The confessions of a semi-successful author

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist/print.html

by niyazpk • 17 years ago

96 51 17 years ago

dir.salon.com

i've been a paid subscriber at salon.com for years now, since they first started asking for money. it seems they have a lot of interesting articles like this one that never make it to the front page, most of which i miss. i wish they had better filters in place.

hristov• 17 years ago

I am pretty sure that this article did make it to the front page as I remember reading it a long time ago. It is a relatively old article so you may have forgotten it or it may have come up at a time you were not following Salon that seriously.

coliveira• 17 years ago

No wonder this woman didn't make any money. Anyone that writes a book every two years can't make enough money to survive, unless if the book is a blockbuster. I think even Dan Brown writes more than a book every two years.

symptic4• 17 years ago

She mentions doing freelance writing and ghostwriting, so she's not only doing her books for income.

neilk• 17 years ago

Maybe this is tangential, but sometimes when I go into the bookstore, I ask myself how many of these books were really necessary. They're filling some sort of need, it just isn't for information. The shelves with the most new books are invariably the topics that nobody knows anything about, like business or love.

I guess I'm asking how many authors we really need. I still haven't gotten around to reading The Brothers Karamazov.

patio11• 17 years ago

I have heard variations of this story quite a bit (two members of my family nurse on-again-off-again dreams of going into the business, and I read a lot). The industry is very, very overdependent on outdated, inefficient methods of moving books because it is the only thing they think they have -- basically, there are no options between getting approved by kingmakers like Oprah or the New York Times and doing book tours to have the author hand books to readers directly.

This is insane. Can you imagine how little work I'd get done if, after being rejected by the New York Times, my marketing effort was going to little collections of teachers, giving a speech, and trying to persuade them to play bingo with their classes? And I make a lot more off a marginal sale than the average midlist author does.

Thankfully, some authors are finally starting to get clueful. They're doing things like having a blog and an email list. (I will bet you any amount of money that the anonymous author cannot identify her hard-core fans by name or contact them in any way. What the heck. Screw the New York Times, these are the people who you should be most worried about getting your next book to because you know they will love it and tell everyone they know about it.)

I think that is pretty much the way forward for midlist authors: do your own marketing, talk directly to your readers, cut out the middlemen wherever possible. Midlist authors don't make a lot of money or sell a lot of books in the status quo. You can probably do better just being a micro-celebrity on the Internet: beloved by the "thousand true fans" that know and talk to you, and selling to folks a bit wider than that social circle.

It beats sitting at the kitchen table waiting for rejection letters.

symptic4• 17 years ago

Tim Ferriss is a good example of this.

adamhowell3• 17 years ago

Tim Ferriss is an example of this.

rjurney• 17 years ago

Yeah, why would you need to hire a publicist? Use the tubes.

whatusername• 17 years ago

Brandon Sanderson is a good example. http://twitter.com/BrandonSandrson/ http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/ etc.

brc• 17 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking the whole way through. If she can move 10 or 20,000 books, she can build a list by regularly publishing a blog. Then she can market directly to that list and self-publish, and keep most of the bones for herself. 70% margin to 1,000 readers is the same as 7% margin to 10,000 readers. As she says, when a book bombs, she's the only one who loses a job.

I suspect much of the problem, though, is counting on advances to write the book instead of just writing the thing in your spare time after something like a part-time job. Kind of like a startup wannabe who won't lift a finger until they've got funding.

It reminds me of a boyfriend of an old roommate of mine. He would introduce himself as an author, or aspiring author, something like that. Mostly he just sat around reading and smoking. I always thought 'if you're an author, just friggen write something - anything'.

gaius• 17 years ago

Summary: I as an author sure do like money. This makes me cute. Megacorporations like money too. This makes them evil.

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

i didn't get the feeling that the author has a problem with publishers making money. more like she is sad that publishers are no longer willing to allow an author to build a reputation over a number of years, like they used to. and even there, she seems to acknowledge that it's due to economic realities more than anything else.

symptic4• 17 years ago

They did give her that chance though, with a $150,000 initial advance. At least, more of a chance than most authors get.

joshkaufman2• 17 years ago

Very timely article: I'm in the midst of writing my first book, which will be published by a major business imprint in late 2010.

