Textbooks are a separate world from what is called trade publishing. Trade publishing is most fiction and nonfiction. Children’s book are separate. Christian publishing is a large, but separate world, and so are the equivalents in Jewish publishing, Mormon publishing, Muslim publishing and so on. Manuals and other specialized publications are separate. University presses are separate, even though some of their books can be found in general bookstores. Medical publishing can be separate, along with other professional fields like the law. Encyclopedias used to be separate back when they existed. Books that aren’t designed to be sold at full price, sometimes called instant remainders, are separate. Government publications are separate. I’m sure that the other writers here can probably come up with a dozen more little niches that aren’t part of the mainsteam publishing world.
With every publisher I’ve worked with, costs are included in overhead and are part of the calculation of the book’s list price. No costs, of any kind, are ever charged to the author. This is absolutely standard in mainsteam publishing.
It’s possible that some small, specialized presses may work like that. And it may be possible that English traditions are different from those in the U.S. As I said above, publishing is huge and has lots of niches. But what’s usually called the “New York” houses, which would include all the big names in the history of publishing in this country, never work like this.
Is this why authors tour. One of my favourtie authors Janet Evanovich (Stephanie Plum series of mysteries) will go on tour and in bookstores and hold talks. I noticed the bookstores will do things like “If you buy the author’s book, you get the book a personalized signature AND you get to ask her a question during the talk.” People that don’t buy the book can only ask questions IF time is remaining.
I heard an interview with Evanovich and she said when she first started she’d spend DAYS in a bookstore and no one would want her to autograph her book. She’d just help out with the customers 'cause she was so bored.
She also said selling the rights to her first book to Hollywood, gave her enough money so she’d never have to write again. (Oddly enough a movie from “One For The Money,” never even got to the script stage)
I imagine movie rights help a bit with the cash flow. So sad that some good movies were made from novels after the author was dead. Where’d all the money from Lord of the Rings go?
Orson Scott Card says for his tours he will sign any of his books even if it was bought a while back, he doesn’ t require anyone to buy a book that day to get it signed.
Virtually every author in the world will sign any book you bring them, whether you bought it new or not. Of course Scott does it. Everybody does. It’s like saying he wears clothes at his signings.
Some bookstores may need to limit signings to new books just because certain bestsellers are so popular that lines would be impossible otherwise. But Markxxx doesn’t even say that, just that you could only ask questions, presumably after a talk, if you bought a new book. Again, this is the bookstore’s doing, not the author’s.
Authors can and do improve their fan bases by relentless touring, signings, talks, and appearances. It’s a Catch-22, though. Signings did Evanovich no good until she was famous enough to draw people to signings.
Never heard of this before. My publisher has many publicists, some in-house, some out-of-house, that handle different sales/PR channels (bookstores, libraries, schools, mainstream media, etc.). I have no idea what they pay them. That transaction has nothing to do with me, any more than the publisher’s building rent or telephone bill does.
Again, this is for major publishers in the USA. Your friend may be in a diff. situation. Also, was it the publisher, or an agent? Agents usually pass on costs (postage, copying, legal fees, etc.) to authors; publishers don’t.
This is the case for the vast majority of UK publishers as well. I would be very suspect of a publisher that passed on costs to an author.
Yes agents do this, but at the agency I worked for these costs were pretty minimal and often waived - it was literally just a few photocopies of the manuscript plus postage. I never heard of legal fees being charged. What for? Also these costs would only be charged if the author got a deal.
One of the great things about working at the agency was seeing the success stories. We sold the movie rights to one author’s book. She had been a struggling, fairly unknown writer. She got close on to £1 million. I also watched another extremely poor children’s writer as his book became a worldwide bestseller. It was great to see.
I have never heard of such a thing. I, and all of my author friends, are paid either a flat rate or a percentage of the sale price of the book, so publisher expenses do not affect us.
It’s very rare for textbook authors to get royalties. They’re a specialty item, usually collaborative with lots of authors, editors, and fact-checkers, and everyone’s paid flat rate.
And they’ll do it cheerfully, and they’ll do it for free. I’ve talked to a lot of very popular authors and had a number of them in my store. The only one who ever asked for money was William Shatner, who said he’d sign for ten bucks a book.
Ever since agents went from a standard 10% to a standard 15% it became extremely rare for a (good) agent to change any expenses to an author. I’ve never paid a single penny to an agent for costs.
There may be exceptions. For every answer in publishing there is always an exception. Some textbooks have made their authors very rich from royalties. Robert Samuelson’s Economics textbook has made him millions.
