Hrm, RSE may have beat me to it.
Anyway....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daithi
Myth (half-truth) #1: Most authors don't even earn back their advance.
This isn't exactly a myth, but it is a half-truth. The implication when the publishing industry, or one of the fanboys, make this claim is that the publishing industry is either losing money on that underperforming author, or that the authors making their advances are carrying the underperforming authors that failed to make back their advances. None of that is true!
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If you were basing your claim on actual numbers, you might qualify as a myth-buster. However...
Lynn Viehl (thank you to whoever linked her blog page to MR
), who has published several sci-fi books, posted her
royalty statement and an analysis thereof online. She got a $50k advance, 8% royalties on paperback, sold around 65k copies. She earned $40k in royalties, $13k of which was held in case of returns.
Or to put it bluntly: she sold 65,000 books and hasn't earned her advance yet.
If she had a 16% royalty rate instead of 8%, she'd still need to sell around 40,000 copies to officially cover the $50k advance; assuming a 30% reserve against returns, she'd have to sell 65k hardcovers before getting an actual royalty check.
There is a separate issue of, "are writers selling enough to cover the publisher's expenditure of the advance." But the advance is not the only cost -- so it does not make sense to isolate just that cost and, on that basis, pass judgment on how much profit the system makes. I.e. when you ask "did the publisher make money on that book?" you
must include
all the costs of the book in that analysis. That's also going to have a complex answer, as the publishers have all kinds of overhead costs that are spread out over dozens of titles (e.g. office space, taxes, staff, legal).
It's pretty well understood that publishing has razor-thin margins. As informative as Ms Viehl's blog post is, it's only a part of the story.