While $50,000, even $40,000, sounds wonderful, it will only support you if you write fast. If you've spent four years on your novel, your agent has spent six months submitting it, and your book won't come out until eighteen months after it's accepted, that's six years from start to finish. Fifty thousand dollars divided by six equals a salary from your writing of $8,333.33 per year. A $15,000 advance with the same time frame brings $2,500 a year, and a $7,500 advance brings $1,250 per year. So even though you'll probably need to keep your day job, it's easy to see how a more modest advance—a sum of money that your publisher gives you in the hope that sales of your book will pay him back—can earn out more quickly than one that was pushed up by auction fever. When royalties from sales of your book add up to the amount of your advance, you've "earned out." But how does that happen? How do they figure it all out, and how in the world does anyone make any money at this?
THE FORMULA
Before making an offer to buy a book, an editor will prepare some kind of pricing formula. Every company's formula is different, but according to Brian DeFiore, who was an executive at several different publishing houses before becoming a literary agent, the formula is generally composed of such costs as the author's advance; paper, printing, and binding costs; printing plant fees; the costs of jacket art, marketing, warehousing, and shipping; and overhead (such as building leases, employees' salaries, and all the other expenses of running a business). The formula helps publishers arrive at an estimate of how much money they'll need to spend to purchase the rights to the book and to produce it, which will be balanced against the number of copies the publisher hopes and expects to sell. Book sales are not as predictable as, say, sales of Coca-Cola, but a publisher's experience and knowledge of the marketplace will help find the right ballpark for a book's advance.
Most mainstream publishers offer, through agents, a contract that stipulates your book will receive a royalty of 10 percent of the cover price on each and every copy sold. The offer usually includes an escalation in royalties that goes like this: 10 percent of the cover price on each of the first five thousand copies sold, 12.5 percent of the cover price on each of the next five thousand copies sold, and 15 percent of the cover price on every copy sold thereafter. These are royalties on sales of hardcover books. Sales of trade paperback books—trade paperbacks are the larger, nicer paperbacks—fetch a royalty rate of 7.5 percent of the cover price on each copy sold. And sales of mass market paperbacks—sometimes called rack-size paperbacks, these are the smaller, cheaper paperbacks you can buy in supermarkets, newsstands, and airports, as well as in bookstores—are often granted a rate of 6 percent (and as low as 4 percent) of the cover price on each copy sold. Sometimes you can get the publisher to go up to 8 percent after, say, 150,000 copies. Established agents can often get the mass market royalties to start at 8 percent and escalate to 10 percent or more.
After several years of creeping price rises, the price of hardcover novels hasn't gone up appreciably in recent years. Putting aside the publisher's formula, how many copies would your $24 hardcover novel have to sell before you'd start making money? If you've gotten an advance of $20,000—$10,000 after you signed the contract (and when I say after, I mean something like two months after, not the day or the week after) and the balance of $10,000 when the book was published—you'd make money over and above your advance if it sold ten thousand copies. If every copy was sold in a regular bookstore, and if every one of them went home with a customer and stayed there (in other words, if not returned to the publisher), your book would have earned $27,000 against your advance of $20,000, and your publisher would be happy. If you were to write another novel as good as the first, you'd probably get another contract with a higher advance from that publisher.
Knowing how essential it is that your book make money so you can earn out your advance and secure future, more lucrative contracts, you should be inspired to focus on the publication process and get involved in helping the book achieve its sales potential. We'll examine this process and see what you can do to help in the next chapter.
RECOMMENDED READING
"Advances & Royalties—How Authors Are Paid" (www.brandewyne.com/ writingtips/authorspaid.html). This article is best-selling author Rebecca Brandewyne's simple explanation of how books earn money.
"The Big Misunderstanding About Money" (www.sabrinajeffries.com/big-misunderstanding-about-money.php). This article for aspiring writers by a hardworking romance writer has an excellent chart that breaks down what certain types of books might expect to earn.
RECOMMENDED WEB SITES
WritersServices (http://www.writersservices.com/). This site is run by Chris Ho-lifield, who has a great deal of publishing experience. The site's useful articles on the business of publishing include pieces on advances and royalties and pricing, among many other subjects.
Publishers Marketplace (http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/). Subscribe to its free weekly e-newsletter, called Publishers Lunch, if you want a quick rundown of what kinds of books are selling each week for approximately how much. If the flood of sales starts to depress you, however, just cancel your subscription. There's such a thing as too much information.
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
becoming a published author
Your editor is just the tip of the iceberg that is the publishing house.
Behind her is not only the entire editorial staff, from publisher and editor in chief to editorial assistants, but the departments devoted to publicity, marketing, sales, contracts, production, and subsidiary rights. In another building—usually in another state—is the warehouse and distribution center, which stores the books and fills the booksellers' orders.
