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[Transcript] ISBW S17 Ep12: Poor Little Rich Writer
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Poor Little Rich Writer
I Should Be Writing S17 Ep12
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
book, publisher, agent, people, deal, writing, advance, earn, publishing, podcast, author, sell, money, career, sales, lafferty, sympathize, fact, royalties, pay
SPEAKER
Mur Lafferty
Mur 0:00
This is I Should Be Writing Season 17 Episode 12. And I am Mur Lafferty. This is I Should Be Writing, the podcast for wannabe fiction writers. And I like to talk about writing but I also like to talk about the writer’s life. Anyway, I hope people are doing well today. What have I been up to? Well, I am thrilled to finally be able to announce that yesterday I finished one of my many projects. Finished one of my three major projects and turned it in. I hate saying this but you know, I got to be honest. One of the first times in my life, I worked on a project right when I got the information about it and turned it in well before the deadline. And saying that out loud sounds like ‘Well, of course, that’s easy.” But it hasn’t been so I did it. Shocking. I am happy I got that completed. And this morning I pulled up the notes my editor had on my novel and started making notes about what changes to make there. And now I’ve got the weird problem of I was really sure that one thing about the novel, like one person’s arc, wasn’t solid. And I really expected her to bring it up. And she brought up an entirely other arc. Another character, another arc and how that didn’t work for her. I’m thinking, “Okay, well I respect that and I’ll take a look at it but am I wrong in thinking this arc is weak? Should I not touch it?” I don’t know.
Mur 2:17
So got some edits going on. Feeling good about that. Trying to get my podcast editing still, got to get that flow going. It’s very boring to talk about so I won’t get into it but it’s more complex than it appears to be. So what I want to talk about today is that every couple of years, there’s a think piece or an article, either written by an author or by somebody who’s thought it would be interesting to interview an author, and they talk about the publishing industry as if it’s a complete mystery. And I’m tired of it. Nevermind the fact that it’s usually about somebody who got a massive advance really early in their career. Mismanaged the money, mismanaged the book, mismanaged their career, and now they’re in The Guardian or the New York Times whining about it. Publishing is not easy. I will be the first to tell you that. I tell you that twice a week, it’s not. So I sympathize with people who are frustrated about it but it’s not news. You don’t see news about how doctor residents are stressed. There’s no uncovering piece about how much these people have to work, because we know. And if it needs to be fixed, it’s not gonna be fixed with one newspaper. I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I’m just saying that, why do they need to uncover the fact that publishing is difficult with like this surprised, new author who has a bucket of money and not enough sales, and now they’re sad.
Mur 4:19
I got feelings about this. I do. Let me tell you. I pulled up the article. I’m not going to read it to you, obviously, but I do want to hit the high notes. The title is I Was Pretty Crushed. This author wrote two novels, then stopped. What happened? Okay, the book deal? So this guy is a comedian, so he’s got Twitter followers. He is bored one day. So he tweets that he’s bored and asks for suggestions what to do. A book publisher replies and says, why don’t you write a book for us? And I can hear every beginning writer digging their own graves, lying down in them, and then rolling over. I hear you. I hear it. So, he literally gets handed a book deal for no reason except saying he’s bored. And then, let’s see, it doesn’t look like he got an agent. So you just got a two book deal. And he says, it’s quite possible somewhere along the line I said the wrong thing to the wrong person. I don’t know. Perhaps nobody liked the novel, or maybe sales were crap. To be honest, I’ve never found out what happened. People who don’t do the due diligence to figure stuff out, that’s not news. I don’t know if these portals were available 10 years ago. This was an author who got a deal 10 years ago. Currently, if you don’t know this, book publishers have author portals where you can log in and see the book sales. You can see how much royalties you’ve earned. You can see how far you have to go to earn out. That’s fun. I did discover that, if you write in somebody else’s IP, work for hire which is what I did for Minecraft. Minecraft, the publisher, gave me one lump sum, I mean, paid out in advances and I’ll get to advances later. But they gave me, didn’t matter whether the book’s a flop or a hit, I was going to get the same amount of money. So I got that money. And I guess since I’m not tracking royalties they haven’t told me what book sales are. Which, that’s annoying because I’d like to know. It’s not going to make me any more money but I would like to know if my book is selling.