I should have added that if the bookstore will not allow Card to sign old books, he won’t go there. Not sure how many other authors have that policy maybe it’s common for authors to do that.
It was unusual for agents to charge authors costs even when they got 10%. Sometimes they’d deduct extraordinary costs, but never for their regular costs of doing business. Maybe as some agents got squeezed, they considered this before going to 15%.
But the first sign that an agent it going to rip you off is when they ask for money from you.
Write that in big glowing letters and send it to all new authors. Money flows TO the author and the agent gets a cut. Money does not flow from the author unless it’s self-publishing or a scam.
Just found some related information on Lois McMaster Bujold’s blog. For those who don’t know her, she’s a successful SF/Fantasy author. Here she is on the topic of how many books get sold:
Lois McMaster Bujold is attributing too much significance to Amazon sales.
Firstly, Amazon rankings are updated hourly and are fairly easy for unscrupulous publishers and authors to manipulate (I’ve written a couple of articles about this). All you have to do is clump a lot of sales in a short time period. Well, it’s a bit more complex than that, but I’d rather not go into details.
I have a friend with a self-published book that gets over half his sales on Amazon. Even if that book were to crack the top 100 or top 50, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the NYT list.
On the flip side, I have one traditionally-published book that sells tens of thousands of copies per year, and Amazon accounts for a couple of hundred copies per year at best. Amazon’s sales figures aren’t statistically significant - their ranking means nothing. Ditto a self-published book of mine that’s sold around 600 copies. Three of those (yes, 3) were sold on Amazon.
As another example, people are more likely to buy hardbacks online because they’re discounted more often and shipping is a lower percentage of the overall cost. When I compare my bookstore’s rankings to Amazon rankings, paperbacks rank significantly higher for me than they do on Amazon. Similarly, grocery store sales (which are counted in the NYT list) are slanted almost entirely to mass-market paperbacks.
Amazon ranks anything – NYT only ranks certain genres and categories (they don’t rank self-help books, for example).
I’m not saying Amazon’s numbers are totally meaningless, but authors spend way too much time obsessing over them.
Well, I’ll say it then. Trying to correlate Amazon ranking with actual sales is ridiculous. There is no correlation. A single sale can move a book up or down the list dramatically, and a book that ranks #25 in one category may sell 1000x as many as a book that ranks #25 in another. Anyone who claims to have a formula for converting rankings to sales just doesn’t understand.
Authors who want to know their actual sales data should ask the publisher for Bookscan data. But even that can provide a misleading view, and I know fellow authors who check their page rank every day and obsess over the fluctuations. It’s no more useful than reading tea leaves.
I’ll go back to what I said earlier in this thread. Many (most, all?) first time authors are shocked at how few copies of their book sell, especially if it seemed to perform very well in Amazon rankings.
And here’s the bottom line:
If you’re self-published, you know exactly how many books you’ve sold.
If you’re published through a traditional publishing house, your royalty statements tell you what’s sold. If you can’t wait for your next royalty statement, they’re usually pretty good about running you a report.
And if what you want is comparative numbers between your book and everyone else’s, then you’re obsessing about the wrong things.
Oh, I know, it’s fun to be able to say, “My book was the #1 top-selling book at Milly’s Bookshop in Albany last year” or “My book was in the top 100 on Amazon for an hour last Tuesday” or “My book was the best-selling Christian vampire romance graphic novel in 2007.”
To me, though, it’s about making enough money from my books so that I can justify continuing to be a writer. It’s about someone saying, “Hey, you’re the guy that wrote (Fill in book title here)! I love that book!” It’s not about whether some other dude sold a thousand more (or a thousand fewer) copies than I did.
100% agree, and those are the reasons I would like to be a published author also.
However, comparing book sales to other authors is one “real” seeming benchmark someone can have about their book success. It may be meaningless, but I’ll bet for the first book or two, it will seem “real” because they’re actual numbers.
Sure, the dollars deposited in your checking account are actual numbers, too, but it will also seem to be a correlation - the better the book rankings or sales, the more my deposits? 
I only excerpted Bujold’s blog entry. She went on to talk about how Amazon figures are only a partial reflection of total sales and Bookscan is more accurate. And about how publishers game the system. Her main point was that Amazon can be a realistic indicator of total book sales if your sales overall are in a certain range, that it’s readily available data any author can access at will, and this was how to interpret it.
Colibri: Field guide or coffee table book?
Will you let us know when it comes out in the U.S., please?