Oh, man can’t help this one one of 'em said “like Shakespeare” and another one said I would take my place in textbooks in American Literature. Now, who the heck is making all teh money? Not me!
On 2002-11-12 17:20, Anna Martinez wrote:
Oh, man can’t help this one one of 'em said “like Shakespeare” and another one said I would take my place in textbooks in American Literature. Now, who the heck is making all teh money? Not me!
Reviews are one thing Anna. Getting the punters to fork out is another. (Remember, you don’t write those textbooks.) But the really hard bit is getting the profits from the schmucks (oops, I mean dear souls) who are marketing the literature.
Bit early for a royalty cheque at this stage isn’t it? But, what fantastic reviews. Still, until the hard-earned readies start rolling in, measure the rewards in non-monetary terms. But what reviews. Wow … well done.
Wombat, I’m not expecting a royalty check yet, but I am keeping an eagle eye on the figures. It’s an expesive book for a paperback, and when the damn thing goes for 21.99 on Amazon, I get all of two bucks…so who get’s the rest? Seriously, though, folks, who makes the bucks here? If I were getting marketing support from the publisher, it might be a different story, but every review copy is out of my pocket. I could end up with the equivalent of a degree in marketing when I get through with this, which is not bad. What’s funny is these small town snobs who think I should have money because I wrote a book! Smoke and mirrors, buddy, smoke and mirrors! Whee! What an adventure! How close are you to Yara Junction?
Waiting for the Mothership…
[ This Message was edited by: Anna Martinez on 2002-11-14 06:53 ]
$2 out of $22 wouldn’t be bad by our French publishing standards. Some authors get them only after the 5,000 th copy sold. Comic book authors known to settle for less (splitting it between the scenarist and graphic artist), while it’s a big cultural thing in France or Belgium.
Here, the distribution (wholesale, retail) takes ca. half of cover price. The publisher is the only one to really invest in the production. Think of him as a producer.
Way out ? Self-publishing, i.e. self-production. It may be easier now because the key to cost (and profit) is distribution, and Internet could help.
On 2002-11-14 06:50, Anna Martinez wrote:
Wombat, I’m not expecting a royalty check yet, but I am keeping an eagle eye on the figures. It’s an expesive book for a paperback, and when the damn thing goes for 21.99 on Amazon, I get all of two bucks…so who get’s the rest? Seriously, though, folks, who makes the bucks here? If I were getting marketing support from the publisher, it might be a different story, but every review copy is out of my pocket. I could end up with the equivalent of a degree in marketing when I get through with this, which is not bad. What’s funny is these small town snobs who think I should have money because I wrote a book! Smoke and mirrors, buddy, smoke and mirrors! Whee! What an adventure! How close are you to Yara Junction?
Waiting for the Mothership…
[ This Message was edited by: Anna Martinez on 2002-11-14 06:53 ]
Anna, that strikes me as outrageous but I’m not really surprised. It’s the schmucks who get the bucks as far as I can see. I’ve never done a breakdown but Zubs figures don’t look unrealistic although it will vary from country to country. I’m well-published but in academic areas and I’ve never seen a cent in royalties. You don’t expect to get paid for journal articles but I haven’t been paid for book chapters either. I think you need to be both established and in a high-volume-sales area before you can start to dictate terms a bit. I’m in the former but not the latter category but when I write a text book—I’ve got one nearly finished—I’ll try to ensure that I get good royalties. (Not holding my breath though.)
With those reviews though, it might be worth getting an agent next time around but it wouldn’t surprise me if the agent’s fee ate up the improved royalties. I’m going to have to look into all of this soon because I have a book (a non-text book) one draft away from completion which might be a seller—who knows—and I don’t want to lock myself into a horrible deal.
All of this reminds me of the music business—funny eh. Some artists sell CDs by the bucketload and end up owing their record company money.
I think, short of becoming a known best-seller, the only way out is self-publication. I have a CD on the way and that’s the way I’ll go if it comes out well enough. CDs cost about a dollar to produce and we all know what they cost to buy—you don’t need to sell many to cover costs and start seeing a return. For books though, I need the prestige of a major publisher. All I can do here is try to get a short term deal which gives me bargaining power later if things go well. As for the small town snobs, I think the whole world is a small town when it comes to creative works.
I’m about 900km (500 miles) away from Yarra Junction but I used to live on a farm there some of the time as a teenager. Lovely place, but watch out swimming in the streams; they’re fed by melting ice caps. (I still swam in them.)
This one was financed by a small ($3,000) grant from the South Dakota State Arts Council, and I get no marketing support from the publishers, no review copies, etc., so all that comes out of my pocket. This is a demand publisher, because we know if Anna gave all but one of her whistles away, she’d give all of the books away, or worse would have gotten stuck with a garage full of non-selling books that the mice would use for a bathroom. It seems to be selling well enough for a new book with out much of a boost. My illustrator and I are both pushing hard. Funny, we could not have gotten the book printed here in SD or even in Minnesota…well, they could have printed and bound it, but there’s no designers who know how to do book covers. I have no fantasies of a Steven King rags to riches thing, but I did not expect to be spending grocery money on books to send out with media kits, either. This is some industry, this publishing, I mean people write because they have something they want and need to say is a big way…sh*t, maybe it’s time to go back to the moccasin telegraph and town criers! Right now I’m begging for a cover from the local arts magazine, I used to write for them, can’t collect the $25 bucks plus $5 for pics for the articles I did…but then again they’d rather do a write-up on a super annuated seventies rock star who’s coming to town! Jeeze, I’m whining! Kick me! Seems like good reviews are all I’m gonna get! Hey, Wombat, we have streams like that here, too! I don’t go wading in them anymore, because of the mine tailings! The funny thing about getting the grant, though, it was considered income and not prepaid expenses, so I had to fight with the state to keep my medical coverage and pay taxes on it! I’ve decided I’m nuts…because I just applied for another fellowship for emerging artists! That should really screw up my life! I have to admit, though, one of the real benefits of having doen this, is some of these Big Small Town Frogs look pretty damn funny with there lips puckered hovering around my rear end! Gawd,I’m a babe in the woods when it comes to this stuff! I spend a lot of time whistling “Little Maggie in the Woods” lately! I’m of the school that is your write to reach people, you really do need to open a few veins and use 'em for ink, write straight from the heart! Think I’ll take up screen writing, next, but at least a nomination for PEN is in the works, and I did get an invitation to join the tourist artists roster for the state! Whee!
