Storytellersunplugged

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A Well-Travelled Road

Storytellers Unplugged

A Well Traveled Road

So I was planning on doing a piece on the careful construction of a novel. Then I decided I’d change subjects from writing for a few minutes and discuss the logistics of handling business.

Oh, I know it’s been done before, and right here on Storytellers Unplugged, too. But as the header suggests, it’s a well traveled road and one that should be examined regularly. The fact that a lot of authors have been down this particular stretch of pavement doesn’t mean it’s been well mapped out, or that there aren’t a few areas where things can go wrong.

I figured we should look at a few of the aspects of the business side of writing. Not nearly all of them, not by any stretch of the imagination. Just a few of them. Let’s start with the basics, shall we?

Be professional: This one is self-explanatory, or at least it should be. The editor didn’t like your story? TOUGH! Send it to another one. Send a thank you note if you’re so inclined, or just wait a few weeks and send another submission. If you piss off that editor, you will be remembered, but not as someone said editor wants to deal with in the future. Be professional means, in this case, put your fractured ego aside and get on with the business you want to be a part of. Don’t start throwing slanderous accusations and don’t tell ten friends what a rectal orifice that editor is. Failure to follow this rule enough times will make it very, very difficult to get a writing gig.

Getting paid: There are, of course, numerous methods of payment in this business. There is the satisfaction of having your name in print. There’s the beauty of free books with your name in them. There’s the ever popular free ad in an issue of a magazine you’ve sold a story to. There’s the legendary “exposure,” and then there’s cold, hard cash.

Raise your hand if you can guess which one will help you pay your bills. Pick only one. Got it? If you said “cash,” you’re on the right track.

Yes, that’s right. Cash. Or a check will do, if you can trust your publisher. Some people probably prefer money orders. Exposure works, but only to a very limited degree and most of the places that only pay you in exposure, frankly, aren’t going to get you a lot of bang for your buck unless a lot of people suddenly decide they can’t live without going to that site or paying for that magazine no one has ever heard of. There are exceptions, to be sure, but they are few and far between. Frankly, in most cases, you’re better off putting the story up on your website. But be smart and have somebody edit your story for you first. Somebody mean, brutal and honest, who will do what an editor is supposed to do. Go check my website. I’ve still got a few stories up there where I forgot my own advice. Your name in print and a contributor’s copy: Wonderful! You now have your name in print and if you’re lucky as many as three copies of the fanzine with your name in it. You can keep one for yourself and SELL the other two to anyone who will buy them. Now you’ve got something to show for your efforts. Free advertisement in the magazine? Sweet! Check the distribution and see if it’s worth your troubles. If they have a national distribution deal and you recognize a few of the names in the magazine with you, it might be a decent investment. Oh, and make sure you have something else to advertise, okay? If you haven’t already sold a novel, or a short story collection or even a chapbook of your poetry, the free ad won’t do you a lot of good. That brings us back to cash or the equivalent thereof. That will buy you copies of the magazine if you need them desperately. It will also cover the cost of an ad in the magazine of your choice. It will also cover the cost of postage, office supplies and the occasional power bill or phone bill. You’ll need it if you want to keep your writing business in business.

Snarky comments aside, I really do recommend going for cash. I still throw an occasional story out for free when it strikes my fancy; if it’s for a charity or for a starting magazine that has promise. Otherwise I expect to get paid. My philosophy from day one in this gig was that if I expected to make a living, I had to get paid for what I do. Same as any business and this IS a business.

Oh, and you’ll notice that none of my examples above mentioned novels. If you’ve invested the time and effort into a novel length work and you give it away for free, then you are, in my heartfelt opinion, beyond hope. Maybe you can give away an occasional short story or poem, but never, ever a novel.