I thought long and hard before signing my trade print contract: my next-best alternative was self-publishing via Lightning Source, which would give me full distribution at Amazon and all Ingram-affiliated bookstores (without shelving, probably), no inventory requirements on my part, ~75% margins for each book sold, and full control over the process. I have enough technical and design skill to pull it off well, and my publishers know it.

I also have a list of ~14k people to sell to, which I established via my blog. Most of the early sales of the book will come from this list, trade contract or no, and most of the ongoing marketing for the book will be my responsibility.

I signed the print contract because my publisher made it worthwhile: six-figure+ advance for worldwide rights, and I retain multimedia rights so I can freely adapt the content for online courses and other programs. That was a good deal for me. If I want to write book #2, they'll have right of first refusal, and if they don't want it for some reason, I have other options I can pursue.

Book contract negotiation is like any other business negotiation: always have options, ensure you're holding the valuable cards before you decide to play, and be willing to walk away from a bad deal.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

That's sage advice. I value all business relations like a poker game; you have to manipulate your way to a win, because that's what everyone is doing to you and if you just don't have the cards for the stake on the table then you fold.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

sarcasm? i like to be authentic 100%. i try not to think to hard about how "business" really works. i like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, rather than think everyone is trying to manipulate a self-centered win.

barmstrong2• 17 years ago

Sounds like you're playing it right...

netcan4• 17 years ago

DO you have a summary you could link to of what it takes to self publish?

joshkaufman2• 17 years ago

Morris Rosenthal's blog: http://www.fonerbooks.com/

Book - "Print-On-Demand Book Publishing": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0972380132/

Excellent resources, and Morris is very generous with his experience and advice. Highly recommended.

cstross2• 17 years ago

Let me just note in passing that her first book advance was for $150,000.

That's not midlist; that's indicative of a publisher taking serious aim on the New York Times bestseller list.

Average first novel advances in SF/F fiction are on the order of US $7500. Average n'th book advances for agented authors are around $17,500.

Of course, there's a power law at work here; about 1% of the authors get 50% of the advances. But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it.

adamhowell3• 17 years ago

"But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it."

Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"?

It took Twain 8 years to write Huck Finn and it was finally published when he was 49. He wrote 100s of small stories under pseudonyms to make ends meet until then. Today, he wouldn't have ever finished it, and we'd be without one of the best books ever written.

robotrout2• 17 years ago

I'm delighted that you like "Huck Finn". In my opinion, it's not his best work, nor was it his "big break", by any means.

Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for.

Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished prior to the book that you enjoyed. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html

cstross2• 17 years ago

Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"?

Yes. In the eyes of your editor's boss, the VP (Marketing), you have blown it if your first book doesn't break even on P&E. Break-even comes some time before you earn out the advance, but even so: if you don't break even on your first contract they'll drop you like a hot potato. Especially if someone gambled $1.5M of the corporate turnover on you and lost!

Assuming an average royalty rate of 10% -- it varies from 6% up to 15% in commercial fiction, depending on print run, format, phase of the moon, elevator clauses, and so on, but 10% is about right for a big hardcover run followed by a metric buttload of paperbacks -- then you can multiply the author's advance by ten to get a handle on the amount of turnover the publisher was betting on her. Which in her case was on the order of a million dollars.

Her final tally: 10K hardcovers and paperbacks sold. Even if those 10K sales were 100% hardcover at undiscounted list, they didn't turn over $0.24M (and more likely they broke down into something like 2500 hc and 7500 mmpb, in which case total turnover for the book was more like $100K). Actual profits for the publisher are typically about the same as the author's advance (a lot of money goes into the pockets of the distributors and retailers). So they were looking to make about $150K in profit, and instead made $10K and lost $150K on the advance (not to mention another $100K on the unsold copies they pulped).

