08-20-2008, 04:19 PM | #16 | |
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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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08-20-2008, 04:39 PM | #17 | |
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08-20-2008, 04:42 PM | #18 |
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08-20-2008, 05:27 PM | #19 | |
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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. |
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08-20-2008, 05:40 PM | #20 | |
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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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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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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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08-20-2008, 08:17 PM | #24 | |
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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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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. |
08-21-2008, 05:38 AM | #26 | |
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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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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. |
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. |
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. |
08-21-2008, 09:33 AM | #30 | |
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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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