A Worrying Trend…
Before me begin, let me say quickly that I love my publisher. They have been loyal, dedicated and generally awesome for 13 years, and my editor is funky incarnate. As well as that, I love my agent, not least as I first met her when I was 14 and she has therefore assumed a slightly fairy godmother role in my imagination, complete with magic wand and the ability to make everything better with biscuits.
This, therefore, is in no way a gripe about my life, which is a privileged one. It is, however, a muse on certain topics that out of good manners we writers tend to avoid, but which actually have a bigger effect on all things literary than we politely admit. I refer, of course, to cash.
An author is paid in four parts for any novel they write. Ten years ago, a nice-if-unspectacular fee was £10,000. The first third of this is paid immediately on signing a contract. The agent then deducts her fee (about 15% and totally worth it) and the remaining sum is sent on to the author. The next third arrives when the book is actually delivered and edited to the publisher’s approval; the final third is paid on publication. The entire process can take anywhere between nine months to two and a half years – certainly, I’ve never known it go faster, and have occasionally known it go slower. In other words, take £10,000, knock 15% off, and spread that income over, let’s say, 18 months. It is quickly apparent that this is not enough to live on in the UK.
Thankfully! Other means of income are available, of which the best and most emotionally reassuring is writing sequels. You are paid for a sequel in exactly the same way as the first book, and the act of delivering it and its publication might hopefully see you through tricky financial gaps. However – sequels have their limit. No sane publisher, for example, would sensibly commission 4 books at once, without knowing how book 1 of a series is going to sell. They could find themselves with a flop in book one, followed by three books also destined to fail catastrophically, and no easy contractual way to get their money back. Thus, a publisher is unlikely to commission more than two books ahead, even for well-established writers. This means that when you’ve finished your first and second books, you’re still likely to find yourself sat on your bum waiting for them to be published, and for sales figures to get good, before you have any prospect of being paid to write something more.
I said that writers are paid in four stages – this last step is royalties. Royalties are a percentage (somewhere around 7% to begin) paid to the writer on every sale of their books. However! They are only paid after the writer has ‘earned out’ their initial advance – essentially, once all the publisher’s costs are covered, including the initial £10,000 advance. Moreover, the 7% the author earns is not on the £7.99 you paid at your local bookshop for the masterpiece in question, but rather 7% on the heavily discounted wholesale-price sold to the bookshop by the publisher, before it’s marked up to retail price. In the case of big sellers, such as amazon, the retailer has the power to more or less dictate the wholesale price of books owing to the massive share of the market it has, and thus can drive down how much the publisher earns on a book… and thus how much the author earns on royalty. It also, alas, means that earning out a £10,000 advance isn’t as simple as dividing it by £7.99 and selling that may copies.
To put it another way: don’t rely on royalties.
The final glorious hope for income is foreign rights. Having your book translated into another language feels, to me, like free money, as well as being hugely flattering. (One day I will be good enough to read Mirror Dreams in Mandarin! I will, damnit, and I shall blame the translation for all the bits I don’t like! Hurrah!) With all this combined together… advances, royalties, foreign rights… you might just have a hope at maybe covering your rent if you are lucky. Perhaps.
However there are certain trends in the scribbling industry that are mild causes for concern.
Firstly, getting money from foreign rights is becoming harder and harder. Where in the old days publishers usually bought English-language rights only, now they tend to buy world rights, which essentially means that they get the money from any foreign sales, and take a commission on that money, and the writer only sees that money if a book ‘earns out’ (again, the same rules that applied to royalties). The purpose of this for the publisher is simple – if my book fails, then at least they have the profit from foreign sales to see them through. For an author, however, this essentially puts a buffer between that source of income and the writer, if not actively preventing that source of capital, then at the very least slowing it down hugely. My agent would argue – and perhaps wisely – that she can focus on selling works elsewhere, letting the publisher deal with foreign rights legwork, but I must admit, as matters currently stand, I’m not entirely convinced.
Secondly, advances have, rather than holding steady with £10,000 as a fairly decent fee, dropped for the majority of writers, particularly new writers, across the board. If you think about inflation, you can further point out that £10,000 in 2000 is now only worth £7,009 in today’s money, so not only are fees dropping in real terms, but also the power of that money to buy food, drink and shelter is also dropping, as the cost of goods goes up. (See: how much I loathe our government.)
Sure, there are exceptions to the rules. But let’s for a moment be sympathetic to the publisher! Publishing as an industry is increasingly battling with a changing world. I do not believe that people will ever stop loving books, but books as a medium now have to fight against TV, cinema, blogs and podcasts, as well as adapt to the new demands of ereaders, of monopoly suppliers who can dictate the market, against digital piracy and google+ mission to digitise the world whether the author’s rights are protected or not. Thus, publishers are fighting to make ends meet, and moreover they are fighting to keep people reading the books that they love and find inspiring, in an economy where the old model of distribution as their main purpose, is now giving way to marketing.
However, marketing is expensive. More and more, publishers look to the internet to solve this – this is one of the reasons why authors tend to keep blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts etc.. However, digital marketing tends not to be able to function alone. Word of mouth, print marketing, good reviews or a vast amount of time and money spent on online ads and networking are what makes digital marketing successful – the problem with a twitter campaign or facebook page is getting people to go there in the first place, and I remain uncertain that publishing yet has the solution to that problem. Particularly a solution that doesn’t involve huge sums of cash gambled on an editor’s best guess of what next year’s big seller might be.
Moreover, a commercial trap hangs over publishing as a whole, which is the question of ‘the next…?’ A publisher has to be able to survive commercially if they are to produce the books that we love, but to survive they need ‘big sellers’. 2012 was the year of 50 Shades of Grey, lord help us, so 2013 became the year of trying to find ‘the next’ 50 Shades of Grey, and a great deal of derivative nonsense was produced as a result. Editors want you to read fantastic books, but if last year’s ‘bad books’ (dig my subjective air quotes) sold well, then this year there is pressure to promote books that are like those books, and because they’re promoted people will read these bad books, and more books will be promoted like that, and then, and then…
… and so, readers dictate what the publishers promote, and publishers dictate what the readers read, and through this cycle of uncertain courage, there is a serious danger of a few big sellers getting bigger, and a whole world of less-marketed awesome books declining, and thus the balance of big writers, small writers, and the diversity of published literature, wobbles.
Self-publishing to the rescue, say you?
I’m afraid I will say no. I will say no because while I applaud online self-publishing as a wonderful means of self-expression, at the end of the day for every great self-published book there is online, there are 99 terrible works of dire fiction. Every person should be free to write whatever they want, so long as they do no harm to others, but as readers we should demand more from our literature. And publishers have a duty to posterity to try and raise the bar of society’s aspirations, and writers have a duty to study their craft and hone their skills, but this takes time, and time is money, and at the moment no one really knows how to solve this equation.
Let me re-iterate: my publisher is awesome. The imprint I’m published by, Orbit, genuinely strive towards a diverse portfolio of amazing books, promoted by passionate people. But even the most jubilant of editors will admit, with a wry smile, that this portfolio is only made possible by the very few ‘big writers’ making money, and that it is on the big writers that the big efforts must be spent, so that the risk always lurks on the horizon that the smaller writers may, regardless of our merits, sink without a trace, or find ourselves too skint to dedicate ourselves to writing. And that seems a tragic thing, for everyone involved.
