How much does the average author get paid?

[bob_ninja]

Originally Posted by nekokami

....
The publishing "gate" is probably too small right now, but that's partly because there's very little money to be made in publishing midlist books. Despite the fact that many of the costs would still be the same for ebooks as for pbooks, I think there are a lot of inefficiencies in the pbook system that could be eliminated and might rescue the midlist catalog, e.g. paper/printing/binding, shipping, "stripped" returns, etc. I don't happen to think that good editorial services are one of the processes that ought to be eliminated. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Why does money have to be involved at all?????

Say a "midlist" author wants to publish a book but has no idea if it is any good. S(he) can simply post it online without any processing, editing,... some sort of very simple online store, or some community. Now nobody may read it ever, which is fine. Or few people may give it a try. Maybe s(he) persuades some friends to read it. It costs them nothing to attach their raiting, comments, etc. It may get good enough ratings that some (semi) professional takes a look at it. In my community model it would be one of the community members, gives it a read and attached comments. Now the book has "certified" comments from a community member, so it carries more weight. And so on. It may eventually have enough audience/interest to warrant editing and proper publishing, etc.

The point is using this WWW technology you can start vritually cost free. Sure a lot of junk may show up, but then decent content is bound to get some attention at some point while the rest keeps langushing.

Now for you and me, having a couple of kids, etc. not having enough time, we can simply go to "established" authors and books based on the community rankings. When I am retired and have more time I may start exploring more. etc.

So there is room for both, high quality books from well known authors having the best publishers as well as unknowns starting out. Hey, I just got a terrabyte hard disk. Certainly disk storage is cheap

[DaleDe]

Anybody can publish today. It doesn't even cost a huge amount. I published a book via POD publishing using AuthorHouse and retain all rights. I don't know why people think they can't publish if they want to. Of course anybody can also set up a web site and mobipocket and Amazon will also allow self publishing. Where's the problem?

[tompe]

Originally Posted by bob_ninja

Say a "midlist" author wants to publish a book but has no idea if it is any good. S(he) can simply post it online without any processing, editing,... some sort of very simple online store, or some community. Now nobody may read it ever, which is fine. Or few people may give it a try. Maybe s(he) persuades some friends to read it. It costs them nothing to attach their raiting, comments, etc. It may get good enough ratings that some (semi) professional takes a look at it. In my community model it would be one of the community members, gives it a read and attached comments. Now the book has "certified" comments from a community member, so it carries more weight. And so on. It may eventually have enough audience/interest to warrant editing and proper publishing, etc.

Well, I would not like to read the unedited version if another version that can be significantly different will be published later.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

The only real "problem" as I see it, is the Big Publishers still have the lock on mass market promotion.

Big pub has the money and the connections to market their material effectively, in all of the markets where people go first and last to buy a book. Their well-established system effectively keeps indie promotion at arm's length, and since the mass public sees the big pubs' promotions right off, they rarely go looking much past that, and indies go largely unseen.

Online indies (like me) may turn out a good product that entertains people, but without the big pub marketing machine, the chances that very many people will discover your work are still very small. Sure, people may recommend to others, and you'll pick up some new customers... but compared to the marketing carpet-bombing that pubs can do, it still won't amount to much.

What indies need is a better, more comprehensive marketing system that stands up to the big pubs' work and promotes their work nationally, even globally, in an effective way. The big double-hurdle is convincing enough consumers that an indie is potentially as good as a publisher-promoted name, and worth checking out... "double" because part of it is convincing them, the other part is getting a lot of people to convince. The former usually just takes cleverness, but the latter almost always requires lots of money.

A single author can conceivably do all of their own writing, checking, editing, rewriting, packaging and production. (I get someone to help me edit, and I do all the rest.) But without effective promotion, all of that is just spinning wheels.

[nekokami]

I don't know... maybe this applies more to "mainstream" fiction than the genres I usually read. I suppose some marketing must be happening in the world of science fiction, but I'm not seeing much of it. I seem to find out more about new authors from friends, blogs and discussion boards, and occasionally Amazon recommendations than any other means.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

Consider the explosion in publishing in the last several years - of course as Mr. Carver pointed out most of those titles are pod's that may sell a hundred titles and make the author happy

That's not exactly what I meant. I was referring to books that made the professional cut, were published, went out of print, and later came out as POD reprints from a small or alternative press. There are thousands of them, and most of them never see the light of a bookstore shelf. You can find them if you look specifically for them online, but they're probably expensive, especially compared to a cheap used copy.

