Macmillan's experiment
Brian Clegg
Saturday, 10 March 2007 17:55 UTC
I’d be interested to see what other science writers think of Macmillan’s experiment of paying no advance at all for their Macmillan Science books, but a larger royalty.
I know Sara’s arguments for doing this, but I personally think it tends to favour people with day jobs, who don’t mind not having the advance, over professional writers who often can’t afford to take the time commitment required for a book without an advance.
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Replies
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I think it’s an excellent and very exciting model for getting books published from authors whose books might never see the light of day (MacMillan Science shares this model with MacMillan New Writing, an imprint for debut fiction).
Of course it favours people with day jobs: but then most writers are in that position (even professional writers). Books are very much side-projects. The days when advances could support anyone other than a particularly ascetic and anorexic gnat are long over.
The model is not as experimental as you might think—it was once used more widely, especially for high-risk projects. Here is a celebrated example. When Tolkien submitted The Lord of the Rings to his publisher, Allen and Unwin, it was 12 years late and wildly overlength, and represented a kind of fiction which at that time would have been incomprehensible to most people. Couple these factors to the fact that it was the early 1950s and paper was still scarce, Allen and Unwin knew they’d be taking on a sizeable risk.
What to do? They decided that the risk should be re-balanced so that the author took on more of it. They offered Tolkien a kind of contract used for high-risk prestige projects, in which the author was paid no advance, but a handsome royalty once sales reached a certain volume. The Lord of the Rings was a success, the authors and publishers all became very rich, and the reading public got a unique book that might otherwise have remained unread. Everyone was happy: the gamble paid off.
But that was then. What about now? I’d contend that the books market is as chilly now as at any time in the past half-century. Advances are tiny to the point of invisibility, even if publishers are willing to take on and promote new authors at all. Most publishers will only publish material from established authors or ‘celebrities’—indeed, some agents won’t take on new, untried writers as they once did—so there is a market for a way to get books to market at relatively low risk to the publisher.
From the author’s point of view, a kind of natural selection comes into operation. With the risk resting more on the author than on the publisher, authors will be less prone to devoting time to material that won’t sell.
A few years ago there was a glut of popular science books, a market fuelled by publishers who felt that they really had to have a science list (in the wake of Hawking’s Brief History of Time, and the surprise successes of Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem and Sobel’s Longitude), and waved large advances at anyone who could come up with a barely workable proposal called Darwin’s Tea-strainer, Einstein’s Earlobes or Richard Feynman: My Special Friend.
Many of these titles, I dare say, were probably fairly superfluous, albeit loaded with advances which will probably never be recouped (I’ve published some of these. Quick—go buy them now through my website before anyone notices).
During the boom, authors got nice advances, for sure—but the situation could not be sustained. Ultimately, publishers lose out, as their only hope of staying in business will be to be bought out by larger conglomerates, and ultimately everyone is a loser: publishers and editors (who lose their jobs); agents (who have a less diverse market in which to trade); authors (ditto) and readers (less choice of reading matter).
Now the market has had a dose of realism, and that’s all to the good. However, the publisihing situation is now so desperate that most publishers with an eye on the future, especially in niche markets such as science writing, will embrace this new (or, at least, recycled) business model, as they will soon face stiff competition from online publishing and eBooks. If it does anything, this model injects much-needed and fast-disappearing diversity into the market.
If the books fail, relatively little is lost (compared with the advance-and-royalties model), and the publisher lives to fight another day. The author will think about writing a better book, or at least wondering whether he or she could do a better job selling the product (in my experience, authors should never rely on publishers’ in-house marketing departments).
If the books succeed, publishers and authors will succeed disproportionately. Authors and readers are happy, and the publisher will turn a profit and be able to underwrite more books. Really, what’s not to like?
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Henry –
I think there are a couple of things not to like. First is, I think there are a fair number of authors like me who, yes, can’t earn a living from books, but do rely on regular advances to keep the cash flow balanced. If I have to wait for the first royalties, these might come as late as 3 years after I sign the contract – it’s a long time to wait (see the separate topic I’ve just started on royalty periods).Secondly I think an advance indicates more mutual interest. If a publisher doesn’t pay an advance, they really aren’t investing much in the project and there’s a feeling, right or wrong, that they won’t put much effort into selling it either.
