

The confessions of a semi-successful author - niyazpk
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2004/03/22/midlist/print.html

======
joshkaufman
Very timely article: I'm in the midst of writing my first book, which will be
published by a major business imprint in late 2010.

I thought long and hard before signing my trade print contract: my next-best
alternative was self-publishing via Lightning Source, which would give me full
distribution at Amazon and all Ingram-affiliated bookstores (without shelving,
probably), no inventory requirements on my part, ~75% margins for each book
sold, and full control over the process. I have enough technical and design
skill to pull it off well, and my publishers know it.

I also have a list of ~14k people to sell to, which I established via my blog.
Most of the early sales of the book will come from this list, trade contract
or no, and most of the ongoing marketing for the book will be my
responsibility.

I signed the print contract because my publisher made it worthwhile: six-
figure+ advance for worldwide rights, and I retain multimedia rights so I can
freely adapt the content for online courses and other programs. That was a
good deal for me. If I want to write book #2, they'll have right of first
refusal, and if they don't want it for some reason, I have other options I can
pursue.

Book contract negotiation is like any other business negotiation: always have
options, ensure you're holding the valuable cards before you decide to play,
and be willing to walk away from a bad deal.

~~~
electromagnetic
That's sage advice. I value all business relations like a poker game; you have
to manipulate your way to a win, because that's what everyone is doing to you
and if you just don't have the cards for the stake on the table then you fold.

~~~
diN0bot
sarcasm? i like to be authentic 100%. i try not to think to hard about how
"business" really works. i like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,
rather than think everyone is trying to manipulate a self-centered win.

------
patio11
I have heard variations of this story quite a bit (two members of my family
nurse on-again-off-again dreams of going into the business, and I read a lot).
The industry is very, very overdependent on outdated, inefficient methods of
moving books because it is the only thing they think they have -- basically,
there are no options between getting approved by kingmakers like Oprah or the
New York Times and doing book tours to have the author hand books to readers
directly.

This is _insane_. Can you imagine how little work I'd get done if, after being
rejected by the New York Times, my marketing effort was going to little
collections of teachers, giving a speech, and trying to persuade them to play
bingo with their classes? And I make _a lot_ more off a marginal sale than the
average midlist author does.

Thankfully, some authors are finally starting to get clueful. They're doing
things like having a blog and an email list. (I will bet you any amount of
money that the anonymous author cannot identify her hard-core fans by name or
contact them in any way. What the _heck_. Screw the New York Times, _these_
are the people who you should be most worried about getting your next book to
because you _know_ they will love it and tell everyone they know about it.)

I think that is pretty much the way forward for midlist authors: do your own
marketing, talk directly to your readers, cut out the middlemen wherever
possible. Midlist authors don't make a lot of money or sell a lot of books in
the status quo. You can probably do better just being a micro-celebrity on the
Internet: beloved by the "thousand true fans" that know and talk to you, and
selling to folks a bit wider than that social circle.

It beats sitting at the kitchen table waiting for rejection letters.

~~~
symptic
Tim Ferriss is a good example of this.

~~~
adamhowell
Tim Ferriss is an example of this.

~~~
symptic
While we're being pedantic: Tim Ferriss did a good job at this _

------
netcan
Interesting read. A few thoughts

* Lamenting that 'publishing is a business' or 'ROI is everything to them' inevitably sounds whiny. Authors seem to be very aware (probably even overestimating in order to preserve ego) that the "I" part is very important. As much as she seems desperate for an advance, she obviously knows that large advance = large promotion budget & wants both.

* Her books seem to have failed to make anyone money. It's not that everyone but the author got paid. She got a slice of a small pie.

* Authors get paid so little because of how badly they want to be writers. This is actually evidence of supply-demand at work in job markets, something that is hard to come by. Without knowing any numbers, one might predict that garbage collectors get paid more than writers, professors, etc. No one want to collect garbage & lot of people wants to write. Supply of writers is high, price is low.

* Apart from the financial consequences, I imagine it would be very frustrating for a writer to live in this world of gatekeepers where you need permission all the time.

* I think this frustration is what makes writers sound whiny. Since they are constantly trying to get over the gatekeeper barrier, it seems like this is what is standing between them & crazy success. This lets them avoid the sobering ratio: # of books successful per year/ # of books written per year.

* Writers need to play a different game. Seth Godin/ Tim Ferris/ 1000 True Fans/ Trent Reznor/ etc. inspired (depending on taste) direct promotion. Also, try to make money indirectly. The Author cites how being a published author is already being a mini-celebrity. It might be possible to capitalise on this some way that isn't just selling books.

------
cstross
Let me just note in passing that her first book advance was for $150,000.

That's not midlist; that's indicative of a publisher taking serious aim on the
New York Times bestseller list.

Average first novel advances in SF/F fiction are on the order of US $7500.
Average n'th book advances for agented authors are around $17,500.

Of course, there's a power law at work here; about 1% of the authors get 50%
of the advances. But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first
novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it.

~~~
adamhowell
"But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most
professionals will never see -- and blew it."

Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've
"blown it"?

It took Twain 8 years to write Huck Finn and it was finally published when he
was 49. He wrote 100s of small stories under pseudonyms to make ends meet
until then. Today, he wouldn't have ever finished it, and we'd be without one
of the best books ever written.

~~~
robotrout
I'm delighted that you like "Huck Finn". In my opinion, it's not his best
work, nor was it his "big break", by any means.

Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more
tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book
form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I
own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time
when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious
satire, not the stuff that he's famous for.

Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished
prior to the book that you enjoyed.
<http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html>

~~~
adamhowell
Fair enough, I got the timeline pretty wrong.

The point I was trying to make was it's unfair to place a higher standard of
success on an industry just b/c it has a finished product it has to ship.

Twain wrote many novels b/f his breakout success, whichever book it was. Why?
Because when he started he wasn't as good as he was in his 40s/50s... just
like when you launch a webapp it's not as good as it will be after you've
iterated on it for 2 years.

Anyway, I'll try and stick to a subject matter I know a little better next
time ;)

~~~
robotrout
That lesson may be the correct one to draw here. However, I could just as
easily say that the lesson here is to abandon your web app, and write 10 more,
until you "make it". No amount of lipstick will make a book with a boring plot
shine, or a web app that doesn't fill a need, popular. I've abandoned three of
them (web apps), and am working on a fourth, while you've been presumably,
iterating and making yours more beautiful. Hopefully, we'll both win.

As an aside, I was reminded, when I read the chronology, of all the money he
lost as a wanna-be venture capitalist. He lost his fortune, dumping it into
printing press designs that the engineers could never get the bugs out of. Too
bad he didn't abandon that at some point...

------
neilk
Maybe this is tangential, but sometimes when I go into the bookstore, I ask
myself how many of these books were really necessary. They're filling some
sort of need, it just isn't for information. The shelves with the most new
books are invariably the topics that nobody knows _anything_ about, like
business or love.

I guess I'm asking how many authors we really need. I still haven't gotten
around to reading The Brothers Karamazov.

------
mtts
Methinks the serious issues the author raises would have benefited from a
better written article.

Even though it's a subject that interests me greatly, I found this nearly
impossible to get through on account of the fragmentation.

~~~
alan-crowe
I was frustated because the artilce talked money but not economics. If 10% of
people are readers and read ten books a year, and 1% are authors and write one
book a year, average sales are 100 books. Yikes!

It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days, but if twice as
many people want to write as 20 years ago, how does that work out? Do average
sales halve? Is it possible to write a novel that is in some absolute sense
better than a novel of 20 years ago, so people change their priorities and
read a book instead of going bowling? I doubt it. The author is on friendly
terms with her fellow authors, but it seems likely that they are in zero-sum
competition with each other and all the other authors out there.

She gives the impression that it has got harder to earn a living as an author,
which makes me guess that more people are trying to earn a living that way,
but she leaves me to guess. How many competitors does she have? With inelastic
demand, supply becomes the key number. I think that Charles Brown said "God
loves authors, he made so many of them" with bitter irony.

~~~
h_operator
"It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days,"

Yeah: see Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of
Abundance. [http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-
pub...](http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-publishing-
in-an-age-of-abundance) .

------
stevoski
Why, oh why, would she write this anonymously? Does she not realise that an
article like this, getting passed around the Internet, finding its way to HN
and personal blogs, is a great way to get immense publicity? Publicity ==
sales.

~~~
electromagnetic
It's only good publicity if you can get published. Outing the corporate nature
of the friendly looking book publishers is a sure way to get every editor in
an exceptionally small market to blacklist you, you're then fucked and have to
start selling primarily to a foreign market where the editors have no clue who
you are.

~~~
netcan
What has she said that's so unforgivable?

The value of her advances? That she liked/ didn't like editor A or agent B,
the names of whom you would need to do detective work to find out? Her opinion
of the industry?

------
allenbrunson
i've been a paid subscriber at salon.com for years now, since they first
started asking for money. it seems they have a _lot_ of interesting articles
like this one that never make it to the front page, most of which i miss. i
wish they had better filters in place.

~~~
hristov
I am pretty sure that this article did make it to the front page as I remember
reading it a long time ago. It is a relatively old article so you may have
forgotten it or it may have come up at a time you were not following Salon
that seriously.

------
xiaoma
She repeatedly made comments about her work being good but her publishers
wanting something "commercial". Maybe she should have tried to make something
people wanted instead of something she thought they _should_ want.

~~~
lionhearted
It's one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around going into business -
people buy what they want. If you deliver what they want, they'll buy from
you. If you don't, they won't.

They don't buy what you'd like them to buy, or what you think they should buy,
or what you yourself would buy. They buy what they want to buy. If you can
line that up with them, you can sell to people.

