business

Day Job

Nadia Lee Writing and Publishing 4 Comments

Diana Fox wrote an interesting post on agents with day jobs. You should all go read it. It's very illuminating.

Something else to consider in addition to what she's written:

Agents only make 15% of what you make. Since publishing pays authors very very little and agents take 15% of that very very little pay, do the math.

Furthermore, I think it was Donald Maass who said that it's extremely stressful when a client quits his day job too soon and begs his agent to sell anything so he doesn't have to get a job that gives him steady paychecks. Unfortunately the client is too depressed and/or worried about money that he can't produce his best work, and his agent is reluctant to shop substandard projects.

Now reverse the above situation. Imagine you have an agent who quit his steady paycheck job too soon. He realizes that he can't survive in the commissions he makes, so he tells his clients to pump out books faster so he can start shopping projects around, hoping to get commissions faster even though the client projects could've benefited from an extra month of revision. Or worse, he may get tempted by the client money and embezzle. (Desperation can make people do stuff that they would never dream of doing otherwise.)

I'd rather have an agent with a day job who doesn't pressure me to write faster than I'm comfortable with and / or doesn't get tempted into doing anything questionable / unethical.

If You're Interested in Publishing Business and How Some Books Get "Skipped"...

Nadia Lee Writing and Publishing 1 Comment

...check out this post by Andrew Wheeler. Some of the most interesting parts include:

By the way: that's what it's called when your book isn't picked up by a particular bookseller. Your book is "a skip," and they have "skipped" you.

...bookstores are businesses, not public conveniences. No store has the responsibility to carry every book published -- although, to be honest, that's a straw-man argument, since no one is asking for that. (They're just wishing that their books, the books they like, and the books by their friends be spared the chopping block.) I market books for a living, so I can tell you an unpleasant truth: the order for any book, from any account, starts at zero. The publisher's sales rep walks in the door with tipsheets and covers, past sales figures and promotional plans, to convince that bookseller's buyer to buy that book. In many categories -- SFF is still one of them -- the chain buyers say "yes" the overwhelming majority of the time. But not all the time. Sometimes, that buyer is not convinced, and the order stays at zero.

I should also point out that chainstore buyers have budgets; they don't have an infinite amount of money to play with. They have to buy books for all of the stores in the chain, in their category, given the money they have available -- this is called "open to buy," and varies depending on recent sales, returns, and what else is publishing that month. Like any other budget, I'm sure buyers start with the most important things -- the big books that month -- and work their way down the list. If the money runs out before they hit the bottom, that's it.

Let's talk specifics. Frost's Lord Tophet was skipped because his previous book (the one Lord Tophet is the second half of), Shadowbridge, didn't sell well enough.

...

Frost points out that Shadowbridge "received glowing reviews and went back to print twice in its first six months." But neither of those things, sadly, mean anything on their own. Lots of books are glowingly reviewed and don't sell -- ask the literary writers selling 1,500 copies of their first novels -- and reprinting twice in six months can just mean that the first printing was tiny. What I can say: Shadowbridge sold less than 2,500 copies, as a $14.00 trade paperback, across all reporting sales outlets (which include Borders, B&N, Amazon, and others), since the beginning of this year. Of those, almost 2000 were sold at the "Retailer" level, which includes Borders, B&N, and other brick-and-mortar stores. If those were sold evenly between B&N and Borders superstores, and nowhere else, each superstore sold a little over a copy and a half.

Pat Cadigan all but called for a boycott of Borders in her post. Even allowing for the effect of anger, and the tendency of blog posts to be overly extreme and rabble-rousing, I can't see that this would be a good idea. Even if it had a noticeable effect -- and that's a big "if" -- getting SFF readers to move their business away from Borders is exceptionally unlikely to get Borders to start stocking SFF in more depth. Rather the reverse, actually. If Cadigan wants Borders to cut back on SFF, she has an excellent plan. If not, not.

Now Is Not the Best Time

Nadia Lee Resources, Writing and Publishing No Comments ,

There have been several articles and blog posts about how the subprime crisis is going to make it near-impossible for new writers to sell, blah blah blah, and I'm sure many of you have read them already. They do look pretty gloomy, the end-of-your-dream-as-a-wannabe-pro kind. And some aspiring writers are feeling so discouraged that they don't even want to bother querying until the economy improves.

This is what I think about the entire situation:

It's never been easy to get published. I can't think of a time when someone squealed, "OMG! It's sooooo easy to get published."

It's always been difficult to get published and build a career. What changes is the factors that make it hard to do so.

But one thing you know for sure is that people will continue to buy great books. Everyone's looking for a fabulous story, the kind that makes them lightheaded with excitement. And that's what you the writer can control. So write something that leaves agents and editors panting for more, and no matter how bad the economy is (or whatever), they'll publish it and readers will buy it.

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