One more little piece on this, and I suspect I’ll offend a few fledgling publishers and contest holders along the way. I’ll go ahead and apologize in advance for any hurt feelings. I don’t give my stories to contests that charge money. I can’t afford it for one thing and for another, it just chaps my hide. I worked hard on the story. It might not sell to all markets, it might even suck wind. Whatever the case, I worked on it. I don’t then pay somebody to read it in the hopes that out of thousands of possible entries mine will be one of a small handful, usually a maximum of three, who will then get a portion of those entry fees back as the winner of said contest. But wait! Some of those contests get you published! Yes, yes they do. And if the magazine or collection it goes into was worth a wad of chewed gum, they’d pay from the earnings they’re making from their publications, not from a large flow of money that comes in as a result of potentially thousands of submissions, each paying ten dollars or more a pop for the privilege of being read. Yes, the old adage may well be true and you might, in fact, have to spend money to make money, but no one said you had to be stupid about it. Trust me; you’ll spend money along the way without lining anyone’s pockets.

Now, just because I’m in a negative mood and being opinionated, that doesn’t mean I’m right. I’ve hardly researched the contests except to decide they aren’t right for me. The following link goes to a site that has researched them more than I have and can give you far more detailed information including links to several other sites and possibly even a contest or two.

http://www.writing-world.com/rights/contests.shtml

The same rule applies (for me at least) to handing agents money for reading your novel. There are plenty of people out there who will disagree with me, I suspect. That’s fair. I never said I had all the answers. Just as I believe writing is a learning process, so too is the business of writing. I have several issues with agents in general and the way that they handle affairs, but one that stands out for me is a reading fee. If they’re looking for the next big name and I want to be the next big name, we might be able to do business, but no, I’m not handing them any amount of money to have them decide if we’re going to do business together. Once again, I simply don’t have that sort of cash flow. Even if I did, I wouldn’t keep it long if I had to hand every editor and agent out there a wad of my cash for looking over what I’ve written.

On the subject of agents: Do you need one? Maybe. I’ve had two. Both of them did their work well enough. Neither of them ever sold a solitary piece of work for me and neither of them ever increased the value of my works. Both got fifteen percent of what I made, and both of them got paid before I did. If either of them had ever managed to increase my cash flow or managed to sell even one of my novels for me, we could have stayed together.

Here’s one of those cold, hard facts of life for you. And I warn you in advance, this one is ugly. Agents serve a valuable purpose in a lot of cases. They can A) Sell your novel. B) Help improve your novel. C) Negotiate a better contract for you. How? They can increase the value of your sale. They can maneuver to help retain your rights for sales to other companies (you know, movie rights, TV rights, reprint and foreign rights, rights in other languages, hell, maybe even the rights to the exciting action figure collection based on your work. Stranger things have happened). They can then resell those rights to other publishers or companies fro an increase in your profit margin. They can and often are the pitbull that gets you your money when it’s due. They can and often do generally deal with aspects of the business that are uncomfortable.

They CAN do all of those things and more. A lot of them WON’T do that for YOU, unless you are a name. Why? Because you aren’t the only client that they have in most cases and if you ARE their only client, you can bet they’re going to spend a lot of time looking for more clients or they’re not going to be in business for long.
There are a thousand successful stories of writers and agents working together in perfect harmony. There are a thousand times as many writers who felt, justifiably or not, that they got the shaft somewhere along the way. That doesn’t mean they had bad agents. That means they had expectations that were not met. There is a difference.
Let’s say you get amazingly lucky and managed to get in with an agent at a prestigious agency. Congratulations! Fabulous news! Now you are one of that prestigious agent’s fifty or so clients. You have a book and you’d like said agent to sell it for you. Perfect, marvelous, wonderful. Said agent will get right on that, just as soon as authors 7-49 have been handled. How did you get stuck at number fifty? Well, hell, that’s easy. You’re new to the agent and numbers 1-49 are proven money makers. Clients 1-6 are the ones who are earning 6 figure advances, and also getting movies deals. They will consume the lion’s share of the agent’s time, because if said agent sells your novel for $3,000.00, the agent’s share will be $450.00. If he sells the movie rights for client number 2—the anorexic sex symbol slut daughter of a once massive name in the music industry who continues to be seen at all the right parties and makes the cover of People Magazine at least once a month—his take will be $42,500.00. It’s not just your career the agent is dealing with: there are 49 other careers to consider and, oh yeah, the ones that make the biggest cash put money on the agent’s dinner table. Agents need to eat too.

