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Old 08-20-2008, 04:19 PM   #16
Patricia
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Originally Posted by RickyMaveety View Post
Writers of books do not get paid a "salary." They get a royalty off of each book sold.
That's often true, but not always.
I once wrote a chapter for a textbook and got paid £1500 as a one-off fee. The rights went to the publisher and I got no royalties at all.

However, it took me about three weeks' full-time writing. It was the most profitable bit of writing that I ever did. I earned more money on that than my partner did for his first book. (He had a royalty deal. The book just didn't sell in sufficient numbers, even though it was very good and took him two years to write. and he had to travel and consult French archives at his own expense.)

The moral is that life and the Free Market are not fair. Renumeration is not commensurate with either effort or originality.
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Old 08-20-2008, 04:39 PM   #17
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Originally Posted by Patricia View Post
That's often true, but not always.
I once wrote a chapter for a textbook and got paid £1500 as a one-off fee. The rights went to the publisher and I got no royalties at all.

However, it took me about three weeks' full-time writing. It was the most profitable bit of writing that I ever did. I earned more money on that than my partner did for his first book. (He had a royalty deal. The book just didn't sell in sufficient numbers, even though it was very good and took him two years to write. and he had to travel and consult French archives at his own expense.)

The moral is that life and the Free Market are not fair. Renumeration is not commensurate with either effort or originality.
A one time fee is still not a salary. Even if it was profitable for you. A salary denotes getting a regular payment for work performed. I don't know of any book writers who are paid a salary by a publisher. A fee that includes a bonus for the fact that you will not be getting royalties ... that I've heard of. But I have never ever heard of writers on salary.
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Old 08-20-2008, 04:42 PM   #18
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Originally Posted by RickyMaveety View Post
But I have never ever heard of writers on salary.
What about people that write for the NY Times. People that write for TV shows. People that do technical writing. They are all on salary.

BOb
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Old 08-20-2008, 05:27 PM   #19
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What about people that write for the NY Times. People that write for TV shows. People that do technical writing. They are all on salary.

BOb
Sorry .... read all the posts, Bob. I recognized the fact that script writers and writers for newspapers do get paid a salary. It's just that we were talking about books. As I mentioned, there are book writers who do have regular salaried jobs working as script writers or newspaper writers/editors ... it's just that they don't make their living writing books.

And I should have put that one word in that last post, and missed doing it. I have never heard of a book writer on salary.
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Old 08-20-2008, 05:40 PM   #20
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And I should have put that one word in that last post, and missed doing it. I have never heard of a book writer on salary.
I think that Stratemeyer Syndicate employed several writes who Ghost Wrote the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. I can't say if they were on salary though or paid per project.

BOb
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Old 08-20-2008, 06:03 PM   #21
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Try being a poet. I've won cash prizes and awards. I've been paid for accepted submissions. And I've been paid to write for a school textbook, and an accompanying poster series. All of the above might just make a single house payment.
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Old 08-20-2008, 06:59 PM   #22
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Writers have my admiration and I show that by spending way too much money on books. Wish I could write but there are circuits in my brain that just don't connect that way.
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Old 08-20-2008, 07:26 PM   #23
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Kindle books and paperbacks from createspace.com (subsidiary of Amazon) pay much higher royalties. Check their sites for details. They offer a much better deal for writers who can edit and produce their own books. I use Scribus for cover layout and LyX for excellent typesetting. Production is some work but not nearly so much as the writing which might take me a year or two per book. I have been very pleased with both outfits. Writers no longer need to go through big name publishers. Creative Commons copyrights protect the writer's interests. My own free ebooks have been downloaded 75,000 times from www.memoware.com and many more times from other sites that got the books from project Gutenberg. Writers can format for project Gutenberg without too much hassle. Times are changing fast and for the better.
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Old 08-20-2008, 08:17 PM   #24
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I think that Stratemeyer Syndicate employed several writes who Ghost Wrote the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. I can't say if they were on salary though or paid per project.

