Last night I took part in the writing/publishing discussion podcast Litopia After Dark (the edition I was in won’t be online until Monday, I believe).
The theme was money in writing, a sore point with most writers whose intials aren’t JKR. One story stood out for me. Apparently megapublisher HarperCollins is to form a new publishing group that will try a very different model with money. They won’t pay authors any advances, but when the cash starts rolling in, will split the profits (whatever that means) 50:50 with the author.
I have two questions I’d like to ask Robert S. Miller who is to head up this new outfit.
The first: will everyone working for the company – him included – not receive any salary, but instead wait until there are profits to share and pay themselves out of those? It can take up to three years from committing time to writing a book to receiving any cash other than an advance (many never get anything else). Will Mr Miller and his employees wait 3 years to be paid for their work?
Secondly, at the moment the accounting for royalties harks back to the days when accounts were done in big ledgers with quill pens. Most publishers pay royalties once every six months, up to ten months in arrears. So you don’t receive money you’ve earned on a book in July 2008 until April 2009. The other publishers are even worse – royalties are paid every year, so you might have to wait until September 2009 for that July 2008 earning.
If Mr Miller’s company really wants to be fair to their authors I trust they will go to monthly payments. There is no reason with modern stock control and accounting why everything can’t go through practically instantly – except that greedy publishers want to hang onto the cash as long as possible.
Some publishers moan they have to do the long wait thing because booksellers take books on sale or return, so it takes quite a while to work out whether or not books have really sold. Again, this is a pathetic argument with modern IT - but it’s also irrelevent for Mr Miller’s outfit, as they’ve announced their books won’t be sale or return – once a bookseller buys it, it’s sold.
Change is a wonderful thing – and the publishing business is certainly in need of it – but you do have to examine just what’s going on underneath those bright ideas.
Fifty percent of PROFIT? She-ite.
Two words:
“percentageofthe” and “gross”.
Absolutely, Richard, wouldn’t that be nice?
To be fair, not many book agreements relate to gross amount these days (giving you a percentage of the cover price of the book), because there is so much discounting. But at least publishers currently offer a percentage of the nett (what the bookseller pays for the book).
This new outfit is offering a percentage (admittedly a big one) of the profit. But what is that? Will they apportion parts of the setup costs (editing, proofing, printing etc.) to each book sold, or will nothing at all be paid until all that has been covered? It’s a minefield of worms, to consciously mix metaphors to produce a bloody mess.
I think any author signing up with this lot has to be either bonkers or a guaranteed best seller (I suspect JKR wouldn’t mind, for instance).
This marks the return to a very, very old style of publishing contract. By placing more of the risk on the author, the publisher will be able to afford to publish authors it might not otherwise consider. MacMillan New Wrting, for example, is an imprint for debut novelists that does just this.
Why has this form of contract come back into fashion? Because mainstream publishing has become very much more conservative as publishing reality has bitten (i.e. that very, very few books make a profit). This model was old even when Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings. Unsure whether such an enormous book in an untried genre would make anything other than a huge loss – especially at a time (1954) when paper was still rationed, Unwin offered Tolkien no advance, but a generous share of royalties once the book was in profit.
Of course Macmillan Science does that too, Henry. But still there’s a big difference between share of the royalties and share of the profit.
I also still feel those two questions in the original post need answering. Why do the employees feel they deserve to be paid up-front, when the writers – surely the most important person involved apart from the customer – have to wait three years or so?
Well, it’s a good question. Perhaps it’s because that if employees of a publishing company weren’t paid upfront, their employer wouldn’t be able to get anyone to work for them (and their trade union wouldn’t stand for it, either). But there is always a long queue of authors who want to be published.
I read a post on this by David Isaak at the Macmillan new writers’ blog earlier today. The post has the title Stand back and wait for the outcry in the USA
He ends up recommending that the HarperCollins people come over and buy the Macmillans New Writing people a good lunch in return for some advice.
Of all the truckload of books I’ve ever written on the royalty basis, the only one that has ever made a profit was the one that I wrote without any advance at all. There’s a lesson in here, somewhere.
To hear more interesting discussion on money in publishing/books (and on the significance of digital publishing) that podcast is now available here