I have spoken with many authors about their agents, especially during those times when I’ve been thinking about getting one myself. A frightening percentage of those authors have explained to me that the agent didn’t sell their books but merely negotiated the contracts for them. Some of them were happy with that arrangement and others were not. I don’t point fingers here. If the agent is worth the money and can double the original offers, I think that’s wonderful. If, on the other hand, the agent is only looking over the contract and not really making any noticeable changes, why is the author giving away 15-20 percent of their earnings?

So is an agent worth it? Ask twelve different writers and you’ll get twelve different answers. What do I think? At this particular moment, no, not for me. A month or a year from now? Maybe. There are no solid answers on this one. I and one of my agents parted on equitable terms. The other agent? Well, said agent couldn’t remember my name when I called, but had certainly been willing to take 15% of my previous novel. If the agent couldn’t remember my name, how was the agent doing me the least bit of good? If the agent thinks of me as a number and one that is low on the list of priorities, the agent sure as hell hasn’t been pitching my book to all the right people. Pitching it in the trashcan, maybe, but not to the editors and the publishing houses. I’m perfectly able to get my manuscripts thrown away all by myself, thanks just the same.

Not mentioning names, because that’s not what I’m here for. I know of one author who was doing media tie-in novels and getting handsomely rewarded for each one. The author’s agent was glad to work those deals. Said agent was getting a nice chunk of change for each and every media tie-in. Unfortunately when it came to trying to sell original fiction, the agent didn’t seem to want to bother. Agent and author parted company when said author realized the score. The agent never minded getting money for nothing, but didn’t want to be bothered to further the author’s career if there was actual work involved.

Oh and a bit of advice for you. If your agent is also handling your short stories, they’ll get 15% of that money too. A lot of agents won’t bother, of course, but you might run across a few who will handle short stories. My advice? Sell them yourself unless your agent has managed to sell a few to Playboy or The New Yorker, who pay very handsomely for the tales they publish.

Next on the list of things to seriously consider avoiding: Book doctors. Now, don’t misunderstand me here, I believe that having someone look over your work is a wonderful thing under the right circumstances. I have someone who edits my works for me from time to time and I also use several of my peers as sounding boards. I also have several of the same peers use me, because frankly, we trust each other to be honest. I have never, however, paid anyone to write me a critique of my work and tell me where I need to improve. Here’s a little tidbit for you to consider. There are several companies who will gladly look over your work and even go so far as to do a full redline edit of your work for you, for a fee. That fee can range from a small fee for the critique (Small fee in this case is a few hundred dollars) of the entire work all the way up to thousands of dollars for critique, red lines, and a few suggestions on how to make your manuscript more marketable. They’ll give a general critique, do a red line edit, or even do both together, with fees that vary greatly depending on the level of work you’re requesting. The lowest fee I’ve heard of for a full line edit was two dollars a page. I’ve heard of upwards to seven dollars a page in some cases. So, looking at the lower end of that, on my most recent manuscript, which is 281 pages, I’d be looking at $562.00 just to check for misspellings and coma splices. Then fro a critique, we’ll go low end again and say $200.00. So now, for having a book doctor study my latest manuscript, I’d be talking $762.00. Remember, that’s on the very low end of what a book doctor could charge. Using the same manuscript with some of the higher numbers I’ve run across; you could be looking at a $1,905.00 (or even higher) for a redline edit and a full critique. Here’s a rub to consider: Most first novels don’t sell for big money. Some of the book doctors out there actually charge more than the average writer is going to be offered as an advance for a first novel. How is that good business sense? “Hey, look, ma! I sold a novel for $3,500.00 and it only cost me $5,000.00 to do it!” Yeah. Do the math.
Are they any good? I have no idea. I’ve never used one. Why? Because the ones I’ve seen listed in various writer’s magazines are either rip off artists or delusional. Let’s just go with a simple example based on a site that I will not mention. I bet you could find them if you searched the web.

A gentleman I know is in business as a book doctor. I must assume that he’s been hiding his publication credits from me. According to his website, everyone who works at the site has at least twenty years in the industry under their belts. Odd then, that I have never heard of a book by him and that, when we went out to lunch he was asking me for advice on how to get published.