BOb
My guess is that they were paid by the project. Most ghost writers are. It would be highly unusual for a publisher to actually employ a writer and to pay that writer a salary. Especially since a salary would be paid to the employee regardless of whether or not they actually produced any content.

I know I'm messing with semantics (again) ... but there you have it. A reporter, a script writer, a technical writer ... it is common for them to be salaried employees, but then, they are expected to churn out a certain amount of content -- often without much regard to the quality (unfortunately).
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Old 08-20-2008, 09:35 PM   #25
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The "American Girl" franchise has house writers that produce their books. (I know, because I wrote to them asking for writing guidelines at one point.) I don't know if they're paid a salary or by project, however.

Regarding books published through a publisher, the common procedure is for the author to be paid an "advance" or a flat amount toward the potential royalties a book might earn. I've heard the amount for fiction is US$3000-5000 per book. If the amount of royalties generated by book sales ever exceeds the amount of the advance, the author gets more payments, but this isn't especially common. However, book sales drive future contracts, so by buying an author's books we can at least make it more likely that the author will be contracted for another book.

For my non-fiction book, I was paid an advance of $500, and I doubt I'll ever see another payment.
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Old 08-21-2008, 05:38 AM   #26
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Originally Posted by nekokami View Post
Regarding books published through a publisher, the common procedure is for the author to be paid an "advance" or a flat amount toward the potential royalties a book might earn. I've heard the amount for fiction is US$3000-5000 per book. If the amount of royalties generated by book sales ever exceeds the amount of the advance, the author gets more payments, but this isn't especially common. However, book sales drive future contracts, so by buying an author's books we can at least make it more likely that the author will be contracted for another book.
This is all true. Each book sale is worth a certain amount to the author. For the sake of argument, imagine that Mr. A, an author, has been paid an advance of $2000 by the publisher (not unusual for a first novel). In theory, for every book he sells, he gets $1. However, because he has already received $2000, he won't be given any more cash until his sales exceed 2,000 copies. This is called 'earning out the advance' or simply, 'earning out'. Many, many books never reach this point.

The good news, from Mr. A's point of view, is that even if he fails to 'earn out', he will not have to pay back the portion of his advance that he didn't earn. The publisher's accept that this is their risk.
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Old 08-21-2008, 06:39 AM   #27
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In practice, about 70% of the cover price of a book you buy in the shops is eaten by the distribution chain -- retailer and wholesaler. The publisher and author get to split the remaining 30%. For dead tree books, the split is typically 20%/10% -- but the publisher also gets to shell out the money for buying the paper and putting ink on it, not to mention marketing.

Amazon are pernicious because they collapse the retail/wholesale chain and still demand the biggest discount (off list price) of any retailer. They get to have their cake and eat it at our (the writers) expense.

Here in the UK, the Society Of Authors figures for 2001 were that the median income for a novelist was £4000 a year, and the mean income (including folks like J. K. Rowling pushes it up) was £16,000 a year, as noted in that Independent.co.uk piece linked to previously. However, I'd like to add that there are a lot of hobbyist novelists -- folks with a day job who write a novel every year or three as a hobby and take their income as an extra bonus on top. Those of us who work at the coal face full-time can generally top that £16,000 average without being best-sellers. What it takes to earn a reasonable living is an awareness that it's as much a business as an art form, and a willingness to work at it in a businesslike manner.
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Old 08-21-2008, 07:08 AM   #28
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At the moment I can afford to live from writing, but only because I've temporarily relocated to the Far East from the United Kingdom. The cost of living in the UK, if you're a writer, is usurious.

As people have said, writers rarely if ever make a full-time living from writing books. I would certainly agree they are not well rewarded for what they do economically, but them's the breaks and the nature of the market.

