Over at Rex Hammock’s, he’s reporting that Harper Collins is launching an inprint with a “new” business model, where they won’t offer advances and they won’t take returns.
Yeah, we call that “academic publishing” and we can’t make that model financially feasible either.
Filed under: Pop Culture
yeah, but how could you link to that Rex Hammond page and not comment about your cuss-o-meter rating? Is it only because you’re not the cussisest?
Someone needs to ask NIT what words he’s counting. And, does he counter consider fleeting uses, or is he expecting for the Supreme Court to rule with the FCC not the broadcaster? http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080318/ts_csm/aobscene
Well, I’ll be rolled over like a cold, wet piece of shit and fucked worth a good god damn. My blog measured a measly, panty-waste 50% on the Cuss-o-meter. As one of my former colleagues once explained when admonished for his potty mouth, “I live in a profane world.” If you ain’t cussin’, then maybe you’re lyin’. Or some fucking shit like that.
I need to give my language a kick in the ass; this world is getting more profane by the day.
Seriously B, Egalia only beat you by a 0.6%. I know you can win this.
(I on the other hand, am a mild 5.9%.)
I guess they aren’t going to try to get anything on that imprint into any big box retail outlets. The “no returns” will kill them there.
But the “no advances”? Well, having seen myself how few non-recoupable advances actually earn out, I can see their economic point.
But, really, most advances are right around the $5K mark. If they don’t want to pay a measly five grand–recoupable or not–for content then they don’t deserve to be a publisher.
Back after some investigating (RTFA)
“The new venture is expected to publish about 25 titles a year, emphasizing shorter hardcover titles priced at about $20.”
So, yeah. It IS academic literary publishing–just like what several university houses are already doing.
I can only assume that the cuss-o-meter doesn’t have “cooter” in it, because I have to assume that, if you count that towards my cussing rate, I’ve got to have it won.
Coble, I know that the big publishers have to be getting eaten alive at the retail level on most titles, so maybe they don’t care if they can dissuade Barnes and Noble from buying titles they’re only going to return anyway, but I do just find it hilarious that they’re advocating a model that doesn’t work unless you get a huge subsidy from someone as something new that’s going to save them.
I agree, too, about the advance thing. If you figure that most titles should earn an author about a dollar a book sold (or, shoot, even if it’s only 50 cents a book), the commercial houses ought to be able to sell five thousand copies of a book. Shoot, they ought to be able to sell ten thousand copies of a book.
If they can’t, I really wonder what the advantage to an author of going with a commercial publisher is.
Oh, it occurs to me that that comment might not make sense to others, but here’s the deal. When you get an advance from publishers, they’re not just giving you money because they love you. It’s literally an advance against royalties.
In other words, they’re paying you the money upfront they believe your book will earn over the course of its lifetime. Depending on your contract, your royalty rate probably gets you someplace between half and a whole dollar a book.
So, if a publisher gives you a five thousand dollar advance, in an unfuckedup world, what they’re saying to you is “We believe your book will sell at least five thousand copies (presuming the dollar a copy royalty rate), because we aren’t going to give you money you aren’t going to earn because, if you didn’t earn it and we gave it to you, you’d end up owing it back to us and that would be awkward.”
In other words, in a perfect world, your advance would give you some indication of how good the publisher felt about the potential sales of your book.
In our world, an advance is often used to encourage an author to choose one publisher over another or to make headlines.
So, it sometimes happens that you have a publisher who’s honest with you–who says, in essense, I’ll give you a $5,000 advance because I’m pretty certain I can sell five thousand copies of your book. And another publisher will say “I’ll give you $25,000.” And who knows why. Maybe they hate the other publisher and want to stick it to them.
So, say your book does better than expected. Say it sells fifteen thousand copies. If you’d gone with the first publisher, you’d have gotten your five thousand dollar advance plus, after royalties had been figured, ten thousand dollars. Fifteen thousand dollars for your book.
But you’re at the second publisher and they gave you twenty-five. So, even though you earned fifteen, you didn’t earn out your advance. They gave you ten more than you earned.
Only very rarely do publishers come after you for that through legal channels.
Usually, what they do is say “You didn’t earn out your advance. You owe us ten thousand dollars. But you can just give us your second book and we’ll be in the clear.”
Now, you can hope that your second book does well enough to earn out your advance from the first book, or at least to get you close enough to earning it out that you don’t end up owing them a third book, but let me tell you, if they’re now getting books from you for basically free, they don’t have a whole lot of motivation to waste marketing resources on you.
If you have a good lawyer, the contract for your second book will keep the royalty accounts for the two books separate, so that you don’t end up in a bottomless unrecouped pit.