Seriously. He might have been reading and writing for the last two decades, but he hasn’t been in print anywhere that I know of. He’s got manuscripts done, but has yet to sell one. I’m convinced that he means well with his site. It’s a lovely way to get some extra scratch and to help out his fellow writers. His fees start at $250.00 for a critique and I think it’s around four dollars a page for a full redline and write up. You know what? I can find somebody else to do all of that for a lot less. How? I can ask a few friends. Oh, wait. I already did. Never mind then.

If you feel you still need to go to a book doctor, find one with excellent credentials. Find one who has actually been published, and maybe even teaches writing courses at a local college. The odds are most of the people working in the college field would be glad for the extra money, are better equipped to handle the task put before them and have actually managed to sell something, thus assuring they at least have rudimentary knowledge of what it takes to get published. Also understand that no legitimate book doctor will ever promise that your novel will sell as a result of their efforts. Of if they do, get it in writing so you can go after them in court later.

Matt Warner wrote an excellent article on his unfortunate experience with a book doctor. The difference in his case is that he was working for one, not just submitting.
http://www.horrorworld.org/columns.htm

If you want to learn something valuable, read the article and follow the links at the bottom of the article. The article also lists a link to where you should go to look for a LEGITIMATE AGENT. Another alternative that seems to work for a lot of authors is having a group of fellow writers they can trust to be honest with them working together in a critiquing group. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that idea, as long as you can accept honest criticism.

Self Publishing: Okay, I’ve said this a few times before and as always I know there will be a few people out there who disagree with me, but if you are wise, you will not self publish anything more extravagant than a Christmas card. A little while ago I was saying that you shouldn’t give your short stories away. That still stands. You shouldn’t get self published for a lot of the same reasons. Number one, there’s a serious bias against it in the industry even in this day and age when the glory of PublishAmerica, Xlibris and Lulu.Com are available for you. There might be a few cass where that bias is unfair, but believe me, they are the exception, not the rule.
Brian Keene made a comment recently online and I’m putting it here for one and all to see, because the words are direct and eloquent. He said: “Right or wrong, fair or not, nothing will get you laughed at quicker in this industry than submitting a vanity-published novel. I see it all the time. Poor saps handing them out at conventions, desperate for some editor to read them and pick it up for their press, or for some author with marketing credibility to read it and offer a blurb. And those editors and authors smile and are polite and say thank you—and you know what happens after that author walks away? Worst case scenario, the book is passed among friends to be snickered at over drinks at the bar. Best case scenario, the giftee goes home and sells it on eBay. I have seen literal stacks of self-published trade paperbacks sitting in the corners of editor’s offices at some of the biggest houses in New York. They will sit there and gather dust until a few weeks before Christmas, when the interns and Associate Editors will order pizza, stay late, sit in a circle, and take turns reading them out loud to one another. Then the rejection letters will be sent out.

Is this fair? Of course not. Is it right? Hell no. But that’s the way it is. Self-publishing and vanity-publishing have such a stigma in this business, that you’re much better off mentioning your arrest for manslaughter in your cover letter than you are including your latest Publish America or Lulu.com effort.

Later today, many of you will privately email each other and say, “Wow, that Keene is such an asshole. How dare he say something like that?” And then, two years from now, you’ll say, “Wow, he was right. I owe him a beer.”

If you are SERIOUS about writing professionally…
If you are SERIOUS about becoming a better author…
If you are SERIOUS about making many from your talent…

Then one of the absolute worst things you can do is continue to self-publish.”

Brian, if you read this, I owe you a beer.

(Want to know the number one comment I’ve heard in defense of self published works? Are you ready for this? “It’s always possible to find a few gems hidden in the gravel.” True enough, but I for one don’t really like sorting though mountains of quartz and sandstone while I look for them. See, they have editors at the old fashioned publishing houses that do this for me, and while I may not always like what they choose, I know that the quality will usually be a little better. Hell, even if it isn’t, the books look better in around 90% of the cases.)

