In response to a question in the comments a couple of days ago, I am going to give you a brief overview of how advances work. Please bear in mind that these are generalities, and that for every rule there is an exception.

When you sell a book to a publisher, they advance you a proportion of the anticipated sales, so you can do useful things like, you know, eat.

It's called an "advance" because that's exactly what it is. An advance on your earnings. That means you don’t get another penny until you've earned it. The publisher buys the rights for the territory you have sold them and they agree to pay for editing, cover art, printing, distribution and marketing etc, which is why they get a bigger bite of the pie than you do.

So, let's do the math...

Suppose you sell your first book for an advance of $9,000 (which is probably generous for a first time unknown genre author. Celebrities and ex-presidents are the only ones who get 7-figure advances for a first book).

That $9,000 is broken down (roughly) in to three parts: one third on signing, one third on delivery and one third on publication.

So, you sign your contract (assuming you were accepted on a completed MS) and you'll get a cheque in the mail for... $6,000.*(If you've sold on synopsis, you'll get a cheque for $3000, the other $3000 to be paid when you deliver the completed MS.)

Less, of course, your agent's fee (if you have one) of (approx) 15% - $900.

You now have $5100 ( yay!) on which you owe tax ** (not yay!).

The other $3000 (less commissions and taxes) you'll get when the book is published, which might be over a year later.

Before you get another cent, your book has to sell enough copies to cover what the publisher has already paid you. Usually an author gets between 5 and 15% of the cover price. For the sake of this argument, we'll assume 10% which is common in Australia. Let's also assume that the cover price of your book is $20.00.

That means you're earning $2.00 per book sold.

So, to sell out your advance of $9000 means you have to sell 4500 books.

Let's assume you sell 5000 books in the first six months. Royalties are calculated six monthly, so if your book has sold 5000 copies, you will have earned $10,000.

But you've already been paid $9000 of that, so your royalty cheque is $1000 (less tax, agent's commissions, etc).

Subsequent cheques will reflect the sales in each six month period, bearing in mind that most books spike in the early months after their initial release. Royalties are calculated from Jan-Jun and Jul-Dec. You will not get paid, however until at least 3 months after the end of the royalty period and often much longer.

Selling a series is a little different. You'll get a larger advance (for more books) and the signing payment will be bigger but the breakup of the remainder will reflect the multiple delivery and publications dates and it may take you several years to collect. If the publisher "bundles" the advance, you have to earn out the whole thing before you get any royalties, rather than each book earning out its own advance.

If the first book tanks, the publisher has the option not to publish the subsequent books. You keep the advance you have, in this case, but you don't get the future delivery or publication portions of the advance.

There is also a trend now with some publishers, I've been told, where they offer no advance, but a higher royalty to compensate. I'm not sure how this works, but I know it means you earn only what you sell and nothing up front, so you might have to spend up to 2 years living on the dole before you see any money from your runaway bestseller. :)

You usually don't have to return an advance if the book fails to earn out (although you'll find it harder to get published again). That's the risk the publisher takes and the reason you're unlikely to get a 6-figure advance unless you're a known quantity. Nobody can predict how well a book will do. Ask anybody who rejected Harry Potter.

On signing a contract, your payment may take a while to arrive. My record is three weeks. My worst is three years (seriously). So don't go ordering the Beemer until you have the money in the bank.

I hope this clarifies this a little for you. I get asked this question all the time, but please, don't take anything I have written here as gospel. If you have a sale looming, check with someone like the Australian Society of Authors (or the peak professional body in your country) for proper advice.



*The publisher may also deduct income tax from your advance if you do not have a company, but I do, so I'm not going to go there. I get my advances paid in full, plus GST, and then pay my accountant an obscene amount of money to sort it all out at the end of the financial year.

** Unless your accountant charges obscene amounts of money to minimise your tax liability down to diddly squat...hehehe

A friend rang me this morning to ask why I’d drawn attention to a bad review in yesterday’s blog. “Aren’t you worried,” she asked, “it will turn people off the book?”

“I don’t care,” I told her with a shrug, which is absolutely true, because I really don’t think it matters. Take Wolverine and Star Trek, for example. Critics panned Wolverine and raved about Star Trek and yet Wolverine took a couple of million more at the box office. So much for the critics.

Besides, if bad reviews were going to make or break a book, Dan Brown would be pumping gas.

But the other reason I post bad reviews as well as the good is because I often talk to unpublished writers who are nervous about having their work critiqued. They worry people won’t like their work (and perhaps, by extension, them). I think it’s good to remind writers still struggling for recognition that writers will always be judged and if you don’t like it, you need to stop trying to get published until you can deal with it.

Note: I did not say you have to stop writing. Just stop asking for opinions (or collecting rejection slips) until you’re confident enough in your own skin to handle the bad along with the good.

