Hope in the Mail

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  The advance: This is the money a publisher will pay you up front—before the book is released for sale. This can range from nothing to a whole lot, with “a whole lot” being the exception rather than the rule. Advance is short for advance against royalties, which is a significant detail, explained shortly.

  Agency fee: This is the percentage your agent will take from your advance, their slice of the pie for the services they provide. Again, this figure varies, but it applies to your advance as well as to royalties.

  Taxes: Any money you receive is taxable. To be safe, you should set aside about thirty-five percent of everything earned for Uncle Sam. Especially if you have other forms of income. You do not want to be caught off guard come tax day.

  Royalties: Your contract will have details regarding the percentage you will be entitled to for the sale of all forms of your book. This can include hardcover, paperback, book club, audio…Whatever percentage is specified in your contract is the amount you get for the sale.

  Advance against royalties: Whatever amount your publisher pays you up front must be recouped through your slice of the sale of your book (your royalty) before you see any additional money.

  As a rule of thumb, after taxes and agency fees, you should count on getting about half of your advance. And you will be in no danger of spending that amount all at once, because you will not get it all at once. The likely payment scheme is that the publisher will pay one-third of the advance on signing, one-third on delivery of an acceptable manuscript (after you and the editor have gone back and forth a bunch), and one-third on publication…a schedule that can take a year and a half (or more) to complete.

  And remember, it’s an advance against royalties. What does that mean, exactly? Well, imagine a piggy bank where your publisher collects your contracted royalty percentage from the sale of every book. To keep the math simple, let’s say that an author gets ten percent of the list price of their hardcover book. If that book sells for $20, the author gets $2 for each book sold. Ebooks have a varied pay structure, but paperbacks have a royalty rate that will plunk about $0.50 into the piggy bank.

  Over time, the publisher collects these $2 and $0.50 royalties, plink, plink, plink, until the piggy bank holds the amount of the full advance. After it reaches the advance amount, the publisher will send any additional royalty amounts (the accumulation of extra $2 and $0.50 earnings from book sales) to you (via your agent), along with a royalty statement—something that happens only twice a year.

  When you begin to earn royalties beyond the advance amount, your book has “earned out,” and that is cause for celebration. The reality, though, is that a lot of books never earn out. The other reality is that if your book hasn’t made good strides toward earning out during its first year, your publisher might not be willing to publish your next book.

  Most authors dream of the big advance and are dying to win the race to the top. But it’s hard to build a career if you have books that don’t earn out, and there’s a better chance of not earning out with large advances.

  Generally, the advance amounts are modest. My advances for How I Survived Being a Girl and the first Sammys were on the low end. It took me many years to begin earning as a writer what I had made as a schoolteacher. And once I made the leap to full-time writer, I no longer had the health benefits, the 401(k), or any of the other perks that come from traditional employment. It was also hard to manage a budget with income coming in so sporadically (and unpredictably).

  Some authors start out with a flash-bang advance, but if that’s not you, don’t be jealous. You may feel like you want it all now, but I truly believe it’s better to build a career over time. I never got a flash-bang advance, but I have a large catalog of books—some of which have been going plink, plink, plink for over twenty years—because I have been a good financial investment for my publisher.

  We used to have a rule that you couldn’t come to our new house unless you’d been to the Box House. It was definitely still a rule when my editor came out to California for that first-meeting conference. She had built in an extra day to stay with us, so on our drive north I told her about the rule. And since we’d barely moved and I still had the Box House keys, I swung by the old place and let her in.

  She blinked a lot but didn’t say much. And on our walk back to the car, she said, “I’m glad I didn’t know.”

  Because knowing would have complicated things.

  Was she wanting to buy a book from me because it was really good and she was eager to work with me?

  Or because she wanted to help me?

  I’m glad she didn’t know either. The joy of her offer would have been marred if our living situation had influenced it.

  I’m sharing all this to illustrate that although we hear about the books that hit like lightning, the reality is that most authors never “strike it rich.”

  So what’s your motive?

  If you’re in this for the money, a lottery ticket might serve you better.

  If you’re in this for the love of writing, please, keep writing. Hopefully you’ll have a career that’s slow and steady. It really is the best way to win this race.

  Plink, plink, plink.

  Another common question from writers wanting to be published is What about self-publishing?

  I get why they ask.

  Boy, do I get it.

  So let’s compare and contrast and then you can decide what’s best for you.

  As you’ve seen from the previous chapters, a traditional publishing house invests considerable wo/manpower in taking your project from manuscript to press. To move the book through the developmental process, they pay you an advance, they pay an editor, a copy editor, proofreaders, and a design team, along with assistants and associates. They pay to print and warehouse physical copies of your book. Then they pay an in-house publicist, a marketing team, and a sales force to get your book noticed and stocked in bookstores and libraries around the country.