I’ll spell it out straightforward for you, something I am almost never guilty of doing: You are supposed to get paid for your work if you are serious about getting published. Several of the companies out there that will publish your works for you either require that you pay them for editing services, layout services and printing costs, or pay you nothing up front and expect you to wait for a long, long time to get any money out of your efforts. They also like to hold onto the rights to your work for up to a decade. I know a few authors who have managed to get themselves into ugly situations regarding getting back what they gave to publishing houses that will, without hesitation, publish anything at all that is offered to them. I had a long discussion with a lady who was selling books at a local bookstore. She was doing her sixth signing at that store and she was pretty darned good at selling her stuff. She ordered the books from the self publishing house, she took them with her, she sold them on consignment (the books didn’t have ISBN numbers and weren’t carried in any bookstores regularly) and she sold them hard. After a year and a half of doing so, she was informed by the publishing house that she had sold a total of eleven copies of her work. Yeah. She’d sold about eleven that day. The publishing company in question very patiently explained that it took time to reflect the sales. In her case it had already taken two years. Here’s a little link that might clarify things. It’s an interesting article.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2073717,00.html

Some other aspects that seriously need to be considered are as follows: the houses that specialize in self publication don’t give much of a damn about your story. They’re going to print whatever you give them and hope for the best. They will not bother with sending out review copies. They will not go over the book with you and make suggestions or corrections. They will not bother with hiring copy editors to look your works over (unless there is an additional fee involved). They will not set aside any part of their advertising budget to make certain that everyone knows your newest book is available. They don’t need to. They don’t care. If someone orders the book, they’ll print it and ship it. It’s cheaper for them to handle it that way than it is to store them in a warehouse. They will not deal with book distributors to sell extra copies. They will not deal with Amazon.com (in most cases). They will not do anything to improve your sales, because in the long run, if you are self-published, you are normally footing the bill for the entire thing anyway.

At best, they will give you the opportunity to see your name in print and they will provide you with copies of your book that you can sell yourself at a marked down cost (Less any possible percentage that you should have earned on those copies). There have been a few occasions where, thankfully, the authors managed to get decent book deals from their self-published works. I personally know of three.

Again, and with feeling, I don’t advise self publishing.

Or to put another way, if you have an agent, ask said agent for an opinion on whether or not it’s a good idea.

On getting paid: Novels take a lot of time and effort on the part of a writer. It doesn’t matter if you think Writer A is any good, there was still a lot of time and effort put into the finished product. My novels have normally taken me anywhere between three months and a year on the first draft. Later drafts take less time in most cases, and there are several stages that have to be worked out after that as well. From receiving and working on the redlines to reading over the proofs, to dealing with a thousand niggling little details and a few dozen discussions with the editor that finally, Hallelujah, buys your novel. That’s not a complaint, merely an observation. Somewhere along the way, a professional writer wants to get compensated for that work (Oh, and yes, there are occasions where books still go out with horrifying typos and watered down plots. That is not the point of this discussion. We can chat about that another time, okay?).

The standard deal is an advance against royalties. We’ll make this easy math and put it on the low end for the sake of argument. It’s your first novel, you’ve sold it and the publisher is offering you $1,500.00 and a five percent royalty. Each book sells for $6.99. That’s 35 cents to the author for each copy. The publisher is fairly certain they can sell 4,500 copies of your book, which is what it will take to break even on their advance to you. Eventually. I won’t get into the logistics of how a book sells and how little the publishers often make. Not now, at least. We’ll save that for another time too. And rest assured that while those numbers are not actually accurate in the fine details, the offer listed above is also well within the normal offers given on a first novel in the horror genre. Some offer more, some offer less, but there are at least a few publishers out there who have no problem at all with making an offer like the one presented above. It’s a low end offer, but you get the idea.

If the book does well, the numbers look good and they sell more than expected, you can probably, hopefully, expect a bigger advance on the next novel. If the publisher is honest, you can have the start of a beautiful relationship.

Sadly, not every publishing house is as legitimate as they could be. I know of at least two who manage to never quite sell as many copies as it would take to match up to the advances they’ve given. No, I’m not mentioning names. Let’s just leave it at I’ll have to be desperate before I deal with them.