I don't know any professional writer who's happy with sales of a hundred copies. Or less. But that's frequently what happens.

Compare that to earlier years, when an eventual pb reissue might sell thousands of new copies. It's not that it never still happens, but fewer and fewer midlist authors can reach that fruit now.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

SF author Mike Resnick did a rough-and-ready back-of-an-enveloped calculation some years ago that suggested that of the 1,2000 or so active members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, maybe 100 make $100,000 or more per year. Change that figure to $500,000 or more, and it's probably 25 members.

Hi Rob -- Nice to see you here!

I actually suspect the numbers are lower than that. I've noticed that Mike Resnick, at least in his SFWA Bulletin columns, seems to have a cheery outlook that may in part be buoyed by his own commercial success. I don't know that anyone has hard figures, but I was skeptical of those numbers when I saw them, and I still am.

Jeff

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

A single author can conceivably do all of their own writing, checking, editing, rewriting, packaging and production. (I get someone to help me edit, and I do all the rest.)

Most writers want to do what they do best--write. Not become publishers. Of course, there's a lot of publishing-related work involved, but once you're into being a publisher, it's not even the same ballgame. Even the limited free promotion I'm doing right now (see free ebooks in my sig line) is taking an enormous amount of time and energy that could be going into writing the next book. It's a hard tradeoff to judge.

And I cannot emphasize too highly the need for good, professional editing. Every writer needs it, even the best.

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by starrigger

T
I don't know any professional writer who's happy with sales of a hundred copies. Or less. But that's frequently what happens.

You are perfectly right about the above - my point was that now the market is flooded at the POD end by tons of new books, mostly self published and not selling a lot, but still there are interesting books out there - I bought quite a few Lulu, iUniverse and such titles that I enjoyed a lot and there are several authors I follow that developed series that sell enough this way to keep them happy to produce more - they may not be pros in the sense of making a living that way true, but again many famous writers never were either, while making tons of money selling Dune volume 177 does not qualify someone as a good writer.

The market has changed and is changing dramatically - for readers in a great way, for writers who knows, future will determine that, though authors like Scalzi, Stross, Doctorow are doing quite well, and probably would not have done so under the old "castle gate" system..

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by starrigger

Most writers want to do what they do best--write. Not become publishers. Of course, there's a lot of publishing-related work involved, but once you're into being a publisher, it's not even the same ballgame. Even the limited free promotion I'm doing right now (see free ebooks in my sig line) is taking an enormous amount of time and energy that could be going into writing the next book. It's a hard tradeoff to judge.

And I cannot emphasize too highly the need for good, professional editing. Every writer needs it, even the best.

No argument there... I've got 2 stories waiting to be writ, but the various other duties of self-promo (like website updating and redesign, as well as investigating other promo options) are keeping me from them as we speak... er, write.

Maybe I'd churn out more stories, and they would be that much better, if I could get a publisher or put an editor on retainer. But since I cannot, I make do with the work I must do myself.

[Greg Anos]

There's gotta be a way to skin this rattler. Look at all the hoorah over the free TOR.com e-book promotion. People wanting to buy e-book product and being turned away. It seems to me that there needs to be some kind of consortium of writers, to have a common website, a common link to POD, and common marketing. This would lower the overhead for each individual writer, while providing a better experience for the end customer. Just some ideas on my part.

[bob_ninja]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

The only real "problem" as I see it, is the Big Publishers still have the lock on mass market promotion.
....

ditto
I couldn't have said it better

[dstampe]

I have to agree with earlier posts, a filter is needed to weed out the garbage and to apply some quality control to the text. Otherwise reading will just not be fun at all. Some entity has to serve this role in a consistent way, and some entity has to bring the book to the attention of those who are most likely to enjoy it. Right now this is the publishers, and and distribution method that excludes publishers must have a successful replacement for both these functions. Downloads and DRM are only relevant in that these support the current mechanism that supplies a filtered and consistent stream of good literature (authors as filtered by publishers).

Before my vision deteriorated and I got allergies to old paper, I used to buy and read lots of SF from various used book vendors. Even though this material had been "filtered" already by being published, I'd still only choose 10% of what was on the shelf, and only really enjoy reading about 50% of what I bought, At least 25% was abandoned after an attempt at reasding it. So either my stndards are high, or my tastes narrow, and I have other things to di than read bad books (such as re-reading good books). Several times in the past decades (mid-80's, for example) I gave up purchasing and reading new SF books and magazine because the genre had goten so far away from what I enjoyed. There were probably a few good books out there, but I wasn't going to waste time finding those in the ocean of trash. If the ebook market was flooded with a wave of low-quality material, without book reviews or solid genre classification, I might very well steer away from reading new ebooks unless I recognized the author's names. And so, I suspect, would most readers.