How does it all come together, and how do you end up with a book in your hands, copies in the stores, and reviews in the newspapers? It's a long story—sometimes it takes nine months, and sometimes it takes eighteen to twenty-four months—with many players. After years of working alone, and then a period of time working with your agent—your business partner—you're going to be working with a whole team of people whose job it is to get your book published.
After you've accepted the offer, the publisher will issue a contract that covers the terms of the offer your agent negotiated, as well as a score of other issues. It often takes four to six weeks for a large publishing house to send a contract to your agent. And after he receives it, he'll want to negotiate
many of those points with the publisher. After all, the contract is written by the publisher, so it's likely to be weighted in the publishing house's favor. Your agent's job is to attempt to redress the balance and make the contract as favorable to you as possible.
THE PUBLISHING PROCESS:
TRYING TO KEEP UP_
Once you've signed your contract, the publishing process officially begins. This process can be exciting—having your book published is what you've waited for, what you've dreamed about—but it can also make you feel very much out of control of your book. There is so much to think about, and so much that seems to be sprung on you—"We don't like the title, can you change it?" "The heroine's name is wrong." "What do you think of this cover concept? You don't like it? Oh, that's too bad, because the book is being printed now."—and on and on and on. Good communication with your editor can make all the difference, but there are nevertheless many surprising and potentially painful moments along the way to publication of your first novel.
Let's try to lay out some of the milestones on the road to publication so you'll have a better idea of what to expect—and a better idea of how much you'll want to get involved at each step.
1. EDITORIAL
After you've signed and returned the contract, your editor will probably get in touch with you. You'll get a telephone call or, more frequently these days, an e-mail from the editor introducing herself and telling you what the next steps are going to be. The editor will probably want to discuss her reaction to the novel and her ideas for revision. She'll tell you how she works—whether she'll send you
a manuscript with her notes in the margins, or an editorial letter, or whether she'll expect you to take notes from the conversation and embark on a rewrite immediately.
After that, you're not really on your own. Your contract carries a delivery date—something like a deadline. And it is for real. During the negotiation, your agent will usually discuss the delivery date with you and ask whether you can realistically live up to it. Your agent will probably have some idea of how much work your editor thinks you'll need to do, and you'll have some idea of what your life is like and how much time you're going to be able to devote to revision. Be honest with yourself about how much time you're going to need. Take into consideration the following factors:
• how well you work under pressure
• how much thinking or meditating time you need to ponder the improvements your novel will need
• how much writing and rewriting time you'll need
• the month or season your book will be published (If you know this, you can work backwards by nine months or more to allow time for editing and production.)
• the necessity of getting this book done so you can embark on your next novel (If you want a career as a novelist, you have to get the momentum going and keep it going.)
Once you've set a realistic delivery date, it's important that you meet the deadline. Your editor will have attempted to set a schedule of editing all the manuscripts that are coming in so she can turn to yours within a reasonable period of time. She'll also have told the managing editor when to expect the edited manuscript. The managing editor will have noted the date on her schedule so she'll be prepared to hire a freelance copyeditor to take the job around that time. The publisher will have found a place for your novel on a future list. In other words, the contract, with its delivery date, sets the publishing wheels in motion, and it's expensive to put the brakes on. Get your book in on time.
When your editor has decided (usually a month or two after you hand in the revisions) that your manuscript is acceptable, an important contractual term, she will schedule it with the production department. An acceptable manuscript is one that is delivered in the correct format—whether it be two printed copies or one computer file and one printed copy, with double-spaced text, page numbers, and title page—and that lives up to the publisher's expectation for how good it will be when it is finished. It's rare that a novel, upon delivery, will be rejected for being unacceptable, because novels are usually sold after they're finished. But if the book was sold based on a few chapters or a partial manuscript, the finished product could be found, in the publisher's eyes, disappointing.
Before this point the publisher will have determined when the book will be published. Nowadays contracts stipulate that a publisher will publish the book within eighteen or twenty-four months of the date of the contract. It used to be that it took nine months from manuscript to published book. It doesn't actually take any longer today. In fact, a book could conceivably be published in a week—printed, bound, and shipped to stores. But the big houses now need to plan further in advance to get all the pieces to come together to make a book's publication a success.
2. ART AND PRODUCTION
From the moment you hand in your finished book and your editor accepts it, with all its revisions, your book will be in production. Let's look at some of the people and departments involved.
Copyeditor
Once your manuscript is officially accepted by your editor, a copyeditor goes over it with a fine-toothed comb to find grammatical and syntactical errors, typographical errors, errors in fact or chronology, even inconsistencies like the fact that your heroine had red hair on page 3 but raven tresses on page 57. The copyeditor also develops a style sheet for your book that specifies standardized spelling, capitalization, indentation, how you handle dialogue, the correct spelling of characters' names and other proper nouns, etc.
