[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

For a big-name author.

Re-read the article; Alex Shakar reportedly got a $300k advance for his first novel. All he'd published before then were some highly respected short stories.

Also, peruse this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/bo...w/Meyer-t.html

$300k isn't necessarily standard. But if you get that kind of advance and only sell 10,000 copies, should you be surprised if you get the axe?

Or, to put it another way: Let's say you write 1 book a year, accept low advances, and consistently earn $15,000 a year for your publisher. For a small publisher with, say, $1 million in revenues, that's very good and they'll want to keep you happy. For a large publisher with $300 million in revenues, that's a drop in the bucket. They may keep you around, but will they put a lot of resources behind you? Should they?

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

And remember that this is an advance.... If the publisher loses that bet -- that is, if the book never earns out its advance -- whose fault is that?

I don't want to shock you here, but yes I know what an advance is and how it works.

There is no single culprit if a book fails to sell enough to earn back its advance. Authors and agents are demanding high advances, and publishers are giving it to them, and no one really knows beforehand how many copies any particular book is going to sell.

For example, perhaps Alex Shakar would've done better if he started out taking a $100,000 advance and aimed for a higher royalty rate, or chose to be the "big fish in a little pond" at a smaller publisher. Whose "fault" is it that he signed for $300k at Harper Collins?

The reality is that authors, agents and large publishers have collectively priced themselves out of the "long term hold" mentality.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

That's one of the reasons I keep harping on Baen, even those I dislike their politics: They've figured out how to keep the money coming.

So have the larger publishers. And part of it is dropping authors who don't have large enough sales.

There is no single approach that works for all books. It's a mistake to assume that all publishers would do great things if they worked like Baen (or that every publisher should try to turn into Penguin).

Nor, I might add, do Baen's business practices make the slightest difference to me. When I read a book, I'm going to judge it based on its merits, not its provenance.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math. So is the current state of the publishing industry. They're still acting like the entertainment climate is the same as it was when books were the only game in town.

Oh, please. Spare us the default publisher-bashing.

Publishing has radically changed over the past 30-40 years. The blockbuster mentality is a relatively recent shift in publishing.

Nor is pushing midlist authors to smaller publishers a bad thing for, well, anyone. The big publishers are cutting their costs and getting more efficient. Many authors will be happier at smaller publishers, who can give a midlist author more attention. The only people who lose out here, really, are the agents; with the smaller advances, the agent gets less up-front.

In other words, to the reader this is essentially a meaningless change. I mean, really. Without looking -- who publishes Jack Kerouac? Laura Hillenbrand? Mark Twain's or Keith Richards' autobiography? And even if you do somehow know this off the top of your head (I don't, btw), I seriously doubt that even avid readers know or care.

By the way, books haven't been the "only game in town" for well over a century. I'm gonna guess that the publishers of all sizes might be aware of other media by now.