Mur 7:18
So we’re talking about the author portal. That’s how you get your information. But the guy’s talking as if publishing is this black box that you put a book into and money comes out of, but you don’t know anything else that goes on in there. You’ve got an editor. Contact them. An editor will be happy to tell you what your sales are or what they aren’t. So he gets the two book deal. And apparently writes the two books, thinks of it as a trilogy and when they decline to publish the third book, he found it particularly disheartening. And, again, I sympathize. It sucks, but it’s not news. This happens all the time. It happened to me. It’s happened to a friend of mine. It happens. This is not news. And if you don’t know this happens, you’re not paying attention. I’m gonna calm down a little bit. So here’s a fun thing that gets me. Hoping that two books and a degree of fame would help, he signed to the New York literary agency. That’s not the order in which you do things. I’m getting the flames on the side of my face, rage. I need to calm down. Okay, so usually the way to go about what this guy has done is you either submit to an agent and the agent signs you and the agent tries to sell your book or you submit to editors, and if they’re interested and give you an offer, then you contact an agent and say, I don’t know what I’m doing. Please negotiate this for me. We need to talk about whether we’re a good fit, my career. We’ve covered that. I’ll cover it again. It’s the whole finding the agent thing is a completely different talk. But you say, okay, if I do believe publishing is this big black box, well you agent, you have the keys to the black box. So why don’t I just hand my deal over to you and you manage it? That’s what we pay them for.
Mur 9:55
So, the guy did get the agent. Good for him but then he pitched a YA fantasy, and the agent didn’t want it. Urged him to write something else, and he said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then he pitched something else and then we have of course, this is the newspaper writer, “When he pitched a fantasy novel they threw their hands up in the air but when he wouldn’t drop the idea, the agency dropped him instead.” Well essentially if you want an agent to sell a book for you, the agent has to be excited about the book. Again, I sympathize with the guy. I do, but it’s not news. It’s not. This is just how publishing works. And the fact that it’s a surprise to him is what makes it news? I don’t get it. It makes me so angry. So he’s lost his agent now, and he’s decided to write the third novel, and is self publishing all three. He says, “Now I’m reduced to excreting out on Kindle when I was published by a house of great repute.” It’s just so frustrating because I know not everybody watches me. I mean I have a handful of people watching right now and podcast numbers are going anywhere either. So it’s hard for me to process this because I feel like I’ve been saying it over and over and over for years. So clearly, the sound waves have like gone out and out and out and permeated the world, right? No. Unless it’s something highly, highly complex like rocket science, there’s very little in the world that you can’t at least get a basic passing understanding of because of the internet.
Mur 12:17
I mean, if you don’t know what you’re doing, there are plenty of us. Plenty of podcasters, plenty of bloggers giving free content. All this free content out there saying, here’s how publishing works. And I wish that I could not purposefully not understand something. Act like I’m a big doofus, that was another quote, “I’m just a big doofus.” and then that becomes news because I don’t do my due diligence to learn about something that’s becoming a new career. Yes Collectonian, I caught that. Complaining about issues and then throwing shade at self publishers too and then becoming a self publisher. Yeah, you really want to insult the group you’re just about to join. And the other thing that blew my mind when I was doing research on it. I was looking at his book one. He got a Neil Gaiman blurb. I just, who are these people that like the universe is just handing them free stuff that nobody else can get, who’ve been working and working and working, and then they don’t know how to handle it because they won’t look it up, or ask for help. And then they lose it and then aw they’re sad. So let’s do an article on them. Yes, exactly. It’s deeply frustrating for those of us who actually care and spend the time learning things. Yeah, that’s it. It’s just like people who bumble about and joke about the fact that they can’t be bothered to do any work at all. And they get coverage for it. They get coverage that most people I know would kill to have for their book launch. Either self pub or traditional.
Mur 14:18
Because I know that not everybody listens to every single thing I’m going to go over advances again and I’m going to go over how book deals work. So, I have a series that I want to sell. My agent gets it to the publisher. Publisher spends a couple of weeks on it. They love it. They want to buy it. But then, let’s say wonders of wonders, more publishers want to buy it so it goes to auction, which is exciting and confusing and takes more time. So, because if you say, “Okay, well, Ace is offering 10,000 more dollars.” Tor’s gonna say “Well I’m gonna have to go into the money people and talk to them about that tomorrow to see if we can make a counteroffer.” I’m just pointing this out because a lot of people hear six figure deals so they think I hand my book in, and here’s a check for $100,000. So then, a couple of days pass, maybe weeks. I don’t know, I’ve only had one auction. And I’ll go over that another time because it was not what I expected it to be. Basically I expected it to all be about money which is stupid because I know that other rights are in contracts but it turns out like this person is offering a bunch of money but they want a bunch of rights that I’m not sure I want to give. And then there were other things going on so the whole auction thing can get confusing. It’s not just, I’m going to pay $75,000. Well I’m gonna pay 100k. It’s harder than that.
