E books. I so enjoy the reading experience on my kindle paperwhite, I’m willing to pay more to get the ebook copy over a used book.
eBook sales have leveled off and book sales are doing just fine fight now.
But most publishers have not gone just to blockbusters like Hollywood. The difference is that it costs far less to publish a book than to produce a movie. And you can never know who the next big seller will be. So most publishers need new talent. You may not hit the jackpot, but there are ways to guarantee you won’t lose. So it’s not billion or bust like Hollywood.
Look in any bookstore and you’ll see hundreds of books that aren’t blockbusters. But nearly all are making money for their publisher.
(A second factor is that many publishers are owned by European firms, who are happy with a lower rate of return than US investors.)
I self-pubbed a non-fiction book. A self-help book, in fact. I think it has sold a few thousand copies to date (my writing partner takes care of the accounts, so I don’t know exactly).
Why self-publish a non-fiction book instead of go the “traditional route”? Well, I’ll tell you.
The traditional route requires the following:
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You write a book proposal. This is about 50 pages long and is a huge undertaking in itself. There are books on how to write book proposals, lol.
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You will then need to get an agent. This is another huge undertaking.
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Book publishers are pussies. They want to buy non-fiction books by famous people so that something sells automatically. The want no risk whatsoever. Buy-back guarantees are common, which means that you promise to buy a certain number of copies if they don’t sell. I talked to an agent on the phone and heard the above and more.
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IF the agent manages to sell your book (unlikely), then it will be in development for a year or more, and you’ll have to make all manner of compromises on the content of your book in order to please the publisher. Which is not to say that you’ll actually get any editing help on your book or anything of the kind, you dreamer you!
Well that’s all worth it, right? Cuz then great things happen, right? But wait:
- A non-fiction book is considered a “success” if it sells 5,000 copies. That is best-seller list material, depending on how quickly those 5,000 sell, etc. Sure, blockbuster non-fic books can sell millions of copies, but most sell a few thousand at best. If you are making a few bucks a copy, wow, congrats, you’ve earned $15,000. Wow.
Seriously, non-fiction publishing is an absolute fucking joke. I am a professional writer. I’m a Japanese translator and work in advertising. The amount of work to make that $15,000 simply wasn’t worth it. Even if I made several times that amount, I had a co-author to split it with and it still would barely have been minimum wage or lower, all told. I figured I could easily make that or more by self-pubbing and selling the damn things on the street corner.
I’m glad I self-published. The book is a reality, and some people have said it has changed their lives. That’s certainly better than sucking up to a bunch of people and not having any book exist at all.
Yes, the first buyer bought the book from the author, but the second buyer bought the book from someone who had read the book and was reselling it. The author made money from the first buyer, but not the second buyer. Before Amazon made buying used books from individuals easy, the second buyer would have had to go to a book store and buy the book and the author would have made money on that second book as well.
Also go to your local library and school library. All those books get bought also. Companies like Scholastic sell into them and not bookstores so much.
I was on a reality TV show with about 3 lines so I must be famous:D
Excellent points and I learned a,lot from reading the responses and my I initAL fears were confirmed in that not to expect to make any money writing a book unless I was really really fortunate.
One more question, do kids books say under 10 years old for a. Audience sell very well ?
It seems like
there are more kids books on the market than adult books.
Most of my writer friends are either freelancers or ghostwriters. The freelancers write mostly web copy/blog posts. The latter is a pretty good living, from what I’ve been told. My friends consider anonymity the price they pay, ego be damned.
They all went through the self-publishing craze a few years ago and discovered, shockingly, that there’s little to no money in it.
I have another writer friend who’s been trying to hawk her memoir to different agents for the past 5 or so years. Right now she’s taking a break on advice of an agent who didn’t take her on as a client but who gave her many suggestions, mainly, “Hold onto your manuscript and concentrate on getting your name out there in another way.” She’s concentrating on writing for radio (a la This American Life) right now.
Making money from writing books is akin to making money from playing/making music. The hard facts are: remarkably few people have the required talent to make a living or achieve fame at it.
One only has to go into a bookstore to see that clearly, yes, both publishers and authors, continue to profit and prosper selling books to readers. So, what’s the formula? If you think there’s a formula you’re incredibly misguided, to start.
