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Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
No, I meant the opposite. Back then the advance system was not broke. Not sure how long it actually took to earn out for her. But if she didn't earn out, then the risk was not painfully high. The gap is widening a lot between the rich and the poor. Imagine for a second that instead of 12K they would have shelled out a 120k advance for her - more in line with the difference between todays below 20k typical, 7 figure high advance. Go even crazier and imagine that book didn't come close to earning out, not even breaking even. In that case it would have taken ten times as many smaller books to make up for it.
No, Anne Rice was an example of how the system wasn't broken, and now it is.
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ok. I really haven't seen any evidence that the advance system is currently broken. Advances are based on what the publisher thinks they will make. If the book earns out the advance, then everything is good, even if it's a 7 figure advance. There has always been a big gap between the best sellers and the average author. This is nothing new.
I've read that the average mid list author sells around 15K copies of a particular book. If you sell 15K copies, then yea, there is going to be a pretty big difference between what you pull in and what some author who sells a million copies pulls in. I'm not sure why anyone who consider that either surprising or an issue.
If a publisher gives out a $100,000 advance and the author sells 5K copies, then the publisher takes a big loss, likely someone gets fired and everyone learns a good lesson in economics. If you can't correctly gauge the market, then you probably aren't going to last long as a publisher.