Mur 16:07
So, you get the deal, yay. Now there’s a contract to go through, which will require your agency. Please God, have an agent by now. Your agency’s lawyers going over the contract over and over again with their lawyers, this can take months. Months. So it can take months to get that. They will argue over commas. They will. I had a contract tied up for a while because of commas. So we’re talking possible months after you turned it in. Possible months after you got the offer. It can take a long time. Now, advances. Here’s how advances work. I’m going to make it easy because dividing and all that. Let’s say you get a three book deal. And you get an offer of $100,000. Now, $100,000 is, you don’t actually get an $100,000 deal. You get three $33,333 deals. So, each book is worth that much. So you’ve signed. You might get a third or even half on signing. That’s a sweet payday because you will get $30,000 minus your agent’s fee. And you’re gonna have to put away 15% for taxes. 15, God I wish. No at least 30% for taxes, maybe more. So already, even though $33,333 in one check, that’s exciting except minus 15%. And then if you’re smart, you got to take 30% of that and put it away. So still several thousand dollars. Nice, nice payment. So now the book goes to the publisher and goes through editing And, my new deal is not on the schedule so I don’t know if publishing is going away from this or that was just my deal, my publisher. So, But what I’ve experienced before, you get the signing payment, which is usually about a third. And then you get paid the next third for a book, when you turn it in. When you turn in the final draft.
Mur 18:54
So notice we’ve gone from, you get a third of every book when you sign, but when you turn in the first book, months later, you get $11,111 minus your agent’s fee, minus what you got to put away. I hope you haven’t moved to New York yet. Hopefully you’re working on book two now. And somewhere around there months have passed. Book one comes out. You get the final payment of the $33,000, which is another $11k. And you’ve been working on book two, hopefully. So, book two, when you turn in that final, months later. Again, this is not a fast process. You get another $11,000 payment. And so, your $100,000 bonus, you’ll get a nice chunk up front, and then will be dribbled out in $11,000 payments that you will lose a little bit over $1500 because of your agent. They earn it, trust me. And you’ll have to put away about $4000, maybe less. And these payments do not come regularly. So, when the final book comes out, there’s a thing called basket… Oh my god, I can’t remember. The concept is, remember what I said it’s three books for $33,000 each. Some deals would say $33,000 per book but really it is $100,000 advance, but you don’t make royalties until you pay back that $100,000. Not pay back that implies you have to be out of pocket but until the books earn $100,000. So, this means if your first book does great, and you make $50,000, you don’t start getting checks, after you hit that $33,000 mark, because you haven’t made the 100 yet. And this is something that people argue over very, very vociferously. Because it’s pretty lousy to have to wait until you hit the 100 if you’ve got a book that’s doing well. So, when I did a blog post on this years ago and I compared it to working at McDonald’s. And over the course of four years because that’s about how this will be paid out, three or four years, you will earn more working in McDonald’s than $100,000 book deal. Which is why if you get that offer, you cannot quit your day job. And you definitely can’t move to somewhere like New York.
Mur 22:06
The thing people also don’t seem to understand is, that’s not free money. So, that is called an advance on your royalties. Which means that once the book starts to sell, if you earn $3 per book. Which is pretty high, but anyway. If you earn $3 per book, when one book sells, you don’t get that $3. That $3 goes to paying off your advance. So you don’t start making royalties until that advance is paid off. I got to say as somebody who finally earned an advance out early on, because A, the advance was not high, and B, the book sold really well. Royalty checks are nice. It’s nice to know that every six months you’ll have a check. Which is also an argument for maybe lower advances, if you have your day job and you’re able to make your living expenses. That is one argument for lower advances. You’ll get your royalties faster. So, I know that a lot of this is inside baseball, and the fact that I’ve been ranting about it for over a decade makes me feel like everybody should know this and I know they don’t. But if somebody is going to hand you $100,000, wouldn’t you think to say, “Well that sounds too good to be true. What are the details involved?” Or would you quit your job and move to New York? Also writers don’t need to live in New York. Live in New York for any reason you want, but we have the internet now. And even before you had, like, phones. You don’t need to be in New York to publish a book, or to write a book.