~~~
wallflower
Supply meeting demand explains why there is now a 'Vampires' book section in
Barnes & Noble

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/echoman/3883032294/>

Also, "Revenue reality of a book on the NY Times best seller list" was about a
Vampire genre author

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949044>

50 Cent (Vitamin Water) on Business:

> Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the
> audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of
> the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends
> that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the
> appropriate supply

------
dan_the_welder
Sounds exactly like the music industry as my friends describe it to me. Major
labels anyway.

~~~
danbmil99
yup. Same prescription: fuck the gatekeepers. But right now, the consumer
culture is such that people are simply not in the mood to pay direct dollars
for any of the art/entertainment they consume. Yet I still pay > $100 a month
for crap-ass cable with fake HD and shows I hate.

Something has to change.

------
barmstrong
Fascinating article.

My biggest take away from this is that the traditional publishing industry is
no longer the route to go.

Basically, if you want to be a writer today you should keep your day job and
just blog. If you blog is successful you'll have a much easier time turning it
into a book (almost as simple as sorting posts by most popular and sending to
a publisher).

Lulu.com is a great option as well for self publishing. You've got to self-
publish (blog, lulu.com, etc) until you're successful. Only after you're
successful should you look at traditional publishing I think.

~~~
dagw
Has anybody actually tried to serialize a novel in a blog? Has anybody done so
successfully. Turning a humour or rant blog into a humour or rant book can
(and has) worked. I've yet to see it done for any other kind of writing.

~~~
sorbus
There are lots of examples, if you look around - but I'm not sure how many of
them were successful, as I haven't looked for data on that.

John Dies at the End was originally published in a serial form online, though
it has since been taken offline. It's been published, and is going into its
... second printing, I think, soon. From what I've heard, the fanbase is quite
devoted (at one point, copies were sold for >$100 because of how hard it was
to get them - the first printing was fairly small).

Ichor Falls, a blog collecting short stories about the titular town, and the
weird stuff going on around it, has a book - though that's recent enough that
I don't know if it's successful.

I also recall a zombie novel, which was published in serial form online before
being published in physical form. Quite good, as I remember. Might have been
called Empire - the plot synopsis fits what I remember, but the online serial
version doesn't seem to be available any more. Once again, I don't know if
it's what you would call successful.

... actually, what's the definition of successful? I would say that it's
simply being published, after already been released online for free and
building up a fanbase; however, I expect that most others would tie it to
sales, or the amount of money the author gets from it.

~~~
noste
"I also recall a zombie novel, which was published in serial form online
before being published in physical form. Quite good, as I remember. Might have
been called Empire - the plot synopsis fits what I remember, but the online
serial version doesn't seem to be available any more."

David Wellington (<http://www.davidwellington.net/>) has written a number of
zombie novels that were first published in serialized form online and
subsequently in print.

------
darien
If she had used her real name, instead of the pseudonym, in this salon.com
article her books would sell better.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The article gave the tag line for one book as _"The much-anticipated new book
from the best-selling author of 'Y Marks the Spot'!"_ so I assumed they'd
written a book of that name. But despite having found a couple of authors to
conenct to the name both were male. Then I thought perhaps it was a pseudo-
title and looked at "title:spot".

Also looked at 150000 advances but that didn't really get me anywhere either
despite bringing up that the author of "the g-spot" got that advance but
that's the wrong year.

Her friend "Patty" is a sort of lead but I don't want to know that badly ...

My Google-fu is waning.

------
coliveira
No wonder this woman didn't make any money. Anyone that writes a book every
two years can't make enough money to survive, unless if the book is a
blockbuster. I think even Dan Brown writes more than a book every two years.

~~~
symptic
She mentions doing freelance writing and ghostwriting, so she's not only doing
her books for income.

------
gaius
Summary: I as an author sure do like money. This makes me cute.
Megacorporations like money too. This makes them evil.

~~~
allenbrunson
i didn't get the feeling that the author has a problem with publishers making
money. more like she is sad that publishers are no longer willing to allow an
author to build a reputation over a number of years, like they used to. and
even there, she seems to acknowledge that it's due to economic realities more
than anything else.

~~~
symptic
They did give her that chance though, with a $150,000 initial advance. At
least, more of a chance than most authors get.

~~~
allenbrunson
i would argue that a real-live nurturing would have been worth more than 150k.

one of her lessons learned was that, yes, there _is_ a downside to having a
large first advance. it sounds like the publisher lost money on that book, so
after that they were probably thinking of her project as an expensive flop. if
she'd taken less money upfront, they might have instead thought of her as a
promising author that didn't quite live up to expectations on her first
outing.

having said all that, i think the whole thing is moot, because it sounds like
a broken racket. there's another regular at salon.com, patrick smith, who has
similarly convinced me that becoming a commercial airline pilot is also being
part of a broken racket. ditto signing to a music label, trying for tenure at
most universities, and so on. i'd advise all of those people to try to find a
way to realize their dreams with a more hands-on, iterative approach.

------
balding_n_tired
"Because although I've published books and articles about things most people
won't talk about, let alone publish -- my sex life and marriage counseling, my
quirky predilections and unpopular politics, my worst mistakes and no-longer-
secret yearnings"

Won't talk about? If only.

