at all ridiculous. It will not be the right path for everyone, but for many authors, self-publishing is a much wiser business decision if they want to actually make a living from writing.
Granted, you can’t live off a lowball traditional advance, but what Rusch is doing is comparing the lowest traditional advance to a speculative best case scenario for self-published writers. Most self-published books earn little or nothing for their authors. That’s why the success stories of Amanda Hocking or Darcie Chan warrant so much press attention.
The awful truth about writing can be found in an article Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson wrote for Publisher’s Weekly in 2006. Anderson writes, “Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. Those blockbusters are a minute anomaly: only 10 books sold more than a million copies last year, and fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000.”
It’s great that you did so well with your short story, but it’s fallacious to extrapolate from anecdotal evidence.
I can see the point you are wanting to make, but using a 2006 article is a bad way to do it. We are now in 2012. The publishing industry doesn’t even look the same as in 2006. The opportunities are greater. The access is greater. More warnings out there about not using vanity presses to get your work available.
Rusch wasn’t quoting the lowest traditional advance to work with. Polls of writers are showing that this is an average for a good number of genres (unscientific polls, so each has flaws, but it’s interesting the number keeps coming up). Average, not low. Ouch.
By the way, making $5,000 off Indie publishing does not require blockbusters. Slow and steady sales across a backlist will do it, each of the books boosting the others. I’m not talking big numbers, if it is priced decently, but it all can add up to reaching $5,000 if you compare it to the time it takes to submit traditionally, being accepted, sign the contract (first usual payment), editing and revising according to the editor, final acceptance (second usual payment), preproduction, release (third usual payment). That’s not including the short time the book might be on the shelves, which is not a guarantee now, either, with physical bookshelf space shrinking. Many are doing it, but the stories of the blockbusters eclipse them because it makes good headlines.
Will most make thousands of dollars now with the new opportunities? Up in the air, depends on time title is available, quality, backlist, pricing (one of the key components of Kris’s post), and many other factors. Did most make thousands, much less enough to survive on for a year, before? No. Will more writers make thousands compared to before the new options? Oh yeah. It’s already happening.
I’m with JA. 5k is the *average* advance – and more like 3k for a debut author. I know authors published with reputable NY houses that were paid UNDER TWO-THOUSAND dollars for their advances. A friend of mine is on her 8th book for trad publishing, and for the last 4 books her advances have been stuck at around 15k per book. Don’t forget to take the agent’s cut out of that, too. Sure, writers dream of the big six-figure advance… but that’s like shooting for the Kindle Million club.
Advances are falling drastically from traditional publishers, too. The key thing about self-publishing is that many more writers *will* be able to make a living with sales numbers that would be considered minuscule (and spell certain career death) under the traditional NY publishing model.
I’m a few days late on this, but self published authors can make a living. I am anyway. My self published romance book came out in May of 2011. Because I have done all my own promotion, sales didn’t start taking off until September. I have never offered my book for free. It’s at $9.99 for the ebook. I did offer it at $4.99 just for Black Friday weekend, but it hurt my sales. As of today, I’m #39 for all Teen Romance books. I’ve sold more than your 5,000 copy benchmark, and definitely made more than the $5,000 advance.
My point is not to brag at all. My point is I’m nobody, doing it completely on my own, working hard to build a brand name for myself, and working toward the future. I completely agree with Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It’s very doable if you work hard.
The answer is now, and has always been, that writers have to get a job first and write in their spare time, or get a spouse who is very supportive.
Indie writing has not really changed that. You can’t expect to write one, or two, or five books and then earn enough money to become a full time pro. It happens to some rare individuals, but it isn’t a business plan.
Stephen King is one of the most successful writers of our generation. It took him 10 novels before he got his first one published.
Can’t expect to become a pro right off the bat.
When reading advice during a industry disruption, you need to carefully consider the assumptions and situation of the advisor. Rusch is pretty clearly smart and successful, but her viewpoint, like everyone else’s, is shaped by her experiences. YMMV, especially if you are in a radically different place. But even then, you would be an idiot to dismiss what she is saying. If her advice is wrong for you, you should know why. Look at why she says Kindle Select is a bad deal. If the negatives she describes aren’t a problem for you, maybe you can make it work. Other folks have. And if you are writing for the acclaim (and have your financial needs met), then you probably do not need to follow her path.
I have some advice for writers based on my experience as a consultant. It is easy to be trapped into undercharging for your work. If you can deliver high quality, you must charge the appropriate price. But you also have to “look” the part. If you charge Barry Eisler prices for your thriller, you better have a quality cover, good copyediting, and a good hook to get readers into your book.
Writers starting out don’t have a backlist to exploit. They are starting at square one. Writing ten novels while living on air isn’t a viable strategy.
So flip burgers at McDonald’s while you write your backlist.
Such an interesting post, Kris, until the attack on the indie writers. What brought that on?
Which best-seller list does Michael Cader use for this claim only twenty self-published ebook authors made the bestsellers list in 2011? Typically a third of the Kindle top 500 bestseller charts are made up of self-pubbed books at any given time.
Obviously an author only available in ebook is not going to compete with a long-established trad pubbed author in both print and ebook, with a huge publicity machine behind him / her and a loyal following built up over years.
Most self-pubbers have neither. They enter the market as complete unknowns, with no previous readership, no brand, no history, no backlist. Which is why they show *enormous* business sense and vision by utilising cheap prices and free listings to get visibility.
When a new and unknown author goes free for five days with KDP Select and gets thousand of downloads how it that showing no vision and no understanding of business? Ninety-nine per cent of those thousands of people were never going to buy this unknown author’s book at 4.99 or 2.99, and probably not at 0.99.
But having got it for free, if they enjoy it they then tell others who will go and buy it. They may then buy that authors next book and become that loyal following.
It must be great to have the luxury of a backlist and a loyal readership built up by years as a trad pubbed author, and no question you earned it. We respect that. Congratulations.
But for new authors without that platform, who choose to strike out alone from scratch, the cheap price points and free strategies you are so dismissive of are essential and proven marketing tools.
I do not even want to divide the number of hours I have spent into a $5K advance, minus 15%, and then taxes, spread out over three years. I really did not need any more confirmation that I should self publish my work, but here it is in black and white.
[...] second article is an excerpt of article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It argues that writers are undervaluing their talent and should look at writing as a [...]
[...] majority of authors who sign a traditional publishing contract stand to earn $5,000 paid over a three year period. Fifteen percent of that paltry sum is owed to an agent. A growing population of indie authors [...]