Angela Benedetti

Kerry Allen has been talking about self-publishing, and recently posted a response to someone who asked whether there’s any money in it, or whether it’s just “for play.” [cough] Her answer is worth reading, but I thought I’d run some more specific numbers through it, and since she has comments turned off (for reasons she explains in the post) I’m doing it here.

Kerry says:

True Story: Within the past 6 months, the agent of a writing friend who had multiple NY publishers interested in her debut novel negotiated up to a best offer of a $2500 advance and a 6% royalty, single-book deal. Belts have tightened so much up there, not even a “bidding war” puts an author in what could reasonably be called an advantageous position anymore.

Right. A $2500 advance and a six percent royalty. And that was what she got out of an auction.

Up until recently, I’d always heard that the standard royalty rate for paperbacks was eight to ten, presumably negotiable upward for writers with a good track record. Apparently that’s changed. Within the last month I was chatting in comments with a successful writer who has more than half a dozen books in print and seems to be doing well. Within the context of our chat, they gave me a number which let me work out that they too make only six percent on their books, or at least on the one we were talking about. I was shocked to get that number out of my calculator (what? you’d have worked it out too, admit it) but it looks like that’s a pretty good number now.

I have a book coming out next month. Just for fun, let’s run some comparisons.

Let’s say that $2500 is a nice standard advance for a first-time paperback with a big New York press these days. And let’s assume that a standard mass-market paperback costs $7.99. At six percent, that’s about $.48 per book. At that rate, it’ll take just over 5208 sales to earn out the $2500 advance.

My book is coming out electronically, and will cost $5.95. I make 35% royalties on books sold through the publisher’s site, and 25% on books sold through third-party vendors such as Fictionwise, Amazon, ARe, etc. Just to make the math a bit simpler, let’s split the difference and say that I’ll make 30% on all sales, since this is theoretical anyway. So I’ll make about $1.79 on each sale. I don’t get an advance, but in order to make that $2500, I need to sell 1397 books.

Of course, e-books sell in much smaller quantities than mass-market books. But with the tiny royalties and advances authors are making these days, e-book authors don’t have to sell as many to even up the numbers — only 27% as many sales will earn me that $2500. After that, I only have to make one sale for each of a New York published author’s 3 3/4 to keep up with them on royalties.

Now, I’m with a small press and Kerry is talking about self-publishing. But New York has always been seen as having this huge advantage, money-wise. And it’s still true that you’re much more likely to sell 5000 copies of a New York published book than a self-published or small press book, because the NY publishers have much easier access to chain bookstores and other venues such as WalMart and supermarkets and such. (Not that my books would be in WalMart any time in the next century anyway.) I’m sure the writer I was talking to a while back is going to be making a lot more money with his writing than I am on mine for a good while yet.

But the margin is narrowing. If the standard entry-level royalty percentage from New York was 8-10% for a while, and now it’s 6%, what’s it going to be in another year or two or five? The standard on the e-pub side is 30-40%, with a bit less for third-party sales (because the vendors take a big cut). I just signed a contract for another story yesterday, and with my publisher, at least, the royalty percentage hasn’t changed, and I haven’t heard any rumors about any of the other small/electronic presses changing theirs either.

This isn’t to say that we’re all going to get rich while they all go broke; they do still have sales numbers on their side. And the advantage to that $2500 advance is that it doesn’t have to earn out; the author gets to keep it no matter how the book sells. But again, that’s a really small advance, by NY standards, and that was what came out of at least a smallish auction. What are advances going to look like in the future?

As has been obvious for the last year or two, the industry is changing. If your main interest is making a pile of money, go do something else; writing fiction is and always has been a financial crap-shoot, and there are plenty of ways of getting rich which are much surer and much less work. The odds aren’t weighted quite so heavily against the smaller games as they were before, though, and it’ll be interesting to see how the numbers — and the business model — go in the next five or ten years.

Angie

One of the stories I have out on submission bounced last night, although with a nice paragraph of personal comments, including the fact that they found the story “intellectually interesting.” Hey, I’ll take that. Also some comments on POV which might be valid, but reworking it as suggested would take like 90% of the suspense out of the story, so I think I’ll keep it as-is and see what a few other editors think.

(I’ve decided to stop specifying which stories I’m discussing in the back-and-forthing, unless/until they sell. We know it’s all supposed to be about the story and nothing else, but human nature says that making it easy for an editor to exercise the Google-fu and see that sixteen editors before them have bounced the story is probably not a great idea. [wry smile])

I also signed up with Duotrope and threw them a few bucks. I’ve been using them on and off for a while now and they’re a great resource; it’s only fair to contribute. For anyone who hasn’t been there, Duotrope provides submission info on like a bazillion fiction and poetry markets. Their searches are easy to do and provide all the basic info you need to sort through markets, with quick links to the market’s own web site for more detailed info.

