Best Selling Authors and Self Publishing

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by avantman42

I pointed out to Steve that I thought he'd made a mistake. Since you had only implied, rather than outright stated, that advances are high enough to remove worries about paying bills . . .

Yes I made a mistake.

Except in cases where your family is going hungry, personality may be the main determinant of worries over paying bills. Plenty of millionaires worry about paying bills. But this is just a detail. Advances transfer risk from author to publisher, albeit not to the point of eliminating authorial financial worries.

To me as someone who has worked at the same location, for the same employer, for 33 years, authorship seems financially stressful, in the extreme. By my standards, it sounds stressful even for an author with a part-time day job, and who never writes past the first chapter without first getting an advance obtained on the basis of a book proposal. Even if an advance lets you know what you will be paid, you don't know how long it will take to write, or how many rewrites your editor (or your own standards) will insist upon.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

In the non fiction world, that $80K check might let a professor spend the summer researching his book rather than teaching summer classes.

Dare I say that the real benefit to me, as a reader, might be similar with a $10K check? That's still more than a university press is likely to offer. And it means that author is going to have to earn the advance by producing, with editorial input, a better-written product AKA gearing the book to middle-brow readers such as myself.

Originally Posted by avantman42

All that still doesn't answer the question of what the current average advance is. $80,000 was apparently the average in 2012. That was three years ago. Has it increased? Decreased? Stayed the same?

Whomever knows isn't saying. A semi-wild guess is that median advance amounts track the economy, going up and down, more abruptly than salaries.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Referring back to Ms Aubrey, the papers said that she turned down a 6 figure advance. In reality, the advance was in 3 increments over a period of 3 books and only if the first book sold wonderfully.
So it is possible that 80k was more like 25k.

Similarly, Steve Hamilton got a 7-figure deal after his agent bought his way out of his old contract, but it is a four book deal. So it is really $250k per book, of which his agent get $37K, taxes get another $70K-plus, and each book advance is spread over two years or more. It's relatively good money but he's an award-winning, 20-year veteran. A newcomer isn't going to get that unless he's related to some insider.

A more typical breakdown for a successful tradpub author will look more like this:

http://mainecrimewriters.com/kates-p...-get-published

There are a lot of expenses involved in promoting a book. Many readers (and even writers aspiring to be published) don’t realize how many expenses are not covered by the publisher. For example: designing and maintaining a website, designing and printing publicity materials like flyers and bookmarks, buying copies of the book to give to people who’d helped me during the writing process, and buying copies of galleys to mail out for reviews, along with the expenses of the 3000 miles I put on my car.

And that’s not all. I was lucky enough to have Death Dealer be named an Agatha finalist, so I attended the Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda in June, along with Sleuthfest in Florida in February. With airfare, hotels, and registration, a conference can easily cost a thousand dollars. In addition, I decided to take a chance on hiring a publicist to see if I could break out and get my books greater recognition.

Even when a book earns royalties, publisher routinely pay them only once or twice a year, and usually several months after the money has been earned, and traditionally hold back part of those earnings “against returns.”

The tradpub reality of 2014-15 is nothing like the reality apologists like Shatzkin remember from their good old days of the last century.

[fjtorres]

Just remembered this one:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rex-pi...b_1289487.html

Bet that never happened to Patterson.

Some animals are simply more equal.

[darryl]

Yes. He was treated appallingly, or should I say typically? Or perhaps both words apply. I still feel sorry for his treatment, but less so when I read the elitist rubbish of his preceding post.

See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rex-pi...b_1224578.html

He'd be right at home with Douglas Preston and the boys and girls at Authors United.

Personally I don't like a lot of the reality TV shows and the like which currently dominate television programming. Yes, it would be very easy to call this lowest common denominator stuff and look down on all of those many people who watch and enjoy these programs from the lofty heights of my own superior taste. Except, of course, that it is not up to me to make that judgement. The reality is that my tastes are neither superior nor inferior. Simply different in this most subjective of areas.

I read what I enjoy reading, and don't need the advice of any self-appointed literati.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

You also said Hugh Howey publishes chapters not books.

Though I have been known to be mistaken at times.