Mur 24:04
Oh boy. So, I’ve talked about the author portals that, if not then right now, authors have access to. So you can’t say I don’t know whether my book sold or not. I’ll answer the question from Christian, do you have to earn out to sell another book? No. You don’t have to, it’s not like part of a deal or something, However, authors that don’t sell out often will get lower advances for the next book, which is what happened with me. I got a fairly nice standard? I don’t know. Advance for my first two books, The
Shambling Guides. And when they did not sell as well for Orbit, I’m pretty sure I’ve earned out since, but I’m pretty sure I got that deal before I earned out, but that was for one book and a 33% lower advance than the first book. So that was, yeah, Six Wakes, that book that did really well? That was a $10,000 advance. But again, I earned out in four months. So by the time royalty time came around, my first royalty period after the book came out, I was earning so that was nice. So no, you don’t have to but they will take your sales into consideration when they think about the new deal. So that’s another thing. That’s the thing that people don’t realize is that the huge advances put pressure on you for your continuing career. This is also why I, I will say, I’m privileged in that my family income is enough that I don’t feel the need to sell books at cons for the extra money because I know some authors do. And I definitely don’t look down on that. But for me, because I don’t need that extra 10 bucks or whatever, they’re making off the book, I would rather have that vote of confidence from my publisher. Because if you buy a book from me, the publisher is going to give me a box of books. And if I want more they can sell me some at cost. And then I can take them to cons and sell them for the list price, and then make, you know, a couple 100 bucks maybe. But none of those books go on my sold list. So I know it’s like a small number but still I’m eager for every single book that my publisher can put in the sales column. So, this is why I don’t sell books at cons. Partly, I also don’t want to manage a big box of books but also because I would rather my publisher knows she’s selling books, so that my next deal can happen, or be a good deal.
Mur 27:24
Does earning out quickly likely lead to higher advances next time? Possibly. I moved publishers for my next deal. Well I mean earning out quickly usually means that the book’s doing well. I’m trying to come up with a metaphor. I can’t. I’ll just say it plainly. If the book is doing well, it’s going to earn out quickly, and they will look at the book sales and say, these are good numbers, and use that to consider the next deal. Not how fast it earned out. I’m not comfortable saying what it was but my deal with Ace was considerably higher because of the success of Six Wakes. So while that’s exciting, part of me is wondering, how long is it going to take to earn out. I don’t know. So yeah, I think I’ve had my rant. I’m calming down. The tea helps. But, again, I’m saying this to anybody. I don’t care if you support my Patreon or you’re a subscriber on Twitch, I don’t care. If you ever get into a position where you get a book deal and you don’t know what to do, email me. I am absolutely free. I would be delighted to give you some basic advice on the next step to take. Please don’t think you can figure out the contract by yourself. And then think that the money’s just gonna come pouring in, because that’s not how it works. And if you don’t understand that, that’s not news. Okay, it’s just the fact that people treat it as news, that’s what really gets me. Like, I do not do my homework. So you get written up in the school newspaper as someone. Oh he bumbled around, didn’t do his homework and then he had a bad test o which brought down his GPA. What a shame.
Mur 29:31
Thank you for viewing and listening to I Should Be Writing. If you want to get in touch with me about questions about writing, or my books, or my podcasts or any advice on the next step you need to take in your career because you don’t want to make an uninformed decision like so many people, even if you want a Guardian article, mightymur@gmail.com. On Twitter I’m mightymur, on Instagram I’m mightymur2, numeral two and YouTube I’m Mur Lafferty, although we’ll see how well that works because today’s stream did not work over on YouTube. There’s some old videos there. Older, not like ancient. And if you want to support the podcast that would be awesome to help keep the lights on. And that is patreon.com/mightymur, or you can subscribe here at Twitch and get fun emotes. I stream live I Should Be Writing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Currently my schedule is three o’clock on Tuesdays Eastern Time and 12:30 on Thursdays. That may change in the future, we’ll see. My schedule is gonna change a little bit after February so we’ll see how that goes. Murverse.com is where you can find all the stuff about me, my podcasts, and everything else. I am grateful to everybody listening, everybody lurking, everybody watching. Y’all keep me going and it means a lot. So thank you and I hope that your productivity and your submissions keep going well because you should be writing.
Remember you can support the show at patreon.com/mightymur, jemi.app/mightymur, or ko-fi.com/mightymur.
I Should Be Writing’s theme music provided by John Anealio. You can find more about him at johnanealio.com.
Art by Numbersninja and transcription by FyreRider.
January 5, 2021 | Season 17 Ep 12 | murverse.com
ISBW S17 Ep12: Poor Little Rich Writer by Mur Lafferty is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