Okay, and now for the last little piece I want to go over. It’s a simple one, but significant. Small presses versus the giants. I’m not going to romanticize this. I could easily go with the David vs. Goliath shtick here, but that would over simplify the issue. Larger presses deal with national and international sales that are positively epic in their scale. They might print anywhere from 35,000 to several million copies of a novel. They handle distribution with multiple companies and they spend a fortune in advertising. Their advances can range from oh, we’ll be generous and say $1,500 to multiple millions. If you get in and you are a solid producer—someone whose books sell well enough—you can have a blast with them and make a fortune. If you’re a big name, they’ll give you a sizable advertising budget, produce enough Advanced Reader Copies to ship out to every reviewer on the planet and gleefully send copies of your novels to anyone in Hollywood who might ask them for one (they often have a stake in that working out, because they’ve negotiated the rights with you or your agent.). If you’re a smaller name, they’ll publish you, send out a few review copies and celebrate every victory with you.

Small presses are different beasts entirely. Not necessarily any better, not necessarily any worse, just different. Most of the small presses will advertise your books and put out ARCs because they need to do so. They can’t afford to put out fifteen novels a month that don’t sell. It will destroy them. So they’re going to do things differently and often times work more intimately with you. For the sake of this article, small presses are defined as everything from specialty houses that do reprints of classic fiction to the folks who make limited edition novels that are signed, and then sold in numbered and lettered formats. They normally use high quality stock and have amazing production values that the major houses often can’t match if they intend to keep selling books. (I’ll explain that last part in a minute.) They are simply not operated in the same way. Small presses have smaller staffs (sometimes only one or two people), and are often operated out of the publisher’s house, at least until they can get around to affording an office. That’s just the way it is. They might never sell a million copies of a novel, but some of them are perfectly willing to try.

Here’s another difference: Small presses lack the clout to force a distributor to pay them on time. Several small presses have been destroyed as a result of distributors refusing to pay them. Going to court would cost too much and in the long run the bills got too big, too fast and the companies folded. A few cases can be solved with the simple phrase “They weren’t good at running a business.” A few of them just got caught at the wrong time and paid the consequences.

What’s the point of all these definitions and explanations? Simple; those are the markets you’re likely going to deal with. In a lot of cases the small presses simply cannot pay you what you might get from a larger house. There are a few exceptions, but not many. Small presses tend to live from book to book. Big publishing houses like Random House or Penguin have a far better cash flow for the purposes of paying writers.

Brian Keen pointed out in a previous essay that the two separate organisms can have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with a writer. If you can work that angle, more power to you. Never assume that a press is too big or too small for you. First step, get published. Second step, repeat. Make sure that you’re getting paid along the way.
If you’re just starting out, the odds are good that you will, eventually, get an offer from one of these folks, assuming that you have actually bothered to submit novels, have followed the proper guidelines, have been professional in your approach and have written something worth their trouble. In most cases you will get an offer for much less than you’d like to receive.

DO YOUR RESEARCH. Ask questions; find out what other authors who have dealt with the publishers have to say, and make an educated assessment of the offer put before you. (Or, if you have an agent, work with your agent on the offers presented). If $1,000.00 is all you’re honestly likely to get and you’re comfortable with that amount, then make your move. If you want more and honestly believe you can get it (and put your egos aside, people. They won’t do you any good here) then try for more. Either way, with any size publishing house, read the damned contracts and check the fine print. Know what you are giving up and what you are keeping before you or your agent sign ANYTHING. Despite all of the potential pitfalls here, despite all the potential rewards, know what you’re doing before you do it. This is not the time or the place to get jumpy. This is the point where you have to know exactly what you are willing to give away and precisely what you refuse to let slip between your fingers. A screw up here can (and has on numerous occasions) cost you a small fortune in potential revenues. No names given, no fingers pointed, but at least one contract I signed earlier on in my career cost me close to ten thousand dollars that I could have used. It knew what I was getting into when I signed it, I just didn’t think it through as well as I should have.

This is not a happy, cheerful article. I suppose I should apologize for that, but I want everyone starting out to know what they’re in for and a few of the obstacles along the well traveled road. There are pitfalls and there are occasional bear traps and now and then, there’s even a bear.

James A. Moore

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