As someone already pointed out, a writer doesn't initially get paid in royalties for each copy of a book published from the day it comes out. They get paid an advance based on the publisher's hopes of how many books will sell. Even if the publisher's expectations aren't met, they get to keep the money; however, if their books consistently don't sell enough copies, they are either dropped or receive even lower advances.

But even when you do get an advance, it doesn't come all at once. I can think of an example in a fellow writer of my acquaintance who sold a fantasy trilogy several years ago and got paid thirty thousand quid, in all. Sounds good, right?

It took him close on five years to finish that trilogy. And they only pay you a fraction of the money at first. The rest comes in distinct chunks; you get a couple of grand when you sell an outline of a book; then, when you finish a manuscript, and the publisher decides it's what they want, you get another couple of grand; when the book appears in the shops, you get the rest of the money for that single book. And the process of selling a book, writing it and seeing it on the shelves can take between a year and a half and two years. Spread it over five years and it doesnt' seem so much.

That's why the Independent article says many writers only make four grand a year; that's even if the book they're writing was sold for three or four times that.

But then you also have to factor in agent's fees, which usually fall between ten and fifteen per cent of the money received for each book sold. And then of course you're paying taxes, and you have to declare yourself as self-employed, even though that means you get charged a higher initial rate. And if you're in the UK, council tax as well, even though you're scraping the barrel in terms of earnings. It can get tough, it's true.

It's partly a holdover from the Eighties when many publishers were handed over to shareholders and accountants and the profit margin became completely dominant (a good example of this is what happened when Marvel Comics was taken over by an investment group in the late Eighties and quickly run into the ground for a fast profit, almost annihilating the collector's market at the time); prior to that, you could imagine a publisher was in business because, on some level, they liked books. But when profit became God, quality became unimportant in relation to sales. As a result, there's a distinct pressure on a lot of new writers to write stuff that can be commercially successful and sell quickly, as opposed to selling steadily but over a number of years, which used to be the way of things. It's also part of the reason why so many book charts are dominated by ghostwritten stuff (like the Independent says), about footballers and models. And also why so many of my favourite authors are either obscure, or haven't been published in years, or both.

I find it occasionally amusing that some few people out there do still believe that if you've written a book, you're somehow 'rich and famous', or at least just 'rich'. Oh, the irony. But some people do get by or even do very well without too much sacrifice of intent or quality, and they're the lucky ones.

It should be said that on the other side of the coin, some countries do offer economic concessions for writers as well as people involved in some capacity in the arts. In Ireland, you don't pay taxes if you're a writer. That's why Robert Anton Wilson and Anne McCaffrey took up residence there, amongst others. I think there's something similar in Holland, and maybe a few other European countries. The cost of living in Taiwan is spectacularly low. it's also another reason a lot of writers still head for Prague - lots of culture, lots of writers, cheap (ie affordable) living.

In Scotland (England too? I'm not sure), you can get arts council grants to help you survive as a writer - I know of one chap who got a grant of twenty grand to complete his second book (it helped of course that he wasn't a science fiction writer, which is frequently not 'literary' enough to get the money from such grants). A grant like that I could do with.
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Old 08-21-2008, 08:46 AM   #29
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There are similar U.S. grants for writing. I've never tried to get one, so I cannot provide any details.

All of this is why more authors are likely to explore e-books where they can, on the chance that they can increase their profits. Whether or not that will work for them is another matter.
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Old 08-21-2008, 09:33 AM   #30
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It should be said that on the other side of the coin, some countries do offer economic concessions for writers as well as people involved in some capacity in the arts. In Ireland, you don't pay taxes if you're a writer. That's why Robert Anton Wilson and Anne McCaffrey took up residence there, amongst others.
Yes, you should join us. No taxes for any writer-related earnings (up to EU125,000!) and one month's rainfall in a single day. What more could you want?

I recently enjoyed Stealing Light. And, if the poster just before you is who I think it is, I want to say that I loved Accelerando.
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