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Being the old cynic that I am, I don’t think there’s much relationship between the payment of an advance and the effort a publisher makes to promote a book. Many publishing houses, in particular large ones, seem to think that books will sell themselves. Small ones, however, are better. Souvenir, who published my book The Science of Middle-earth, paid a tiny advance but got me a PR firm, media exposure and a book tour.
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This old saw of “the advance indicates mutual interest” is nonsense. How much more mutually interested in something can two parties be if they stand to make about the same for each item sold?
I find it a entirely baffling when authors (and agents) imply that if an advance has not been paid then, after all the huge costs of editing, typesetting, printing, marketing and distributing a book to the four corners of the earth (and pulping the returns) that their publishers “won’t be interested in selling it”. And we’d stay in business how, if this were the case?
Lets look at this another way, are you telling me, Brian, that all the authors you know who get advances are delighted with the depth of editorial attention and breadth of publicity support they get from their publishers? Erm, no – get any two authors in a room and these are the two things they’ll gripe about first.
And small wonder: I’ve been at several events with 500-strong audiences given by the highest advance stars of popular science with not a copy of their book or a discount flyer in sight. At MacmillanScience we equip all authors with postcards, discount flyers, prestigeous events, radio appearances and print and online adverts. Why? Because to pay 30% royalties as a publisher and cover your costs and risks you gotta sell a lot of copies.
Advances are great as long as you are the author pocketing the 200K for the book that sells 900 copies. What if you’re the un-agented, very talented first-timer who knocks on that stung publisher’s door next? It ain’t going to open!
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Sara – I was feeling if that if your reply got any more heated, I would have to moderate my editor!
Seriously, we all know, as you seem to imply, that some publishers (not Macmillan Science!) often do go through all the expense of producing a book having paid a small advance, then do nothing at all to try sell the book, somehow feeling it’s okay to leave it to the market. So the argument that because a publisher has invested in producing a book they’ll actively sell just doesn’t convince.
However, I do think if a publisher pays an advance that’s significantly larger than the cost of producing the book, then they are likely to put more effort into marketing than a publisher who provides a small advance. But I take Sara’s point that Macmillan Science does do a lot, so the link is less clear there.
I still think this model makes it difficult for professional writers who earn a significant portion of their income from writing. Even small advances help pay the bills now, where royalties, while I’m writing a book, can be nearly 3 years away – that’s a long time to wait!
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Brian, you wrote “I do think if a publisher pays an advance that’s significantly larger than the cost of producing the book, then they are likely to put more effort into marketing than a publisher who provides a small advance.”
With respect, mate, you’ve not read Sara’s reply, and if that’s really your experience of publishers, then you have been extremely fortunate.
The fact is that the editors at the larger publishing houses have very little to do with their marketing departments, so what might be seen as an editorial priority might not be seen the same way in marketing.
Item. I sold Deep Time to Fourth Estate in 2000 for (gasp) £85,000. It has never turned a penny. You’d think that with such an advance, the publisher would have gone to some effort to promote the book—got me a PR firm, got me on all the chat shows, set me up with a book tour (with local media in each town) and so on.
Not a bit of it. The view of Fourth Estate was that once it left the editorial department, it went to marketing, and that was that … and what then? Marketing would send the book to a few newspapers, magazines and media producers with no follow-up, and they’d think that was all there was to it. The only initiative they showed was that one of their PR people pulled in a favor at a West End bookstore and got the book in the window for a week.
The horrible thing was the distinct impression that the failure of the book to sell was seen as my fault, so that when I sold Jacob’s Ladder to them a couple of years later for £17,000—the science-book bubble having burst, and Fourth Estate had been taken over by Harper Collins and forced to endure some fiscal coffee-smelling—it was made clear to me that if that one didn’t sell, that would be my lot. ‘Think of it as a two-book deal’, my then agent said. I fired him not long after. And their marketing effort for that book was even more supine than before—the book was now being published, you will note, not by a small go-getting company (FourthEstate) but by a very large one (HarperCollins) with a much sub-divided marketing budget, the bulk of which would go to their established stable. The book was very well-received—but hasn’t turned a penny of royalties, either.
Contrast this with The Science of Middle-earth, published in the USA but licenced here by Souvenir. This is a tiny publisher that has remained in the iron grip of just one man, Ernest Hecht, since the 1950s (!)