  You get none of that with self-publishing. You can hire a freelance editor, but that’s not cheap and the job they do does not involve investing their career or reputation in your work. They may love your story, they may hate it. As long as you pay them, they will work on it. It’s a completely different arrangement than the one you’d have with an editor who pays you for your work.

  I do know a lot of fiction writers who have self-published. They’re excited about their creation, excited to press the Publish button, excited to have local book signings. But to a person, that excitement gives way to a common frustration: After the goodwill of their friends and family has been wrung out, their sales dry up. With all the effort they’re making on social media, with the price point online so reasonably low, why is nobody buying their book?

  The discouraging reality is that it’s drowning in an ocean of books, and no single person’s individual efforts are going to be able to keep it afloat. Maybe if you’re famous to begin with or have some other means of getting your book noticed, you can join the exclusive club of people who have had big success self-publishing, but just pressing Publish is not going to get the results you dream of.

  Writers looking to get published often think the traditional publisher’s royalty pay structure is a rip-off. But when you consider all the costs involved in producing a book, and that publishers sell to bookstores at a price point much lower than the retail figure from which the royalty is calculated, you start to realize that their profit is not much greater than your royalty percent. And part of where that money goes is into getting your book noticed.

  On the self-publishing side of things, you get to keep most of the money from sales. But keeping most of the money from next to no sales is not what you envisioned when you pressed Publish.

  It’s not what anyone wants.

  So for fiction writers who want lots of people outside their sphere of family and friends to read their book
, I would say that self-publishing usually leads to disappointment.

  Not always, but usually.

  However, self-publishing may be the way to go in certain cases.

  If you have an area of expertise, if you have knowledge about a niche subject, or unique information about historical events, self-publishing a nonfiction book can make sense. Again, don’t expect to sell a million copies, but if the subject is a passion of yours, there are likely people all over the globe who share your passion and might be interested in reading your book.

  I’ve also seen schools effectively use self-publishing for collections of student essays, poems, or art. Sometimes these are done as fundraisers, but usually they’re just a fun way to get students more fully engaged in a project.

  Self-publishing also makes sense for what I consider the most valuable thing any person can write:

  Their memoirs.

  Or family history.

  Maybe you want to fictionalize your story and try to place it as a novel, or maybe you just want to get it out so your kids and their kids and their kids will know and understand you. Passing down stories is a valuable, time-honored tradition. By documenting yours, you’ll create family treasures, and by pressing Publish at a self-publishing site, you’ll create a work that’s easy to read, easy to share, easy to keep and pass down.

  My cousin has done an amazing job of self-publishing. She is a cancer survivor whose daughters were young teens during her surgery and treatments, and her girls wrote a book about ways to be helpful to a parent who’s going through such an ordeal. A niche subject, but one that people searching for books related to fighting cancer will stumble upon. The goal wasn’t to make a lot of money, but to provide something that could be helpful to others.

  Since then, my cousin has self-published her mother’s artwork, her father’s poems, her grandmother’s journal, and other family memorabilia. It’s a fascinating collection, and without self-publishing the contents would still be buried in boxes in the garage and, in another generation or two, would likely be buried at the dump.

  So there’s a case to be made for both traditional and self-publishing, depending on the situation, the book, and the author’s desires. Ask yourself what you want. Maybe you want your book in stores and libraries around the country. Maybe all you really want is to hold your book in your hands. Or maybe you just want people to be able to download it for free. Every case is different, but if you define what you really want and you’re armed with knowledge of the benefits and drawbacks of each publishing path, at least you can make a reasoned choice about how to proceed.

  When people close to you die, death suddenly casts a darker shadow. It moves from something over there to a real and very present fear inside your heart.

  After my dad died, and later my brother, it felt like Death was lurking, ready to spring out and nab someone else I loved.

  Or me, if it could.

  So I ran. If I kept moving, if I kept busy, if I kept mentally occupied, I could push away that shadow and escape its creeping terror. But when I stopped, that shadow would sneak up on me and, if I let it linger in my mind, consume me with dread and despair.

  Before I became a mom, I simply didn’t want to die. After I became a mom, I had a rational reason, way better than simply not wanting to die: I had two innocent little lives to protect. My kids needed me!

  As my kids got older, I held on to that reasoning. But I developed a backup reason, which, as my children grew into their teen years and didn’t rely on me as much, became less of a backup and more of a focus: I had to live long enough to get to the end of the Sammy Keyes series.

  The deeper I got into the series, the closer I edged toward the final book, the more consumed I became with not dying before I got to the end. What if I cashed in my chips before Sammy’s father was revealed? What if I was pushing up daisies before we got to the root of evil Heather’s issues? What if I bit the dust before Sammy got her first kiss? What if I kicked the bucket before I pulled everything together?

  My readers would kill me!

