Tomorrow, a follow-up post to the much-discussed stuff below about the publishing business. But today, I facilitated an adorable marriage proposal. And she said yes. And I am happy. And I love my job.

UPDATE thanks to comments from Diana Peterfreund and Justine Larbalestier (both brilliant): I am not imagining here a world that exists. I am imagining a world that I think might exist, and I think experience better and more consistent growth, if authors and editors and agents collectively decided to make it so. Also, I am radically oversimplifying the way that advances get paid out, although I don't think it affects the overall argument.

I'm going to argue today that big book advances are almost always bad for both authors and publishers. I'll try to stay active in comments (if anyone's interested) and edit the post as needed. First, some background:

1. Authors are usually paid an advance against royalties; i.e., when they sign a contract, some money will be paid to them in advance of the book's publication. Then they'll earn 10% (ish) of the hardcover price for each book sold. So if a book sells for $20, the author gets $2 per book. To "earn out" a $10,000 advance and start getting royalties, you'd have to sell 5,000 copies. After 5,000 copies, the author starts to make royalties at $2 a book, which are paid to the author in a lump sum twice a year. (For a variety of reasons, including discount stores, the actual math is much more complicated.)

2. The definition of "big advance" changes if you have a proven sales record. But we'll just say to make the math easier that a $100,000 advance is "big." (Which, I mean, it is.)

3. In all this, it's important to remember that the publishing business has become very blockbuster-focused, because it's a better way to generate short-term revenue. So they're chasing blockbusters right now.

Let us imagine a book called The Unicornians about a secret race of unicorn-people. A young writer with a job and a family has been working on The Unicornians for years in her limited free time, and she is finally pleased with it, having polished the love triangle between a Unicornian boy, a Werewolvian boy, and a human (but special!) girl. So the author sends The Unicornians off to agents, and some hotshot agent picks it up.

The agent is really high on The Unicornians. She thinks it's the next Twilight. So she submits it to several editors at once. Editor 1 comes back offering $300,000 for three books. Editor 2 offers $30,000 for three books but with a significantly better hardcover royalty. (Say, 20% instead of 10%.)

Putting aside the (very important) questions of which editor would be a better fit and which publisher is doing a better job with Unicornian-esque books, I would argue that the author of The Unicornians is always better off signing with Editor 2.

Let's say that The Unicornians is not a tremendous success. The first book in the trilogy sells 8,000 copies in hardcover; the second two sell 6,000*. With Editor 1, the author gets her $300,000^^, but The Unicornians comes up $240,000 short^^^ of earning out. With Editor 2, the author only makes $80,000 on the series, but $50,000 of that is royalty, and the publisher has also made a (modest) profit. The publisher will likely ask the author for another series, perhaps something focused in on the werewolf dude.

Some people would rather have money, but I suspect what most authors want is longevity. (e.g., I assume that everyone would rather make $300,000 in a career that contains 30 books than $300,000 in a career that contains three books.^)

Okay, so now let's say The Unicornians IS successful. Let's say the first book sells 250,000 copies in hardcover**, because they make a movie, and teens squeal about how hot the unicornian boy's horn looks. The second and third books also sell 250,000.*** With Editor 1's deal, the author earns back her advance and makes $1.2 million, for a total of 1.5 million dollars. With Editor 2's deal, the author earns out and makes $2.7 million in royalties, for a total of $3 million.****

So that's why it's better for authors, but why is it better for publishers?

Currently, publishers pay for all their bad bets with their good bets--blockbusters like Twilight pays for a lot of $300,000 advances on books that don't sell well. But shifting the incentive away from advances and toward bigger royalty splits would lead to steadier growth across the board instead of surges of growth followed by excessive correction. Better splits would also incentivize authors to do more to get their work to readers, which would help growth.

It seems to me that the publishing business has a lot in common with the mortgage industry: A publisher loans you some money, which they expect you to pay back. And if you don't pay it back, you get a black mark on your reputation and the publisher has to eat a lot of the loss. And we've seen in the mortgage industry that both lenders and borrowers do a lot better when homeowners have an equity stake, and when they've been loaned an amount they can reasonably expect to repay. And I'm increasingly convinced that publishing would be healthier if we moved in that direction.



* A lot of people will say that publishers are more motivated to spend money on marketing a book if they spend a lot of money on the advance. This is true, but only up to a point. In the end, publishers want to make money, and they don't really care how they make it. If they think your book will sell, it doesn't matter if they paid $10,000 for it or $300,000. (I am, to a minor extent, living proof of this.)

Related: These same people might argue that a publisher would be less inclined to support a book if the author were getting a higher percentage of the book's cover price, since they'll make less money on that book. That seems totally plausible to me, but what I'm proposing is that more or less all of us come together and more or less say, "Advances are unreasonably high, but a 20% hardcover split makes more sense than 10%." (Which it does.)


** I am completely ignoring paperback sales only because they make the math more complicated. I don't think they affect the validity of my argument.


*** Real breakout books (like Twilight) in fact sell much more than this, which is why publishers are so gaga over them. Like, imagine a company that publishes Laurie Halse Anderson, Sarah Dessen, M. T. Anderson, Walter Dean Myers, E. Lockhart, Maureen Johnson, Coe Booth, anyone else you can think of other than J.K. Rowling, and me. The combined 2009 sales of that publishing company would be a fraction of the sales of a company that publishes just the Twilight series.


