Why Advances Matter
With 11 days to go, the First (Pro) Novel Survey is up to more than 200 responses, which is wonderful! But it’s also generated some interesting feedback in comments and e-mails. Some people are upset that small press, self-published, and e-book authors can’t participate. Others say advances are part of a dying publishing model. There’s been worry that advances can actually harm an author who doesn’t earn out. To top things off, I’m told I’m completely out of touch with the current state of publishing.
Let’s start with the basics. An advance is an advance against your royalties. When I sold Goblin Quest to DAW, they paid me $4000, half on signing and half on publication. (Slightly lower than the average, because Goblin Quest was a reprint of a small press title.) For the sake of easy math, let’s say I got 50 cents in royalties for every copy that sold. So for the first 8000 books, I got nothing — I had already received that money up front. But once we sold book 8001, I officially earned out the advance and began receiving royalties.
Even if I never sold those 8000 copies, I keep the advance. Nor would I be blacklisted for failing to earn out. A lot of books never earn out their advance. Understand that the publisher doesn’t necessarily lose money on those books. The math is a little messy, but publishers can and do still make a profit on books that don’t earn out.
Will publishers get a little cranky if they pay you a six-figure advance and you only sell 10,000 books? Well, sure. It might mean smaller advances in the future. You might need to adopt a pseudonym (as many others have done), or change to a different publisher. But it doesn’t mean the end of your career.
Remember the advance represents an investment on the part of the publisher, and I want my publisher as invested as possible in my book. There are never any guarantees, but which do you think will get more of a sales push, the book where they paid the author $5000 up front, or the one where they paid $50,000?
Finally, there’s the fact that royalties take a long time to show up. Let’s assume your book is going to earn out, which means you’re eventually going to get the same amount of money either way. Would you rather get that money today, or wait and get it in a year or two or more?
Writing is not a hobby to me. It’s a career, one that helps me pay the mortgage and feed my family. My advances mean I know I’m going to receive a certain minimum amount on each book. I can start to plan and budget, meaning I’m better able to make a living with this. (Now if only my publisher would offer a health plan for its authors…)
As for the frustration and anger that I’m shutting out small-press and self-published authors with this survey? Yes. Yes I am. I’ve got nothing against small press and self publishing. (Please see above, where I first sold Goblin Quest to a small press.) But that’s not what I was interested in for this survey. I wanted to learn more about how authors break in with bigger, advance-paying publishers. If you have a problem with that … well, it’s your problem. Deal with it.
KatG
March 5, 2010 @ 12:26 pm
The idea that small presses are engaged in radical new modes of publishing is kind of weird. Small presses generally operate exactly like larger ones, except on a smaller scale and with no or very small advances. The big concern of a small press is getting into bookstores. The advances concern may be because publishers have been trumpeting a lot in the press about how author advances cost them a lot and make them unhappy. But the advances are estimates by the publishers as to how much they think authors will earn. If they’re wrong, they just revise their estimates on future acquisitions. The era when publishers had to pay mega-advances to keep the handful of bestselling authors around is long gone since the 1980’s.
There are obviously some people who are going around spreading a lot of misinformation about publishing, knowingly or unknowningly, and creating this “Evil Empire” view of fiction publishing that seems to be based more on things that happened in the music industry than in book publishing. All these theories that authors are ordered about by editors, ripped off by publishers who sit around cashing checks and hold back technological progress, blacklisting authors and flogging them if they don’t earn out their advances, and that small presses and self-publishing are the only salvation and will bust through imaginary barriers to make bookstores sell them or create the glorious, free but somehow profitable e-marketplace, etc. — it’s all very strange and not reality based. And it’s getting dumped on authors who are the most visible faces of fiction publishing on the Net.