You'll be asked to go over the copyedited manuscript, answer all the copyeditor's questions, and get the whole thing back to your publisher in ten days or two weeks. Authors usually find this an interesting experience, sometimes trying, sometimes amusing, as copyeditors try to "regularize" a writer's prose style, and the writer fights back to preserve vernacular or other examples of consciously nonstandard English. Most publishers have developed a house style that the copyeditors they hire are instructed to follow. If your writing has deliberate idiosyncrasies that clash with the house style, try to pinpoint them in advance of the copyediting so the copyeditor knows which changes you'll find acceptable and which ones will interfere with the voice of the book. Whatever your response to the copyeditor's marks and suggestions, it's important to study them carefully and respond promptly.
The Book Designer
This is the person who, working with the copyedited manuscript, designs the interior of your book. Not only will she choose the font in which your book will be set, the book designer will make the following decisions:
1. the font of the titles and subtitles—also called display font
2. whether your book will have running heads (These, as their name implies, run across the top or bottom of each page. Some books don't have them at all. Some use the author's name on one side of the two-page spread, and the name of the book on the other. Some use the chapter titles, if the chapters have titles.)
3. the paper to be used (Although the head of production will typically make this decision, the designer needs to know what kind of paper will be used in the book so she can assess the readability of the font on a particular type of paper. The decision about paper is based on expense, availability, quantity needed based on the size of the print run, and the possibility of obtaining more paper should the publisher do well enough with your book that it needs to go back to press. Paper is expensive and orders for it are put in well in advance of need.)
The Jacket Designer
The production head usually works with a stable of freelance jacket or cover artists. He knows their different styles and how well they meet deadlines. He'll get one on board for your book and send the manuscript over. Some designers read the whole book and some only read the description of the book, or just enough of your manuscript to get a feel for the atmosphere of the book or to know something about the main characters or the setting. They may be given some guidelines—"This is a hot young novelist—we want something really edgy," or "Give us something that will make readers think of The Da Vinci Code"—or they may be given free rein.
When the designer produces a sketch, the production head, the editor, and others in-house look it over. Sometimes it's rejected before the author ever sees it. Some designers hand in more than one treatment for the cover so the publisher can choose a direction. The design usually comes with some notes about the colors and finishes that are to be used and any special effects, such as raised type or a cutaway on a paperback cover. When the publisher has something acceptable, your editor will show it to you.
Most publishers do not allow the author to have approval over the jacket art. Each sketch is expensive to obtain, and if the author has contractual approval over the cover design, he might reject three or four or seven possibilities before approving anything. Therefore, although your editor usually asks when showing you the cover art, "What do you think?" or "How do you like it?" she's not technically seeking your approval. I nevertheless recommend my clients take several steps when responding to cover art:
1. Understand your cover's ultimate purpose. The cover of a book is an ad, not a work of art to hang on your wall. Go into a bookstore and look at the hundreds of books trying to get your attention. Some book jackets stand out by screaming, some by proclaiming news, some by breaking new ground, some by sheer beauty, and some by whispering. How is yours going to stand out?
2. Prop the sketch up and walk away from it so you can look at it from across the room. Can you see it? Can you read the title? Your
name? What does it say to you? What do you think it will say to a stranger?
3. If you don't like it, try to
analyze why you don't like it. Think about whether you'd like it if the title font were different, if different colors were used, or if the art were tweaked in some way. Try to think of something good to say about it.
4. Finally, write to your editor. List all the things you like about the jacket. Then list the things about the jacket that you don't understand or that are wrong or misspelled. Ask a series of questions: Can we see it with an orange typeface instead of a brown one? Can the designer make the font bigger? Can we try a version where the tennis ball isn't bleeding? Because you are not a designer, you are not telling anyone how to design a jacket. You're asking for tweaks. Breaking your request to see a new sketch down into little steps is much more effective than an e-mail that says: "I hate it."
Following these steps will greatly increase your chances of getting an improved jacket sketch, if not a completely new one. It's just possible that not everyone at the publishing house loved the original sketch, and if you can articulate some of the problems you have with it, you might help everyone see how to improve it.
The Printer and Binder
The head of production is also responsible for contracting with a printing company and bindery. Some printers provide binding; some don't. Most publishers routinely work with one or two printers for all their jobs. In order to get a book printed, the production head must book a slot in the printer's schedule well in advance of the actual printing. This is another reason why delivery dates and schedules are important. If publishers lose time at a printer's, there's no guarantee another slot will be available immediately.
Although most publishers have a good idea of the number of copies they will print of your book, the final number is dependent on advance sales written by the sales representatives as they take orders from booksellers and wholesalers. If advance orders are disappointing, the number of copies ordered for the first print run will be scaled down accordingly. If the orders are higher than everyone had hoped, the print run will be increased. The final number is determined shortly before the book is sent to the printer.
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