That's a statement of fact, not my opinion. They are called chapter books, short books that tie together into one longer narrative. It's one of the ways that some indies work the system to generate revenue. Not terribly different than the old serials that were common in magazines and the older movies. It does make a comparison of sales figures between authors difficult if not impossible.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by darryl

I read what I enjoy reading, and don't need the advice of any self-appointed literati.

One side effect of the publishers' insistence on authors maintaining an active online presence is they almost invariably reveal too much of their real selves. And since one of the primary requirements to be a professional writer is a big ego, TMI is not going to go over well.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015...edia-presence/

Too many of those folks--especially the older legacy writers--live in their own little worlds far from the reality of their readers.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Maybe not surprise, more like the Who's Who.



I'm quite sure you made a number of comments about indies in general. That is how I read Cinisajoy's statement -- not that you were targeting each one specifically.

But then, you knew that already.


EDIT: And yeah, the Hugh Howey putdown. For reference:

Once again, that's not a put down, but a statement of fact. He uses the system to generate revenue. As I said before, that sort of thing has been around since authors first started serializing novels back in the 1800's. People use to be waiting at the docks for the latest installment of some of Dicken's works.

I know that you like to try to put words in my mouth, then start taking swings at the strawman you constructed, but it is quite annoying.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

You are being orthogonal.

My point was, it is very difficult for any indie writer to compete directly with a Collective, whether that collective is Clancy or Patterson.

It is also difficult for an indie to directly compete with J.K. Rowling. Or John Grisham. Or the Bible.




But, critically, neither can John Scalzi. Or most tradpubbed authors.

Yet apparently your takeaway was "Hugh Howey is the/a top-selling indie author". (And to dismissively claim "though a million probably isn't correct. How many authors publish books with traditional publishers in a year. It's got to be far less than 100,000". Clearly you have never heard of a specific very famous figure of speech. Or else you are raising nitpicking to... well, actually, your usual high. Why am I continually surprised?)

I have no idea if he is, all I know that he is:

• popular
• respected
• makes a lot of money
• publicly opinionated on the matter of self-publishing
• respected for that too

On the matter of top sellers, the obvious choices are a handful of thrillers and cheap "romance" that make up their numbers from the vast majority of book buyers who read a book a year and have a gravitational attraction to total dreck (the trad- AND self-pubbed kind).
Witness how 50 Shades was and still is a bestseller. And yes, I did just lump Patterson and Grisham in the same category.

Otherwise-known-as: Why eschwartz Is Depressed With The Human Race.
Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.

He's the one people point to, if there is someone better for comparison sake, then I'm all ears. Few authors are willing to share the details of their financial life with the public, that's why Scalzi's information is so interesting. It provides a snapshot of hard data when one is peering into the murky world of author revenue and book sales.

Several people in this thread seem to have hurled themselves at the conclusion that I am anti indie, apparently because if one isn't all in for indies, one must be opposed. I'm not anti-indie. There are several indie and former indie authors that I read. Some of my favorite authors go with the hybrid method (some books traditional, some indie). Given how hard it is to make a living at being an author, whatever works is fine by me. What I object to is the process of shifting through all the indie authors trying to find ones that I like. I don't have the time or patience for it. Other people seem to love doing it. My sister is very fond of fanfic. More power to them, if that's what they like. Sturgeon's law (90% of anything is crap) applies just as much to indies, fanfic and regular authors trying to find a publisher.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Sturgeon's law (90% of anything is crap) applies just as much to indies, fanfic and regular authors trying to find a publisher.

And to 90% of authors who have found a publisher, to put it in terms of the tortured last sentence of your construct. Or, more logically, to 90% of traditionally published fiction. Your underlying assumption is that the Publishers weed out the 90% of the "crap", as you put it, and publish only the 10% which is not "crap". An assumption which simply does not hold up. Here is a link to a post by JW Manus which discusses this http://www.thepassivevoice.com/08/20...-tells-you-no/. One very relevant quote;

"The reason I’ve changed my mind is because the prevailing myth is that the reason agents and editors reject writing is because it’s no good. It’s not just a myth, it’s an outright lie. The ONLY reason any work is rejected is because the agent or editor doesn’t think they can sell it. That’s it. The only reason. One person (or a committee) decides a particular piece of work is unsaleable, and rejects it."