In publishing, I promise you, no matter how well (or badly) you write, someone out there is going to love you and someone else is going to hate you.

Would-be writers who suffer this apprehension need to accept that and get over the idea that once they are published the bad things will vanish because people will only say nice things about their work. After all, it was good enough to get published, wasn’t it?

Trouble is, the criticism doesn’t stop. It gets worse because now it’s not just friends and family (who care about your feelings) offering their ten cents worth. Now there are whole bunches of people with access to the internet who don’t give a rat’s arse about your tender ego. They just want to be entertained. Good on you if you can do it. Look out if you haven’t managed to.

How you deal with either end of the hate-adoration scale, will have much to do with how much of your sanity you retain.

Artists of any ilk (writers, actors, painters...etc) can’t afford to get wounded over a bad review. Doing so is only slightly less dangerous than believing everything they say in the good ones. (Or what your publicist puts out in press releases... hehehe)

It is lovely and gratifying to get positive feedback like reviews and fanmail. It is annoying and sometimes hurtful to get negative mail and reviews.

The problem is, every writer will eventually get bad and good reviews, and you need to take both with an equal grain of salt. Or better yet, think of all the authors who can’t even get their work reviewed and be grateful someone deigned to notice your work long enough to say it sucks:). The important thing for me about the Publishers Weekly review for me was not that it was good or bad... it was that Publishers Weekly reviewed it at all!

I am fairly confident I am not the greatest writer that ever lived but I’m also pretty sure I’m not the worst, either. It’s nice to have people remind me of that, but I don’t need to be told it every day to keep writing. I believe in myself and apparently enough other people out there believe in me, too – at least enough of them to keep a roof over my head.

One cannot live their life according to what other people might think. You cannot write and remain true to yourself if you try. You can take into consideration what fans might like to see in a series, but you can’t give them what they want unless it’s also what you want and it works within the context of your story and your characters.

I cannot write a book that I hope will please the reviewers. It is not possible to know what even those closest to you think. When all is said an done, I can’t write a book I hope will please the readers, either, because short of polling every literate person on the planet via survey on the off-chance they might one day pick up something I’ve written, how could I even know what they like?

My first published  work was the one I set out to write to please myself, not all the well-meaning people I had (up to that point) been trying to please.

So, ten years on, I wrote a book a reviewer hated. It was also nominated for an award. They kinda balance each other out, I think.

Either way, I get a laugh and a blog entry out of it:)

I had a fascinating discussion with my agent the other day, about the current and future shape of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. In her opinion, the traditional fantasies (in my case: The Hythrun Chronicles, Demon Child and to a lesser extent, the Tide Lords) that have been the mainstay of the genre for decades, are starting to give way to more contemporary fare. The biggest fantasy sellers of the past few years, after all, are about a kid in a magical boarding school and a vegetarian vampire.

Both are set in the 21st century. There’s nary a goat herder sight.

This is not to say that traditional epic fantasy is dead. That sorry fate, according to my agent, belongs to science fiction at the moment, which she can hardly give away, let alone sell for actual money. Unless you’re already “name” or have credentials that stack up against Stephen Hawkins and can write like Harper Lee, it might be wise to shelve that epic Sci-fi opus you’ve been working on, she advises, until the market turns again, as it inevitably will.

But if publishers would prefer contemporary fantasy at the moment (and I can promise you, with the success of Twilight, romance is back, big time) where does that leave writers of the epic genre?

To be honest, probably not starving. Authors with established fanbases will continue to do well (provided they keep producing the goods at a decent standard). Goat herders destined to become princes, peasants who discover they have great magical powers and hapless wizards caught up in the machinations of courts and kings will be with us for a long while yet. New authors trying to break into the market will be struggling more than usual, because publishers are looking for the next Stephanie Meyer, right now, not the next Tolkien. It doesn’t help that the global economy is in the pits, either, making the risk of publishing a new author in a possibly-waning genre a risky proposition.

The obvious solution, you’d think, would be to just bite the bullet and write contemporary stuff. But contemporary fantasy isn’t as easy to write as you might think. Firstly, even before you get to plot or characterisation, you have the problem of where to set it. Stephen King consistently sets his stories in rural Maine, but what of us who don’t live in a place with so many conveniently spooky locations with such an atmospheric climate? What nation should you set your work in? Is the contemporary dialogue of the characters going to be so local nobody understands it? If you set your story in Coonabarabran, will that limit it to the Australian market? If you set it in Mumbai, will only Indians want to read it? (Actually, given the population of India, that may not be a bad thing…hehehe).

Then you have the problem of established authors changing genres. Fans come to expect one thing, and get annoyed when they do something else. Or fans of the new genre resent you because you’re not “one of them”. It is for this reason that if I ever decided to write… oh, I don’t know… say… a cutting expose of inner world of professional wrestling, I probably wouldn’t publish it under the name “Jennifer Fallon”.