  The last sentence of any book is important. I probably spend more time perfecting the final sentence than any other line in a novel. It’s your swan dive off the page. You want your toes pointed, your arms spread majestically, your body perfectly aligned, and your head held high and proud.

  The last sentence of a long series?

  Wow. That’s a leap off the high dive. And you can’t just get to the end of the board, look down, and stumble off. You have to prepare! Then you have to run at it strong, take a powerful bounce, expose your heart, and soar.

  I had known what the last sentence of the Sammy Keyes series would be for about five years before I got it down on paper. Nobody else knew because, well, if I let it out, it would spoil everything.

  Everything!

  Also, it felt like if I shared it or wrote it, my reason for why it was super important for me not to die would be gone. Oh, that’s how the series ends? Okay. Well, at least we aren’t left hanging.

  Besides, sharing the last line would be like delivering the punch line when you haven’t finished setting up the joke. It doesn’t hold up, doesn’t make sense, isn’t funny.

  Not that this last line was a punch line, or any laughing matter…but then again, it kind of was. It was a line that would resonate with people who’d held on through all the twists and turns of Sammy World. A random person picking up the last book to see the last line would go, What’s the big deal?

  But a Sammiac?

  There would be tears.

  So in this case I didn’t agonize over the last sentence—I knew exactly what it was going to be.

  I agonized over getting to it!

  And it became my new excuse for why Death needed to stand back. I had to finish the series. I had to write that last sentence.

  Sammiacs needed me!

  So maybe it was because I’d held that last line inside for so long, or maybe because I’d projected such importance onto reaching it, but when the last sentence of the last Sammy Keyes book came out of my fingers and onto the screen, I lost it. First the tears streamed, then the gasping started, then my husband looked over from his desk and asked, “Are you all right?” and that’s when the floodgates opened. He came over and held me as I bawled my eyes out. I’m talking great gulping gasping blubbering convulsing bawling. And when he understood what I was saying, when he saw the words on the screen, when he realized that after almost twenty years, the story was finally at its end, he held on and just let me let it out.

  So, lucky me.

  I lived long enough to finish Sammy’s story.

  I lived long enough to see my kids to adulthood.

  I’m grateful and happy, and part of me is more than a little surprised.

  Which should (and does) give me a certain degree of peace, but the truth is, I’m now looking around for new excuses. New reasons why Death shouldn’t catch me yet.

  Maybe I’m greedy.

  Or just human.

  Or maybe we all live best when we have something to live for.

  Despite all the camping and wilderness survival experience I’d had in my life, there was one thing that the troubled teens in Wild Bird are required to do that I had never done.

  Start a fire with friction.

  I’d seen other backpackers attempt it, but never successfully, and it just didn’t seem worth the effort to pursue doing it. I was more into the architecture of the firewood. My signature structure had fine kindling in the center and a tepee of small branches over the kindling, overlaid with a larger tepee and encased by a log cabin that tapered slightly inward.

  This design served me well in the one-match challenges we imposed on ourselves (and each other) as campers. From a young age, that was the goal—start the fire with a single match. Except for the quick rake of a phosphorus sulfide tip over rock,
friction played no role in the lighting of fires. Even my parents would spring for matches.

  But in wilderness therapy camps, starting a fire with friction is something campers have to master to cook their food. There’s no faking your competency in this skill.

  There’s also no faking it when describing it on the page. If I was going to write about it, I wanted to involve all my senses—to really feel it so my firsthand knowledge would find its way into my character’s experience. Once I realized I had to tackle it, I got down in the dirt with my sticks and some cordage and gave it a shot.

  Let me start by complaining.

  It’s a lot harder than you may think!

  There’s a fireboard (a small, flat board with a notch) that receives a spindle (a stick whittled to look like a dull pencil), which has cordage (thick twine or a shoelace), which is anchored to the ends of a bow (a stick with a gentle arch) and twisted around the spindle. The whole assembly looks like a big pencil twisted through a crude violin bow nose-diving into a notched board, and pressure is applied by pushing down on the spindle with a palmed, smooth stone.

  Just getting the pencil-thingy in the bow-thingy took, like, twenty tries.

  And once I finally had the bow-pencil-thingy nose-dived into the fireboard, I anchored the fireboard with my boot, pushed down on the spindle with the palmed stone, and pulled.

  The whole thing fell apart.

  I went back at it, again and again, and when I finally had the hang of the mechanics of it, I pushed and pulled—like speedy sawing—to create friction between the spindle tip and the fireboard.

  Long before I saw it, the first thing I noticed was smoke.

  My nose told me it was there.

  I got super excited because, you know, where there’s smoke, there’s fire!

  The procedure for starting a fire with friction is that the friction you create between the fireboard and the spindle produces a little coal that builds up on a leaf positioned beneath the fireboard’s notch. That little coal gets transferred into a nest of dry grasses located at the heart of your waiting fire structure.