Just like the entrepreneur who builds a better mousetrap, or the musician who taps into the current mood, just the right story at just the right time, is all it takes.
Every single day publishers are contacting people saying, 'We’re interested in publishing your book!" But, not unlike music, a whole lot of dreck passes by before a gem is found.
Music is still a hard path to prosperity, the ‘didn’t quite’ make the grade, are always, always, going to far out number those that find their way in and onto the path. And yeah, it’s discouraging, to be sure.
But there are still people who reach those goals every day.
If you know people who would want to buy your book, you could fund it in advance with Kickstarter or one of the similar things. A friend is doing that now. He’s written a book, and has found a publisher who does “self published” works, but he put it up on Kickstarter and planned to only publish it if he got enough “backers” to pay for the print run.
I doubt he’ll make much money on it, but my guess is he will do a little better than break even. (He raised $5000 in pledges in a few days, so the book will be published.)
I’d add what you’re saying with this: both are noisy systems. They are not pure meritocracies where talent and quality automatically rise to the top. To wit:
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Among the top best-sellers you will find a lot of pure garbage: Twilight, Dan Brown, etc. etc.
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Among the top best-sellers you will also find a lot of stuff that panders to what is popular or seems otherwise hacky. Not necessarily lacking in quality but also not great.
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Once something sells, the market will try to max it out forever. Stephen King will get his toilet paper published before Joe Blow can find an agent for his Great American Novel Masterpiece.
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OTOH, there are plenty of masterpieces being ignored, including stuff that could sell.
There are so many people trying to do it that supply greatly overwhelms demand. The vast majority is incompetent trash, so that it’s hard for the gatekeepers to even wade through it all. Thus, even when something great comes along, it is hard for them to see it.
A blog of a published author called Rejectomancy may be of interest.
Unless you’ve got a hilarious family tree, no you didn’t.
Well, er, yes Mr Voyager, but you see our report here says that you are an extremely dull person. You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.
So we can certainly see a book in you, probably quarto, double entry, focused on audit - what do you say?!
(Monty Python)
Elbows has it right.
Let’s cut through the nonsense below
These are books that people want to read. No matter what you think about them, people want to pay money for them. They aren’t literary or particularly well written, but there are millions of readers who don’t care and a publisher would be crazy to ignore that audience in the name of some sort of “quality.”
See my comments above. But people want to read those books. And the money the publishers make from them is used to subsidize authors who aren’t on the best seller liet.
First of all, King is now highly regarded among literary circles (he’s been published in the New Yorker*, which is as high literary as your going to get. Twice.). And why shouldn’t he be published? Books are a business. You don’t stay in business by publishing things that don’t sell.
Lots of people think this. It’s sour grapes. A good book will find a publisher as long as the author keeps at it.
It’s not hard to see something great. One slushpile reader told me is that you can know if a book is publishable within ten pages (often less). In many cases, you only have to read a small part of the first page to know it’s no good. But slush readers I’ve talked with have told me that when you find something good, it stands out immediately. Any agent would say the same thing: they recognize quality in the first few pages, and often in the first paragraph.
*Funny story I heard last night. A literary author managed to get a story in the New Yorker. He got the check, glanced at it, and deposited it. When he checked his bank statement, it was far too high. He had thought the check was for $500 (excellent pay for a short story); it had actually been for $5000. He had said he had planned to use the money to get a new couch; instead, he got new furniture for the entire living room.
Chuk, the only thing I can contest in your post is that you’re writing from the “if you keep at it, someone will publish it” line of thought - which is true and the gist of most “how to be a serious writer” guidelines from Heinlein’s on down. Sooner or later, anything worth reading finds a publisher.
But that’s not the same as making a living at it. A $500 advance on a book that never earns it back can’t possibly add up to a living wage for even the most prolific (and unlucky) writer. I pissed off two or three Really Big Names on a Worldcon panel, years ago, when they pitched the “someone will publish it” and “any sale [even for a nickel] is a good sale” line, and I pointed out how much I’d made from a single niche book by specifically refusing to fall for those tropes.
The ability to get your words between two slices of cover has never been easier. The ability through vast, easy-access suppliers like Amazon to garner a few sales is almost as easy. But the opportunities to write and sell at a decent level are open wider, too… they just don’t fit the dusty stuff from the introduction to Writer’s Market.
