Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Hrm, RSE may have beat me to it.  Anyway....
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. |
Mrs. Viehl's royalty statement provides a perfect example.
Her publisher paid her a $50,000 advance and an 8% royalty.
Another publisher may have offered her only a $25,000 advance but at a 10% royalty.
She sold 65,000 books with a cover price of $8 ($520,000 total) and earned roughly $40k in royalties.
Had she taken the other publisher's deal she would have earned $65k in royalties, and long ago paid back the advance.
What was each publisher's cost in royalties?
The second publisher obviously paid 10%.
Mrs. Viehl's actual publisher paid 50k for 65,000 books ($520,000 total) or 9.6%.
So Mrs. Viehl hasn't earned back her advance, nevertheless, and this is the point,
her publisher is better off even though she hasn't earned back the advance. Thus the claim that authors not earning back their advance is harming the publisher is a myth/half-truth. A publisher can have every single one of its authors fail to earn back their advances and still be making more than a publisher who has 100% of its authors earning back their advances.
The other costs of creating the book is just a redherring. It plays no roll whatsoever in advances and royalties. If it cost $2 to produce the book it wouldn't matter if a publisher offered the $50,000/8% or if they offered the $25,000/10% option. If it costs $3 to produce the book it doesn't change anything. Even if it cost the publishers $10 per book it wouldn't change anything -- the publisher would be broke but the logic is still sound.