If they'd given her a $10K advance they might have patted her on the head and said "there there, dear, let's try again, shall we?" But you don't get a second chance if you lose big right off the block. The usual response is to bury it deep (before someone higher up notices the oopsie and fires the responsible party).

In today's publishing industry, you're only ever as good as your last book. And if Mark Twain was alive and writing today he'd be an embittered blogger.

mtts• 17 years ago

Methinks the serious issues the author raises would have benefited from a better written article.

Even though it's a subject that interests me greatly, I found this nearly impossible to get through on account of the fragmentation.

alan-crowe• 17 years ago

I was frustated because the artilce talked money but not economics. If 10% of people are readers and read ten books a year, and 1% are authors and write one book a year, average sales are 100 books. Yikes!

It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days, but if twice as many people want to write as 20 years ago, how does that work out? Do average sales halve? Is it possible to write a novel that is in some absolute sense better than a novel of 20 years ago, so people change their priorities and read a book instead of going bowling? I doubt it. The author is on friendly terms with her fellow authors, but it seems likely that they are in zero-sum competition with each other and all the other authors out there.

She gives the impression that it has got harder to earn a living as an author, which makes me guess that more people are trying to earn a living that way, but she leaves me to guess. How many competitors does she have? With inelastic demand, supply becomes the key number. I think that Charles Brown said "God loves authors, he made so many of them" with bitter irony.

h_operator• 17 years ago

"It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days,"

Yeah: see Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-pub... .

stevoski• 17 years ago

Why, oh why, would she write this anonymously? Does she not realise that an article like this, getting passed around the Internet, finding its way to HN and personal blogs, is a great way to get immense publicity? Publicity == sales.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

It's only good publicity if you can get published. Outing the corporate nature of the friendly looking book publishers is a sure way to get every editor in an exceptionally small market to blacklist you, you're then fucked and have to start selling primarily to a foreign market where the editors have no clue who you are.

netcan4• 17 years ago

What has she said that's so unforgivable?

The value of her advances? That she liked/ didn't like editor A or agent B, the names of whom you would need to do detective work to find out? Her opinion of the industry?

barmstrong2• 17 years ago

Fascinating article.

My biggest take away from this is that the traditional publishing industry is no longer the route to go.

Basically, if you want to be a writer today you should keep your day job and just blog. If you blog is successful you'll have a much easier time turning it into a book (almost as simple as sorting posts by most popular and sending to a publisher).

Lulu.com is a great option as well for self publishing. You've got to self-publish (blog, lulu.com, etc) until you're successful. Only after you're successful should you look at traditional publishing I think.

dagw• 17 years ago

Has anybody actually tried to serialize a novel in a blog? Has anybody done so successfully. Turning a humour or rant blog into a humour or rant book can (and has) worked. I've yet to see it done for any other kind of writing.

chromatic• 17 years ago

Serializing a good novel would be difficult for anyone who hasn't plotted the whole thing in advance, isn't incredibly lucky, or doesn't approach writing the same way as Tom Robbins.

My first drafts are decent, but the first stage of editing is vital to add coherence and fix plot holes. (Imagine if the season 3.5 of BSG had some sort of planning; it would have been much, much better.)

forensic• 17 years ago

People do it in all genres except fiction. There are tons of non-fiction blogs that get published by just printing out the words and putting them on the shelf. I've ordered books from bloggers expecting to get new content (lol, pg comes to mind with Hackers & Painters - but I'm actually referring to other writers who don't explicitly tell you.) and I'm kind of disappointed when it's just a printout of their most famous blog posts.

sorbus• 17 years ago

There are lots of examples, if you look around - but I'm not sure how many of them were successful, as I haven't looked for data on that.

John Dies at the End was originally published in a serial form online, though it has since been taken offline. It's been published, and is going into its ... second printing, I think, soon. From what I've heard, the fanbase is quite devoted (at one point, copies were sold for >$100 because of how hard it was to get them - the first printing was fairly small).

Ichor Falls, a blog collecting short stories about the titular town, and the weird stuff going on around it, has a book - though that's recent enough that I don't know if it's successful.