My own introduction to new books and authors has come from several sources, listed here in order of enjoyable reads per eyeball "hit" during the search process:

1) Works by known authors I've read and enjoyed. This has to count for at least 80% of books I've purchased.

2) "Classic" authors of the genre, learned from various reviews and writeups, and to a lesser extend from used-book browsing.

3) "Year's Best" and award anthologies. Typically these contain short stories and novellas first publisheds in SF magazines (see below) and selected by the collectionns editor(s). These are usually the "cream of the cream" and the only question is whether they match my tastes.

3a) "Themed" anthologies where lesser-known authors can play. These often contain a few known authors and a lot of unknowns. However, I find a lot of stories are "written to order" by authors based on a description sent by the editor, and the resulting uninspired work makes even good authors look bad. So it's less likely that a new author will be discovered here.

4) SF magazines (although not as much recently). These are probably the biggest source of new talent out there, and in the past were where almost all new writers started. Publishing in one of these is a gateway to wider attention, including anthologies and collections. Of course, I find that 70% of what's in these magazines does not really match my tastes or is not up to the expectations set by reading only the best works out there. (Still, these need to be supported).

5) Random acquisitions such as thumbing through book in a bookstore based on title and cover art. Those get you to pick up the book and read the back blurb, and maybe scan a few pages. This is one area that the Internet has to work to duplicate, but I think Anazon has some good ways to replace this experience or browing with one that is even more rich and cross-linked.

The above ranking is just to illustrate that filtering counts. Except for buying books by a known author, I buy books based on someone else's filtering, above and beyond the threshold set by simply being selected by publication. The more levels of selection, the more likely I am to purchase multiple books by an author based on a single work, and the greater the probability of enjoying the reading experience. I'd say the chances of buying into a new author (at least when i could still handle pbooks) would be 25% from and award or "Year's Best" collection, 4% from an SF magazine, and less than 1% or less from a book that catches my eye in a bookstore.



I'm not yet complately comfortable with "community" or "open-source" type models of quality filtering. These are fine if some more "professional" filtering has been done first (publication) but might be less reliable if not.

For example, I'm reasonably comfortable with using the reviews on Amazon, as long as there are more than one and I know something about the author's style. Multiple reviews show a consesus and that people are motivated (positive or negative) to post.

I trust the "professional" reviewer's writeups rather less, as the suspicion of kickbacks and industry self-gratification (i.e. the movie industry) come to mind. (Also, I have the suspicion many reviewers are more interested in talking about their own weird ideas about the world as reflected in the book than in the book itself, or are judging the book by standards other than those that result in an enjoyable read. I'm afraid many things came off their pedestals for me when I realized, in the middle of a mandatory English course in university, that the point of such activities was to dissect a story into meaningless twitching fragments, then reassemble them into a mosaic that proved some obsure thesis about the author or his times. Sorry, but I read for entertainment, and when the author starts showing through the pages of a book it's time to stop or the fun goes away. I made this mistake in reading most of the works of Clifford Simak in a few weeka, and I probably won't be able to enjoy anything else by him for a few years now).


The major concern I have with "community" reviewers of raw manuscripts is influenced by what I've seen and experienced in the open-source and community software scene. (Note that I'm not bashing the open-source movement, it's a great thing for creativity and learning, but like everything else in life it has its strengths and weaknesses). There are lots of volunteers with varying amounts time to spends and varying half-lives on their motivation, and these can code something up with different levels of talent and skill, but in the end projects thrive on consistency of quality and direction. You need one core person (or a team of them) that live and breathe the project, to give direstion and hold everyone together and headed in the same direction. Otherwise you end up with multiple incompatible versions (editing criteria) and much time is spent in everyone rewriting each other's code (flame wars) instead of moving forward.

Quality is a huge issue with community projects, and big project may require partitioning to prevent the result being determined by the worst performer. For example, looking at Linux, source code, the kernal code is well-coded, lean, and very eductaional to examine. Driver code, on the other hand, varies wildly in quality and often contains a multitude of bugs that simply cannot be fixed because the coding is obscure and the author abandoned the project once a minimum of functionality was met. The difference is that the kernal code was written by the core person or group who devoted years to the task, and most of the drivers were a passing interest that lastesd at most a few months.