Side note: the most badass fantasy anti-hero to come out in many years is the titular antiheroine of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. She’s an accountant.
Many authors have harsh words for aspiring authors. Chuck Wendig rants here.
If you’re not a great author, don’t aim to sell thousands of books. Reading bad prose is unpleasant. But it can still be fun to write; don’t let a lack of any prospect of commercial or critical success hold you back.
To quote C-3PO, “How rude!”
FWIW, in addition to self-pubbing. I have had 11 short stories published and paid for. I don’t think of it as a big deal or a huge success. I’m just noting this to indicate what I say isn’t from “sour grapes.” Though maybe the only way I could avoid that criticism on your part is by being a famous, best-selling author.
A lot of your responses are tautologies or implied tautologies that don’t really have much to do with the points I was making.
“If you are good and keep at it, you will eventually succeed!” If one tries to produce counter-examples, the response will simply be: “Well, they weren’t good–or they didn’t keep at it!”
You said,
Horseshit. I think it’s instructive to look at artists who were good and didn’t make it or barely made it. That the Beatles’ material was pretty good should have been easy to see, right? They were rejected by everyone and about to give up when Parlophone, a small novelty records company with little presence in the market, took a chance on them.
Meanwhile, the band the Action was represented by the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein–after the Beatles were hugely famous. Talk about connections! Their music was very good and very commercial too, and since their breakup they have garnered what you might call a substantial cult following. But they had a devil of a time achieving radio airplay or any kind of success. Their story is rather a sad one.
J.K. Rowling talks about Harry Potter being rejected right and left too. As an experiment this guy sent Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions to 100 agents and was rejected by all of them. Only one recognized the original text: http://nicholasrossis.me/2014/03/26/kurt-vonnegut-sucks/
So no, I don’t buy your premise, which comes down to wishful thinking. One may safely assume, based on evidence such as that above, that if many great artists barely made it, then many, many great artists didn’t make it at all.
That’s true by definition, right? If they sold, then they deserved to sell! And my point was not even that there should be a Literary Gestapo preventing trashy books from selling to the masses. My point was that, in a noisy system, such books are a big presence and one must fight against that tide in order to get noticed. Even if one has a trashy, commercial book of one’s own, it’s not easy (and in that case, it would not be a “good” book per your standard, and the slush pile readers might have a hard time noticing it, right?).
I made no comment on King’s quality. I merely stated that, once someone gets that big, quality doesn’t even matter. King has written some books that even his fans consider pretty crappy, and of course they get published along with the rest.
Similarly, I think the chance of Kim Kardashian getting a novel published, no matter how bad it is, at close to 100%. Because yes, it would sell.
I’m a professional editor and have looked at a lot of people’s writing. What you say above I think is true, if only for the fact that most people cannot write at all. In most of those manuscripts (unless they have already been through some sort of filter), you’re going to see grade school-level grammar mistakes and nothing approaching even basic literary competence. So (and I’m using my imagination here!) anything that even approaches literacy is going to jump out. But that doesn’t mean that even a high percentage of that higher-quality material is “good.” Mind you, I’m half-agreeing, half-disagreeing with you on this point.
And I also don’t disagree with you 100% overall or mean to imply that there is no justice in the system and authors should have no hope. I just think your main assertion can too easily be used to browbeat people who don’t succeed and automatically, in your eyes, make it their fault.
Which brings it back around to the argument that it is, or should be, a meritocracy. Clearly, it’s not. That a Dan Brown can become the biggest of the big with his trashy, illogical nonsense, and uncounted thousands of very fine, moving writers are never heard of outside a small circle of friends is Q.E.D.
Publishing is as marketing-driven as any other commercial activity, and it’s steadily moved into publishing what people can be induced to read (and buy) rather than any benign notion that they publish “what people want to read.”
Not an argument I made, though… should it be?
“Trashy books will always be with you,” said Jesus to his disciples, IIRC. One must simply accept that fact. But should there be a meritocracy somewhere within the maelstrom of pulp? If there isn’t, then what does it even mean to say, “If you got what it takes, sooner or later somebody will take what you’ve got,” to paraphrase Chuck and quote Deano in Kiss Me, Stupid.
Oh Lord, yes…
Yes, they have market-making power that goes well beyond “beyond responsive.”