I also recall a zombie novel, which was published in serial form online before being published in physical form. Quite good, as I remember. Might have been called Empire - the plot synopsis fits what I remember, but the online serial version doesn't seem to be available any more. Once again, I don't know if it's what you would call successful.

... actually, what's the definition of successful? I would say that it's simply being published, after already been released online for free and building up a fanbase; however, I expect that most others would tie it to sales, or the amount of money the author gets from it.

MaysonL• 17 years ago

Check out http://theamericanapocalypse.blogspot.com/

xiaoma• 17 years ago

She repeatedly made comments about her work being good but her publishers wanting something "commercial". Maybe she should have tried to make something people wanted instead of something she thought they should want.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

It's one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around going into business - people buy what they want. If you deliver what they want, they'll buy from you. If you don't, they won't.

They don't buy what you'd like them to buy, or what you think they should buy, or what you yourself would buy. They buy what they want to buy. If you can line that up with them, you can sell to people.

wallflower• 17 years ago

Supply meeting demand explains why there is now a 'Vampires' book section in Barnes & Noble

http://www.flickr.com/photos/echoman/3883032294/

Also, "Revenue reality of a book on the NY Times best seller list" was about a Vampire genre author

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949044

50 Cent (Vitamin Water) on Business:

> Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply

dan_the_welder• 17 years ago

Sounds exactly like the music industry as my friends describe it to me. Major labels anyway.

danbmil99• 17 years ago

yup. Same prescription: fuck the gatekeepers. But right now, the consumer culture is such that people are simply not in the mood to pay direct dollars for any of the art/entertainment they consume. Yet I still pay > $100 a month for crap-ass cable with fake HD and shows I hate.

Something has to change.

netcan4• 17 years ago

Interesting read. A few thoughts

* Lamenting that 'publishing is a business' or 'ROI is everything to them' inevitably sounds whiny. Authors seem to be very aware (probably even overestimating in order to preserve ego) that the "I" part is very important. As much as she seems desperate for an advance, she obviously knows that large advance = large promotion budget & wants both.

* Her books seem to have failed to make anyone money. It's not that everyone but the author got paid. She got a slice of a small pie.

* Authors get paid so little because of how badly they want to be writers. This is actually evidence of supply-demand at work in job markets, something that is hard to come by. Without knowing any numbers, one might predict that garbage collectors get paid more than writers, professors, etc. No one want to collect garbage & lot of people wants to write. Supply of writers is high, price is low.

* Apart from the financial consequences, I imagine it would be very frustrating for a writer to live in this world of gatekeepers where you need permission all the time.

* I think this frustration is what makes writers sound whiny. Since they are constantly trying to get over the gatekeeper barrier, it seems like this is what is standing between them & crazy success. This lets them avoid the sobering ratio: # of books successful per year/ # of books written per year.

* Writers need to play a different game. Seth Godin/ Tim Ferris/ 1000 True Fans/ Trent Reznor/ etc. inspired (depending on taste) direct promotion. Also, try to make money indirectly. The Author cites how being a published author is already being a mini-celebrity. It might be possible to capitalise on this some way that isn't just selling books.

darien• 17 years ago

If she had used her real name, instead of the pseudonym, in this salon.com article her books would sell better.

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

The article gave the tag line for one book as "The much-anticipated new book from the best-selling author of 'Y Marks the Spot'!" so I assumed they'd written a book of that name. But despite having found a couple of authors to conenct to the name both were male. Then I thought perhaps it was a pseudo-title and looked at "title:spot".

Also looked at 150000 advances but that didn't really get me anywhere either despite bringing up that the author of "the g-spot" got that advance but that's the wrong year.

Her friend "Patty" is a sort of lead but I don't want to know that badly ...

My Google-fu is waning.

balding_n_tired• 17 years ago

"Because although I've published books and articles about things most people won't talk about, let alone publish -- my sex life and marriage counseling, my quirky predilections and unpopular politics, my worst mistakes and no-longer-secret yearnings"

Won't talk about? If only.

The confessions of a semi-successful author

Related Stories