Quote:
Originally Posted by cstross
Yes to both. We (my agent and I) tried to do the non-exclusive thing on our last contract round: they made a deal-breaker of the exclusive rights. I've considered selling to Baen ... but I'm not prepared to take the 50% pay cut it would entail. (Moving publisher is pretty damned serious -- it's the equivalent of changing your day job. And under some circumstances it can involve the equivalent of losing seniority, as well as angling for a promotion.) For the time being, I just have to grit my teeth and keep nudging in the right direction. And I'm not the only author in that position.
(There's other stuff going on that I can't write about in public. If you run into me at an SF convention, join me for a beer and I'll talk about it instead  ) |
I presume that the "50% pay cut" is in terms of the advance, not in terms of "total long-term royalties." Right? I don't think that there's any reason to expect your books to sell worse over time via a different publisher.
On the other hand, a 50% smaller advance is a big, big, BIG deal. It socks you both in terms of the time value of the money
and in terms of certainty of income. That's a really really hard problem to wrestle with. And if Tor will eventually get it w.r.t. eBooks, there'd be no (MobileRead-related) reason to make the switch.
I sure hope that Tor does wind up with reasonable eBook policies. After all, who in the publishing industry
wouldn't want to bring in the equivalent of their hard-cover revenues
without negative impact on existing revenue from paper sales? And, as a reader, I want to be able to buy reasonably-priced DRM-free, multi-format eBooks.
Xenophon
P.S. I'm all too familiar with pay cuts as a result of job changes. I took a
6x pay cut
to go back to grad school for my Ph.D. Now that I'm done, my salary as a post-doc goes up by a factor of three -- all the way back to 50% of what I made in industry... 10 years ago!
I can't wait to get back to a real job...