Signing up lets you create an account (which is free, by the way) and gives you access to a personal database to track your submissions. You can enter info about your stories, which lets you run quicker targetted searches when it’s time to send something out. It also tracks how long a story’s been out, how long it took the market to respond, and what kind of response you got; collecting that info lets them display, on the market’s page, what their minimum, mean average, median and maximum response times have been over the past year, what their accept/reject percentage is, how often they reject with a form versus a personal note, etc.

Good stuff, highly recommended.

Angie

Well, I didn’t do much writing in March — a little over 4K words — but I got A Hidden Magic through edits, which was a much larger job than I expected it to be. Vincent, my editor on this project, is sneaky with comments; there are all these little notes that look like nothing when you glance over them, but end up rippling through the manuscript. [laugh/flail] I thought I’d be done in a few days, but it actually took me right up until deadline. I’ll know better for next time.

This is my first novel, so I was half expecting structure-level changes. Not hoping for them or anything :/ but I’ve heard from other writers over the years about having to add chapters or rip out characters, add or subtract subplots, change the whole ending, that sort of thing. I’ll admit to a certain amount of trepidation while waiting for edits to actually show up, and a whole lot of relief when there was nothing on that level. Vincent said reading and editing the book were a lot of fun, which is great; it’s always cool to get a good opinion from someone who’s not a friend, you know?

I went through the manuscript a few times and found a lot of little things I wanted to change or fix, aside from editorial comments. Some of them were mistakes which the proofreader (who gets the manuscript next) might well have caught, but I’m glad I saw them anyway. I’m a pretty good editor of my own work, but no matter how often I look over a story, there’s always something, you know? And with 72K words to play with, there’s a lot of room for little somethings to hide in.

I filled out the cover art request form in mid-month, and that was a lot more difficult than I’d expected, mainly because I was trying hard to be reasonable and not request anything outside the bounds set by a tiny budget. If I had a few thousand dollars and a couple of years to get on someone’s schedule, that’d be something else — heck, my first choice would be Colleen Doran, whose LOTR art and more elaborate Ovanan (these sort of elf-like aliens) from her comic book A Distant Soil I actually had in mind while developing my elves and their court. The look isn’t exact, but the mood and the esthetic is about right, especially for the evil Ovanan, who are beautiful and decadent. Last I saw on her blog, though, her schedule’s full for like the next year or so, and I imagine she’s horribly expensive. I don’t remember exactly what Torquere pays for cover art, but I think it’s somewhere in the $50-75 range. Humm, I guess George Perez is out too, right…? [rueful smile]

So I was trying to be reasonable, and figure out what to ask for that’d be doable with stock photos and some Photoshop skill. I gave a few possibilities and a lot of descriptions, and I’ll have to see what comes of it.

One thing I did discover, though, while browsing through stock photo sites, is that some of the photographers who upload photos to these places are incredibly optimistic. They apparently think it’s worth their while to upload, say, women’s portraits to the People / Portraits / Men section, apparently on the belief that their photography is Just So Gorgeous that someone who’s specifically looking for a male photo will see these female portraits and instantly think, “OMG! These are absolutely breathtaking! I must have them! I’ll rework my entire project concept to use female photos instead of male, just so I can use These Pictures!!” [/sarcasm]

On the other hand, maybe they’re just incredibly lazy and can’t be bothered to sort out their pictures properly. I suppose that’s possible too. Whichever it is, the People / Portraits / Men section of one site I looked at was at least 25% female, which annoyed me quite a lot. It took hours to go through all the pictures, and it might have taken 25% fewer hours if the photographers would pay attention to the damn section headers and put their photos where they belong. [mutter]

I still have to fill out the marketing form, with a blurb and an excerpt and such. That should be fun; I’ve never had a chance to do that before.

Now that the bulk of that’s done, though, I’m looking forward to getting back to writing. It’s exciting to be getting that much closer to having an actual novel published, but I’ve missed writing for a while. I’ve always known I prefer writing fresh to editing (doesn’t everyone?) but I’ve never had this much editing to do with my previous stories. And the fact that my last big push with HM before submitting it was essentially a months-long restructuring, with just as much editing and fussing around at the structural level as actual writing, means that I’m pretty burned out on editing and fussing and reworking this story anyway. :/ I’m at the point where I feel like I can’t tell any more whether it’s good or not; I’m too close to all the bits and pieces, characters and plot threads and fiddly little details of the world, to be able to see it the way a reader would. I suppose that’s normal too, but it’s still frustrating.