I asked Hecht how he’d avoided being taken over by a conglomerate. ‘Just say no’, was his answer, but the real reason is that he pays tiny advances; runs a tight ship in which editorial and PR work together; publishes only those books he thinks are winners; and backs them to the hilt.
Souvenir’s PR booked me in Cafe Scientifiques all over the country, and hired a really pro-active PR firm for three months to support the tour with local media. At last I learned what FourthEstate should have been doing with my book, having paid such a large sum for it.
Souvenir is still going strong. Fourth Estate, having paid unsustainable advances to books it would not then promote, was absorbed by HarperCollins, and several talented editors lost their jobs.
OK, even my book with Souvenir hasn’t earned a royalty yet. The only book I ever wrote that earned a royalty was an obscure textbooky thing I publishd with Chapman and Hall in 1996 called Before The Backbone, which I wrote for no advance at all, and gets me about fifty quid once a year.
What lessons should we learn from this? It shows, I think, how hard the publishing world has become, and why the Macmillan Science indy-label, no-advance business plan looks not only attractive, but probably much more viable in the long-term than the traditional advances-and-royalty method. Brian, you’re going to have to move with the times, or seek some other means of earning a crust, because the book business as traditionally envisaged is undergoing a seismic change.
It also shows that if you have a product you want to promote, don’t leave it to the marketing department, do it yourself. This is why I have posted my novel The Sigil online even before my agent has sent it to publishers, and promoting it enthusiastically to anyone who will listen. My agent actually likes this, as it is a good way to test the market and will help editors, if anyone likes it, to decide whether they want to take it up. OK, so I am not making any money at all, but the difference between that and what I would make with an advance plus royalties, in this chilly economic day and age, if probably marginal.
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1) This is a great debate – thanks Brian & Henry for your really interesting and informed points – what we need now is for John Brockman (agent of Greene, Pinker, Gould, Dawkins et al) to weigh in.
2) One relevant point I didn’t make in yesterday’s broadside is this: there are lots of publishers with lots of lists and lots of different advance scales and distribution strengths. Good authors and agents can shop around for the terms that suit from project to project.
3) Brian, is your anxiety that the arrival of MacmillanScience—and its fiction cousin MacmillanNewWriting—might have depressed the market or driven down advances? Do you have any evidence?
4) Don’t worry, I’m not heated—I just love a hearty exchange of views!
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No Sara, I’m not anxious about depressing other advances. It’s mostly just a matter of cash flow – the advance system was designed to help writers get through the period when the book was being written, and that need doesn’t go away because amazing advances like Henry’s (I’m in awe, Henry) aren’t paid now. I’ve just written a couple of little books for another publisher. The advances were only £2,000 a time – but that was enough to keep me going. £0 isn’t.
BTW can you have a word with your designers – it’s really irritating with a long discussion like this that having read your bit, I have to scroll all the way up to the top to find the Reply button!
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Brian – you’re in awe. Not half as in awe as I was. That advance came from an auction in which twelve publishers actually fought over the rights to the book, and that was just the UK rights—and remember, this was for a first trade book by an effectively untried author. And even then I didn’t take the highest offer. But £85k was still quite small compared with what some people were being advanced for science books. It was an unsustainable fairyland (although the practical outcome for me was that my wife could afford to stop work for three or four years while we had babies). Those days are gone. Advances are tiny to non-existent, and my children can feed and dress themselves.
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Thinking of the question of whether MacMillan’s Experiment is driving the market downwards: I have no idea whether it is or not, but I suspect that it’s not, at least not all on its own, largely for Sara’s point 2, above: what the Experiment is introduce more diversity into an already diverse market.
In any case, the publishers introduce restrictions that inhibit the penetration of the model, simply because the model is designed to exploit those specific segments of the market that are riskier for publishers. For example, Mac New Writing is only for first novels, which traditionally do very poorly compared with novels by writers who are more established. If it’s your second novel you’re hawking around, you have to go elsewhere.
However, having said all that, I think the market is being driven downwards simply by the logic of supply and demand. There are simply far more writers than can be accommodated in publishers’ catalogues, and this means that publishers can afford to be very picky and drive a harder bargain. (This may change, of course, with new media and trends towards self-publication and print-on-demand, but I reckon that a sizeable portion of the market still prefers real books printed on paper. Only time will tell).
Coupled to that is the fact that reading, at least for pleasure, is increasingly a niche market, like gardening or cookery. A smaller market means a smaller pot of money to go round.
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