There's also the matter of cosnsistentcy, and this is where I think open book reviews might be worst off. Who sets the standards? What are the criteria? Unless there is one or a few reviewers that make the final decision qualitty could vary a lot. But this dedicated core won't have the time to look at everything.

Say a server was set up so volunteers could be assigned manuscripts to review. It's certain that some books would be returned quickly and well reviewed, some would be poorly reviewed, and many would never get reviewed at all. Personal tastes would vary widley as well, aswould literacy. Finally, how a book was judges would change a lot as the reviewer gains more experience and begins to learn review techniques. I don't have experience here, but I would bet it takes time to learn to read a work critically while also predicting how a casual reader would respond to it.

Maybe something could be put together to use volunteers for reviewing, similar to Baen's open reviews. You'd have to farm out each manuscript to multiple people, and part of the review would have to be a rating system on multiple aspects of the manuscript. That way an automated rating could be computed for author feedback and to decide it the manuscript is bumped up to the more dedicated, consistent reviewing core group.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Not that I really have an argument with anything said above... but I will point out that, in all of the published material that you find in a bookstore, not all of that is what I'd consider "high quality" material.

Being published also does not speak to whether or not I want to read the material. There are plenty of books out there, but if they do not represent the type of material you like to read, it makes little difference.

Maybe my tastes have been getting too jaded lately, but I've also been having a harder and harder time finding books I want to read, and authors whose style I like, in the same package. This includes reviewed material, which has not impressed me despite glowing professional reviews. I consider that the publishing system has let me down, as I am not finding what I'm looking for, and am frequently unsatisfied over what I do find. The few authors I enjoy reading these days are often writers whom I'd not even heard of through promotional channels, and just stumbled across on my own (or through a mention of their work online).

Again, not to criticize the publishing system... except to say that it is not the be-all and end-all of quality books. There is room for improvement, and for competition.

[nekokami]

If the reviewers/selectors aren't going to be paid by somebody, and are all volunteers, how does one know which reviewers to rely on? I'm not just talking about quality of reviews (or of writing), but compatibility. For example, take a look at the threads here at Mobileread about Terry Pratchett. Many, many people like his writing. But not all of them like all of his books equally. I personally like the stories with the witches, and find the wizards tiresome. At least one person has posted that they have exactly the opposite view. And here we're talking about the same author!

What I'd like to see is a system that matches readers with other reviewers based on books they've liked in common (e.g. the way LibraryThing works), plus the ability to rate reviewers. As for getting good, well-written reviews posted, how about something like the Amazon referral system? Let's say I'm looking at a review site, and someone who likes a lot of the same books I do is recommending Book X. The review appears in my recommended list because of the similarities between their interests and mine, and I read it and decide to buy Book X. If there's a "click here to buy Book X" link at the bottom of the review, and that's automatically tied to that reviewer's Amazon account (or whatever), then they get a referral bonus for every copy sold. Now, if I read the book and decide the reviewer was out of their head when they wrote the review, I can come back into the system and give them negative feedback, as with eBay (or even Amazon again, which has the "was this review helpful to you," but doesn't require purchase before rating the review). Negative feedback on a reviewer causes their future reviews to drop in rank in my "recommended" list-- and maybe other "recommended" lists, as well, to some effect. But positive review feedback causes future reviews by that reviewer to float higher up in my list, and lots of positive feedback gets reviewers to the top of the overall lists, where new people joining the system are likely to see them.

How does an independent author come to the attention of these reviewers? Let's assume the system takes submissions (and checks for plagiarism), and holds them in a queue, ready to process through Feedbooks into whatever format is desired (or even POD). An author could send a reviewer email or private messages through the system asking for their works to be read, but that would get pretty overwhelming once a reviewer got well enough known. Newer, less well-known reviewers might have less incoming email, but wouldn't get an author as wide coverage, either.

Authors might form writer's workshop groups, and senior authors (who had achieved high ratings within the system) might recommend works by newer authors to reviewers who they think might like them. This would also help to provide some of the editorial process that publishers currently provide. There is still the question of how new writers would find workshops to join, but perhaps managing that could be helped by this system, too.

I don't have all the answers. But I do think that editing and reviewing, like writing, are talents that mature with time and practice, and I'm not sure I want all my fiction to be edited or reviewed solely by enthusiastic amateurs. Whatever ends up replacing the current publishing system, I think it will need to compensate those who excel, to encourage excellence.