My experience is that it is no more difficult to find a good book now than before the explosion of Indie Titles. The actual crap is usually avoided with very little effort and there are far more books available in any particular areas in which I like to read. Based on my experience publishers did little if anything to eliminate the 90% of crap. In fact, they seem to have published quite a bit of it.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

That's a statement of fact, not my opinion. They are called chapter books, short books that tie together into one longer narrative. It's one of the ways that some indies work the system to generate revenue. Not terribly different than the old serials that were common in magazines and the older movies. It does make a comparison of sales figures between authors difficult if not impossible.

Oh he writes children's books. I thought he wrote serials.
A chapter book is a child's book that have chapter breaks rather than illustrated books.

And your exact quote was he writes chapters and publishes them as a book. Not the same thing as chapter books.

But if you want indie authors that make 6 and 7 figures on what you consider a book, there are several. R. Blake, B Crouch, J Konrath/Kilborn, J Nobody, R Brown, A Lee. Shall I continue?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by darryl

My experience is that it is no more difficult to find a good book now than before the explosion of Indie Titles. The actual crap is usually avoided with very little effort and there are far more books available in any particular areas in which I like to read. Based on my experience publishers did little if anything to eliminate the 90% of crap. In fact, they seem to have published quite a bit of it.

Same here.

The "unnavigable ocean of crap" mantra perpetuated by those who seek to artificially maintain a general "level of quality" divide between indie and tradpub is old and tired; and not nearly as relevant as they'd like it to be. Mostly because people don't need to swim the entire indie ocean (any more than they'd swim the entire tradpub ocean hoping to bump into a book they like). Cream still rises to the top in the usual ways: samples, word-of-mouth, promotional sales, giveaways, best-seller lists, and reviews from people whose opinions you've come to trust.

I know of very few people who jab their hand blindly into the tradpub pie hoping to pull out a plum by pure luck (on a regular basis anyway). So I fail to see why they think finding an indie book they can love should somehow be that "easy."

If it's about the basic "competence" or skills of the author ... I say who gives a R. A.? I feel no need to differentiate between a terribly written book and a competently written book that I thought thoroughly sucked. I find it very hard to believe that very many people who find a tradpub book they didn't like at all, comfort themselves with feelings of, "well at least it was competently written." Didn't like is didn't like, in my book.

90% of everything is crap... to someone, some where, at some time. Period.

The "ocean of crap" meme would only be relevant to someone who bought every single one of their books sight-unseen through some utterly random method. The tradpub ocean would certainly offer that kind of imaginary reader a better shot at discovering a competently written book than the indie ocean. But I know of no reader (at least of fiction) who's searching for competently written books. They're looking for books they love. And their chances of finding one through some utterly blind poke-and-hope method are equally slim regardless of the ocean they're in.

What the Ocean-of-Crappers are REALLY saying is; "the dogmatic curation tools/methods I've let myself become overly dependent upon (to select reading material from the familiar ocean of crap I've learned to navigate) may not help me a lot in this new ocean of crap. So I'm going to passive-aggressively belittle this new ocean of crap rather than adapt the least little damn bit."

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Same here.

The "unnavigable ocean of crap" mantra perpetuated by those who seek to artificially maintain a general "level of quality" divide between indie and tradpub is old and tired; and not nearly as relevant as they'd like it to be. Mostly because people don't need to swim the the entire indie ocean (any more than they'd swim the entire tradpub ocean hoping to bump into a book they like). Cream still rises to the top in the usual ways: samples, word-of-mouth, promotional sales, giveaways, best-seller lists, and reviews from people whose opinions you've come to trust.

I know of very few people that jab their hand blindly into the tradpub pie hoping to pull out a plum by pure luck (on a regular basis anyway). So I fail to see why they think finding an indie book they can love should somehow be that "easy."

If it's about the basic "competence" or skills of the author ... I say who gives a R. A.? I feel no need to differentiate between a terribly written book and a competently written book that I thought thouroughly sucked. I find it very hard to believe that very many people who find a tradpub book they didn't like at all, comfort themselves with feelings of, "well at least it was competently written." Didn't like is didn't like, in my book.

90% of everything is crap... to someone, some where, at some time. Period.