The problem is even more complex, because it’s not actually about what’s popular now. It’s about what’s going to be popular two years from now. Realistically, that’s the earliest it’s going to hit the shelves, if you can get your bright idea formulated into a saleable synopsis, written, edited, and published.

If this sounds as if I’m having a tormented internal dialogue about what to write next, it’s not. I have known for over a year what I wanted to do next, and the conversation with my agent was, in some measure, prompted by a sense of relief that my instincts of 18 months ago seem right, and my idea is not about to get overtaken by a rapidly changing market.

What was interesting about the discussion was the sad conclusion that originality is a laudable ambition, it’s not what mega-sells. Twilight is a case in point. Jane Austen’s 18th century heroines are more independent and spunky than Meyer’s Bella, and there’s little originality in her thinly disguised conservative Christian agenda of abstinence and female submission. Harry Potter is a story brilliantly told, using every trope in the fantasy spectrum from orphans through to evil overlords (still don’t know why Voldemort didn’t just use a shotgun to rid himself of those pesky Potters, btw).

And that is what I find endlessly frustrating. Writing successfully (and I am using $$$ here, not critical acclaim, as a way of keeping score) is not always about doing it better. If I can use the analogy of food, it’s not serving up something exotic and new. It’s more about comfort food, packaged to look exotic and new. Underneath the sexy spices sprinkled over your tasty fantasy dish, you’d better have good old meat and three vegies for your audience to sink their teeth into, or you’ll never make it to the menu, let alone have people lining up to try your fabulous recipe.

Remember how  a while back, Glenda Larke and I were chortling over the use of the same pole dancer on the covers of our Russian editions...

Well, it got me thinking...

Russians aren't the only ones who get a bright idea and like to run with it....

Fortunately, both Trudi and Karen have large enough fan bases that their readers know their names, so the covers shouldn't make the slightest difference to their sales.

Wouldn't like to be the non-fantasy-reading boyfriend sent off to the bookstore to buy  the book for his beloved, however, who, when he forgets the author's name, can only tell the bookseller... "she wants the book with the wizard on the cover with the shiny light... it's blue and white... you can't miss it..." LOL

UPDATE:

A reader just emailed me this photo:

That's two different publishers (HarperCollins and Doubleday) using the same stock photo a couple of years apart, I believe.

Update #2 But wait... there's more

I was recently offered a job reviewing books for a rather large national media organisation. While flattered by the offer, I politely declined the job. You may think this is odd, given I happily review movies for the ABC, but the two are quite different.

 

I don’t mind reviewing movies, because, for one thing, I don’t pretend to be offering anything other than the opinion of a regular movie-goer, not an “expert” opinion in any way, shape or form. The movie industry is huge and except in a few rare cases, I am not friends — or even acquainted with — the writers, the directors or the actors. Admittedly, I’ve done some work on screenplays, but not enough for me to pretend I know anything about them (although I am a demon on plot holes – but that comes from my “other” job). I also have the liberty of choosing the movies I review, so I’m not often forced to sit through something I know I’m going to dislike (i.e., anything with Steven Segal in it).

 

Books, however, are quite different. For one thing, you have to review books that people send you, and these are not always books you actually want to read. For another, as a published author, there is an implied expertise that goes along with any “opinion” I might offer, that I really don’t think I deserve. And then there’s the time problem. I can watch and review a movie in a few hours. Books — and particularly the 150K word-plus speculative fiction stuff this job involved — makes a significantly larger impact on my time if I'm planning to do the work justice. Harriet Klausner, I ain’t.

 

But the biggest reason I don’t want to review SF books is that, in many cases, I know the authors. I like the authors. I’m even friends with some of them. Which is all well and good when they’ve written something I think is fabulous. But what happens if I think their latest work, well, sucks?

 

Do I say what I honestly think and risk losing a friend? Or do I offer an “upbeat” review and risk losing all credibility because anybody who picks up the book is also going to realise fairly quickly that it sucks, and that I’m only saying nice things about it because I know the author?

 

How do I look the author in the eye the next time I run into them at a con? What if the work comes from my own publisher? It’s a brave author indeed who comments “I don’t know how this got published” when you have the same editor as the book you are dooming.

 

I was once asked by a publisher to provide a cover comment for a book that I thought was dreadful, by an author I happen to really like personally*. I begged off, claiming I was too busy to read it, rather than ‘fess up that I thought the work was “amateurish, infantile, over-written, cliché-filled crap”, because I figured that a) I’d really upset the author in question, and b) they wouldn’t put a quote like that on the cover, anyway.

 

By the way, the book in question did just fine and garnered many other fine reviews, which brings up the most valid and pertinent point…

What the hell would I know, anyway?   LOL

 *No point in trying to guess who. I know heaps  and heaps of authors and I’m not saying which publisher, either