Oh, and I submitted a story, too, just a bit before midnight. I was working on something earlier for an anthology called Triangulation: End of the Rainbow, but it came out too long. I made a few passes through it, cutting and condensing and trying to get it down to within spitting distance of the mostly-firm upper wordcount limit of 5K, then I set it aside when edits came in. At around 11:30 tonight (last night? on the 31st, anyway) I remembered it and took another quick look. It’s at about 5500, which isn’t too bad. It’s a dark paranormal (no sex [grin]) and I think it’ll be an unusual treatment of the theme — I hope so, anyway. So I sent it along, and we’ll see what the editor thinks. At worst I’ll have another slip to add to my rejection file, and at best he’ll love it despite it being a little longer than he’d like. Keep a set of virtual fingers crossed for me on this one.

Anyway, adding things up for March:

1 pt. — 1 story submission
1 pt. — 4K words of writing
14 pts. — 72K words of editing
===============================
16 pts. total

Whee!

Angie

Christina Phillips asked her readers about promo, what we like and dislike, what we do, and what we think works. Since I’m me, my answer got way long, so I’m posting it here instead.

I enjoy some promo activities and dislike others. I generally don’t do the ones I dislike.

I like blogging, but I post only when I have something to say. I don’t appreciate it when other people post lame whatever just to fill a slot on their schedule, and I won’t blather about what I had for lunch just to get something up on a Monday. I know people who can come up with interesting, useful posts on a regular schedule — and envy them bitterly [rueful smile] — but I’m not one of them and I’m not going to waste readers’ time if I have nothing significant to say.

I have a LiveJournal under my pseud because my publisher has an LJ community and encourages us to sign up for days to play host. I’ll grab a day when I have something new coming out, but don’t try to appear regularly otherwise. I don’t have a gift for entertaining a bunch of people online all day long unless I have something specific to talk about and a relevant theme, and if I haven’t had anything new out recently, well, that sort of leaves me with tap-dancing and birdcalls, neither of which I’m good at. A lot of the other writers do stunt writing, where they call for prompt words from readers by a certain time, and commit to having one or more ficlets posted using the prompts by the end of the day. I’ve done that once or twice, but I suck at it and would usually rather do something else. [hides under keyboard]

I like doing raffles, and have found that an effective way of keeping a decent number of people showing up in comments all day is to give a ticket in the hat for each post a reader participates in. So if someone answers three trivia questions, tells me who their favorite historical pirate is, and posts a cookie recipe (or whatever I’ve asked for that day) they get five tickets in the hat. That draws much more traffic than just saying that each person who participates in some way that day will get a ticket.

And about raffles and other give-aways, if you’re giving away a copy of your new book, people who are participating won’t buy your book until after the contest is over, because they’re hoping to win a free copy. After it’s all over, disappointment can nullify the excitement and anticipation built up by your promo activities, and cause them to put the book on their wish list and maybe buy a copy whenever, rather than running right out after the contest is over. Giving away something else encourages people to sign up to win something from your backlist, or a gift certificate, or whatever swag you’re offering, and possibly also buy your new book, which you’re promoing the heck out of.

And giving away a gift certificate, even five dollars’ worth will let someone buy several of my stories, so it’s a nice prize but not a huge expense to me. And someone who’s a dedicated fan and already has my whole backlist can participate and use the gift cert. to buy someone else’s stories; I don’t mind at all extending the benefits to someone who supports me so much that they already have everything I’ve published, and if they buy someone else’s books with the prize, that just spreads the good fortune around.

I don’t do MySpace or FaceBook; I’ve heard too many bad things about them, and I don’t need an iffy timesink.

I don’t Twitter — major timesink.

I have an author’s topic over on The Phade, in their Manhole area, which is dedicated to m/m fiction. It’s a fun place to hang out, with people who really love the kind of stories I write, but it’s not so busy that it’s a huge timesink. A number of reviewers hang out there, and I’ve gotten several reviews from Phade people since I signed up there, which is way cool.

Being a Romancing the Blog columnist drove a surprising amount of traffic to my blog, considering that RTB is mostly het and I’m an m/m writer, but that was a nice gig, even overlooking the fact that I just love being able to blather on about whatever. ;D RTB is on hiatus right now, but I’m hoping the new owners do fire it up again soon, and decide to keep me on. [crossed fingers] Note that I have no idea how much of that traffic actually resulted in sales, but even just blog traffic is nice to see.