The "ocean of crap" meme would only be relevant to someone who bought every single one of their books sight unseen through some utterly random method. The tradpub ocean would certainly offer that kind of imaginary reader a better shot at discovering a competently written book than the indie ocean. But I know of no reader (at least of fiction) who's searching for competently written books. They're looking for books they love. And their chances of finding one through some utterly blind poke-and-hope method are equally slim regardless of the ocean they're in.

What the Ocean-of-Crappers are REALLY saying is; "the dogmatic curation tools/methods I've let myself become overly dependent upon (to select reading material from the familiar ocean of crap I've learned to navigate) may not help me a lot in this new ocean of crap. So I'm going to passive-aggressively belitte this new ocean of crap rather than adapt the least little damn bit."

3 out of 4 of the last books I didn't finish or were disappointed in were traditional.
One was Willie going off on tangents. Another was so many info dumps I couldn't find the story. The last one started out as humor (in the style of Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr) and turned into socialist ramblings.
The last indie book I didn't finish was because of too much gratuitous nudity and other stuff that didn't fit. Also too much regurgitation from his other books. Sorry but if I am reading action/adventure the nudity needs to have a purpose.

[DiapDealer]

... and to tie my previous rant into the topic at hand, I think Shatzkin's point about the "one big dog that has not yet barked" is mostly... well... pointless. The suggestion that the wholesale "legitimacy" of indie publishing is waiting (or hinging) upon that one huge block-buster name to jump ship is silly. The tide has already turned. The future of publishing is already changed through choice. No need for a big fish to announce their defection.

The current top-tier, publisher-coddled blockbusters will live out their careers in the peace and comfort of their current contracts. But there's not likely to be a replacement for every one of those when they retire or die. With more and more frequency, traditional publishers will have to accept the hybrid contract that tomorrow's blockbuster authors are going to have the leverage to negotiate.

It's not about tradpub dying. It's about them not holding all the marbles any more.That's already done.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

... and to tie my previous rant into the topic at hand, I think Shatzkin's point about the "one big dog that has not yet barked" is mostly... well... pointless. The suggestion that the wholesale "legitimacy" of indie publishing is waiting (or hinging) upon that one huge block-buster name to jump ship is silly. The tide has already turned. The future of publishing is already changed through choice. No need for a big fish to announce their defection.

The current top-tier, publisher-coddled blockbusters will live out their careers in the peace and comfort of their current contracts. But there's not likely to be a replacement for every one of those when they retire or die. With more and more frequency, traditional publishers will have to accept the hybrid contract that tomorrow's blockbuster authors are going to have the leverage to negotiate.

It's not about tradpub dying. It's about them not holding all the marbles any more.That's already done.

Exactly.
It is about power.
Power to control what gets published? Gone.
Power to intimidate retailers? Mostly gone.
Power to intimidate authors? Going, going...

Big publishing won't go away any time soon--Indiepub won't destroy it any more than the PC revolution destroyed IBM--and the BPHs can live off backlist and dreamer contracts for another century. But the day when they control what others do across the industry is pretty much done.

Options exist.
Those that want to huddle together and cling to the contracts and legacy imprints of the past can do so. And those that don't can merrily go elsewhere.

Live and let die.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by darryl

And to 90% of authors who have found a publisher, to put it in terms of the tortured last sentence of your construct. Or, more logically, to 90% of traditionally published fiction. Your underlying assumption is that the Publishers weed out the 90% of the "crap", as you put it, and publish only the 10% which is not "crap". An assumption which simply does not hold up. Here is a link to a post by JW Manus which discusses this http://www.thepassivevoice.com/08/20...-tells-you-no/. One very relevant quote;

"The reason I’ve changed my mind is because the prevailing myth is that the reason agents and editors reject writing is because it’s no good. It’s not just a myth, it’s an outright lie. The ONLY reason any work is rejected is because the agent or editor doesn’t think they can sell it. That’s it. The only reason. One person (or a committee) decides a particular piece of work is unsaleable, and rejects it."

My experience is that it is no more difficult to find a good book now than before the explosion of Indie Titles. The actual crap is usually avoided with very little effort and there are far more books available in any particular areas in which I like to read. Based on my experience publishers did little if anything to eliminate the 90% of crap. In fact, they seem to have published quite a bit of it.

And once again, hurling oneself at a conclusion based on one's perception of the other person rather than based on what was actually written leads to error. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by not sharing your opinion. If you prefer indies, that's your prerogative.