Waiting for the Mothership…
[ This Message was edited by: Anna Martinez on 2002-11-14 10:19 ]
Beam up, Scottie! 
Read Umberto Eco’s “Foucauld’s pendulum”, or whatever that translated to in English ? Half of it is about those so-called publishers thriving on unknown authors who pay to get published.
No-one to design a book cover in the whole state ? Or none to do it for freefor the publisher ?
Do think of self-publishing. There must be a business or sales major, or plain accountant to help you around.
On 2002-11-14 09:20, Wombat wrote:
It’s the schmucks who get the bucks as far as I can see.
Yeah, right. Try setting up a publishing operation and see how many bucks you can make putting out collections of poetry. Publishing poetry is a labour of love and needs to be financed by a bottomless bank account, grants, or by publishing other books about topics like hockey and cooking.
Self-publishing? You might make a bit more money if you’re prepared to become a full-time hustler and hawker of your own wares, and I mean full-time. But you’re not likely to reach a wide audience, and you’re more likely to end up with a garage half-full of unsold books.
A propos, anyone want to buy a job lot of 1,000 copies of My](http://www.rogermillington.com/index.html%22%3EMy) Friend Flanagan? No reasonable offer refused.
On 2002-11-14 10:22, StevieJ wrote:
On 2002-11-14 09:20, Wombat wrote:
It’s the schmucks who get the bucks as far as I can see.Yeah, right. Try setting up a publishing operation and see how many bucks you can make putting out collections of poetry. Publishing poetry is a labour of love and needs to be financed by a bottomless bank account, grants, or by publishing other books about topics like hockey and cooking.
Well yes, I did point out in my first comment that selling poetry isn’t easy, so you’re probably right to accuse me of being unfairly harsh. I’m also aware that prestige publishers require big sellers to subsidise the money losers. Oxford University Press used to bank on getting a profit from only one in three of their titles. But they still benefitted indirectly from having classics that hardly anybody bought. I’m not even slightly bitter about my publishing experiences as I’m well aware that nobody’s made a profit out of me yet—I was just explaining the situation, not sounding off.
Nevertheless, I think that many authors and musicians do get exploited. I also think that the reading and listening public often gets exploited. My cynicism, to the extent that I am cynical, has been fed by talking to too many businessmen who boast about ripping off the creative people whose efforts pay for their flamboyant life styles. (They’re the schmucks.) When you’ve sweated blood to write something, it’s surely reasonable to want that not to happen.
Xlibris is self-publishing, demand publishing, allied with Random House, Bennett Serf would be spinning in his grave! It was expensive as hell, and sucks the cash out of everybody it touches…poetry is funny stuff, people love it, people write it, but seldom buy it! One of the good things about my book is that it reads more like a novel than poetry.
I think this thread raised some very interesting issues which we didn’t really explore very thoroughly, so I’m going to try to say a couple of things after reflecting on the way it went yesterday. What puzzled me most about my contribution was why I allowed myself to get caught out (and rightly rebuked) for calling publishers schmucks when I believe that only a few are. The executives in the major recording companies are another matter but I am ambivalent even there.
What I was expressing overall was a schizoid attitude to the relationship between art and scholarship on the one hand and commerce on the other. I think a lot of us have this attitude. On the one hand, I accept that both are subject to market forces and that this is not the fault of those who market art and learning. On the other hand, I sort of despise and resent the fact that our culture allows market forces to play quite such a large role in determining what gets presented to the public and how it gets presented.
Since I’ve managed to make a living all my adult life (30 years) from combining work as a musician and scholar, playing, writing about and teaching only things I love, I’m not an embittered wannabe genius starving in a garret and I regard myself as blessed not persecuted for being able to live the life I chose. I haven’t made many compromises and sometimes that’s cost me. But sometimes that living has been very secure and comfortable too. So why do I still think that, somehow as a culture, we’re getting it wrong?
Let me just comment on why I think that Anna’s royalty deal is unjust, even though I know that poetry doesn’t sell like hamburgers. StevieJ was right to point out that publishers don’t make money from poetry without the help of subsidies (and probably not even with that help.) I suppose what I think is this. Publishers perhaps ought to offer only token royalties (as they now do) for sales up to the point where they have recouped their costs. What I don’t see, though, is why poets can’t receive higher royalties after that point and why that isn’t part of the initial deal. If a book doesn’t sell enough to cover costs, so be it; but if it does and keeps on selling why shouldn’t the author get a serious share of the profits. Maybe there is a reason for this that I’m simply overlooking. In the case of CDs, quite a bit is spent getting the first run out but after that costs in producing further items are minimal and profits huge—why can’t the artists share more evenly in those subsequent spoils?
All I know is that printers aren’t getting rich either!
Seriously, though, the cost of printing and binding the books is about 20% of the retail price. Half of that goes directly from the printer to his paper supplier.
Jim Mc
Smearer of Ink on Dead Trees