I have a set of GLBT Bookshelf pages and I get some blog traffic from that site. There are buy links from my story pages to my publishers’ buy pages, but I can’t tell how much purchasing traffic originates there. Building my pages also forced me to expand my HTML skills; I got a good book on the subject and did some experimenting to get my pages looking decent, and learned a few things.

I have a web site which I swear I’ll do something with some day soon. [hides under keyboard again] Doing the GLBT Bookshelf pages means I’m that much closer to being able to do something with my web site besides having a mirror blog sitting on it, in all my spare time.

Part of my problem, though, is that so far I’ve only published short stories (and one novelette) and I like writing different characters and even genres so I don’t have a built-up body of information for any individual set of characters or fictional setting. I don’t have any major works which lend themselves to the kind of “bonus material” people like seeing on web sites. I have free sequels available to three of my stories, but they do perfectly well as pages on my WordPress blog. There are some things I want to pull out of the blog pages and put on the web site, like my list of publications, and the freebies, probably add to my bio, that sort of thing, but mostly I want to be able to give people cool bonus material. I have a novel in process with my publisher at the moment, and some more stories in the works set in the same universe; once that’s up and running, there’s other info I’ll be able to give — character bios, info on how the magic system works, background on the fey and various other beings the boys run into, that sort of thing. At this point, though, I feel like so long as I can manage with just the WordPress and its pages, I should keep it at that level, rather than expanding to a full web site (which would be skimpy anyway) just to have a full web site.

I haven’t done any swag because I don’t have anything to put on that kind of item. Again, all I have out so far are short pieces, none of which had an individual cover. Cover art is a primary focus of swag items, especially the cheap ones like bookmarks; I’m hoping my novel will have a great cover which will lend itself to that. [crossed fingers]

And recently (just yesterday, in fact) I signed up with Goodreads as an author. Still trying to figure out how that works — if you’re there, come say hi! I’m not sure what the noticeable effect will be (any comments from other writers who actively participate there?) but there are folks on Goodreads who’ve already put my work up and have done some rating and reviewing and such, so I’ll find out whether it helps to have an active presence there, however much time I can give it.

Wow, looking at all this written down, it seems like a lot. [blinkblink] I guess it sort of creeps up on you, a bit at a time. And some things require regular tending — like being an active presence in the blogosphere — while others are very intermittent, like my RTB gig, or maintaining my GLBT Bookshelf pages. That’s another factor when deciding whether to do a certain type of promo: can you invest the time to set it up and then mostly leave it, with just periodic attention, or is it something you’ll have to carve out a regular block of time for?

Honestly, though, I think the best promo when you get down to it is good word-of-mouth, and a lot of it. If you count that in, it seems promo will eventually start feeding itself, as though there’s some critical mass of talkative fans which, if you can achieve that level, will ensure that you’re going to expand from a decent audience to a really good one. The trick is getting to that critical mass, and making sure that your fans, however many or few there might be at any point, have stuff to talk about. Which comes back to writing great fiction, and ensuring that you have a fairly steady supply of it appearing. Awesome writing is what it’s really all about; with it, you’ll have other people promoing for you once some target number have tripped over your work, and without it, all the frantic promo a single writer can do won’t help.

It’s all about how you invest your resources, whether time (to do things yourself) or money (to hire people to do things for you.) I think we can all control money spent, because it’s money and there are bills to pay and that number at the bottom of the check book. Time can get away from you, though, if you don’t watch it just as carefully. There might be all kinds of promo activities you enjoy, and they all might even be productive, but if you take up all your time doing promo at the expense of your writing time, the wheels are going to grind to a halt eventually. Finding a good balance here is key, and any uncertainty should be awarded to your writing time.

Angie, still trying to find a good balance

Sarah Zettel over at Bookview Cafe has the best summary I’ve run into of the Harlequin Horizons blow-up. Briefly, for anyone who hasn’t heard, Harlequin has partnered up with Author Solutions to form “Harlequin Horizons,” a self-publishing imprint. This has gone over like the proverbial lead balloon, resulting in RWA, SFWA and MWA scratching Harlequin off their list of approved publishers. Sarah summarizes the issues wonderfully well.

Angie

PS — I’m leaving tomorrow to spend the week with my Mom for Thanksgiving. I also have a novel due by then. [flail] If I’m not around much in the next week or so, that’s why. Everyone have a great holiday!