**** Although even in this massively oversimplified example, these numbers still do not tell the entire story, because royalties are only paid out twice a year, and they are paid three months late. So with the current system, one of the big financial advantages to getting paid an advance is that with an advance, the money sits in your bank, but if you earn royalties, the money spends many months in the publisher's bank, where it is not generating interest--or, to be more precise, it is not generating interest for you. But anyway, even putting aside the fact that royalties should be paid more frequently and should include interest, according to my numbers, big advances still don't earn as much in the long run.


^ UPDATE: Sara Zarr points out that the 3 books v. 30 books is not about number of books, exactly--as she says, she'd rather be Harper Lee than James Patterson. And I suppose if one feels that a bigger advance will get this one great book that's in them out into the world in a deeper and more lasting way, then fair enough--although for the record I don't think Ms. Lee was not paid much in advance for TKaM.

^^ UPDATE: Diana Peterfreund, Abby, and others have pointed out that one benefit to the advance is that you have money to quit your job and then work on the next two books in your Unicornian trilogy. True enough.

^^^ UPDATE: In comments, Mary Pearson makes the very astute observation that the risk is a two-way street; the author is giving the publisher exclusive right to publish stuff, and an advance is a way of lessening the author's risk that the publisher totally screw everything up (which of course publishers do sometimes). That's a really compelling argument for advances, I think. (I still feel that excessive advances are bad for both sides of the seesaw, though.)

(Soon, there will be a long post for publishing nerds in which I argue that big advances are almost always bad for almost everyone.)

One of the things I like most about America is our libraries. I like that communities come together to make a commitment to making books and the Internet and periodicals available to everyone. Here is how libraries work:

I agree to give up some money that would otherwise belong to me. And in exchange, I get these amazing centers of learning. These places are obviously good for me in the sense that I can become more engaged and knowledgeable thanks to having free access to a wide variety of books about every conceivable subject. Libraries also good for me in the sense that the more engaged and knowledgeable the community around me is, the happier I am.

There is something profoundly important about our public commitment to making good books (and good Internet) available to everyone, rich or poor. And as you may have heard, the great state of Ohio is on the verge of cutting its library funding 50%. This will cripple every library system in the state, and result in the closure of many libraries.

This is a stupid, counterproductive idea. If Ohio wants the Ohioans of the future to earn enough money to revitalize the state, they need good libraries and those amazing secret superheroes known as librarians.

If you live in Ohio, please consider calling and emailing your elected representatives. (It works!)

For those of you interested in the business side of publishing: Susan Beth Pfeffer, a writer whom I admire (and once reviewed in the NYT Book Review), has put up an amazingly forthright blog post on the subject.

Many of you will know that authors are often paid an advance against royalties--that is, the author is paid a certain amount of money in exchange for the rights to publish the book. The author then earns a percentage of each sale (usually between 9 and 12.5 percent for hardcovers and between 5 and 7 percent for paperbacks), and should the author earn more royalties than the advance, the author is paid that extra money. (If the author earns less, she still gets to keep her advance.)

In the six years since I sold Looking for Alaska (my advance was $8,000, and it was generous), I've seen the expectations of first-time authors grow even faster than the YA market has grown. But when you actually look at the numbers, I am increasingly convinced that big advances are bad business for both author and publisher--and more importantly, bad for the book business. (If there is interest, I can explain in boring and excruciating detail what I mean, but I think most of the readers here are book readers more than publishing types.)

Pfeffer's post makes me wonder if the current business model will continue, or whether maybe there might a more equitable solution. Several publishers, for instance, are experimenting with bigger royalty shares in exchange for small--or nonexistent--advances. Is that a better way?

There's a story in the New York Times today repeating the tired notion that Holden Caulfiled is 'losing his grip on the kids." (And that therefore Catcher in the Rye is somehow less good.)

The article implies that there was some recent moment in which Holden seemed fresh and new. I'm sure there was such a time, but it's been a while. I am what teenagers would call "old," and yet when I was a teenager, Holden did not seem to be my historical peer. His slang was different, for one thing. Also, he had phone numbers of prostitutes, which was apparently common in the late 1940s but seemed rather exotic to my teenage self. It is not news that books published 59 years ago read differently than books being published now.

The thrust of the NYT story is that kids don't like Holden, that they find him whiny and immature and want him to get a life and take his prozac and engage in the world.

This is not news either. In fact, I'd wager that readers have always felt the need to (at least publicly) disavow all association with Holden Caulfield, in precisely the same way that Holden himself refuses to acknowledge the truth of his situation to any of his peers.

To sympathize publicly with Holden is to acknowledge that you feel unacknowledged, that you have a difficult time escaping the prison of yourself, that you are unsure of how to be a person, that you are lonely and dishonest and feel reviled. Adults can do this in a way that teenagers cannot.

Also, look: Teenagers hate lots of really good books. So what? English classes are not in the business of providing enjoyable reading experiences. English classes are in the business of A. teaching children how to read critically and thoughtfully, and B. teaching them how to be people.

Teenagers have always hated the books they read in school. I hated GATSBY! I did! I wrote a paper (no, I won't show it to you) in which I argued that Gatsby was just a dumb book about rich Yankees and their uninteresting rich Yankee problems, and that all that stuff about the billboard and the eyes was a bunch of English-teacher hooey.

I was wrong, of course. I was wrong in precisely the same way that students who dislike Catcher are wrong. And I got an D on that paper, which was the appropriate grade, even though of course I was furious at the time. I'd read the book! I'd shared my feelings! What else could a teacher want?!

I know that I am, like, annoyingly old-fashioned about this, but it seems to me that a big part of the problem is that we have lately empowered students to think that their reading of a book is inherently good and/or interesting.

Too often, we teach kids that all readings are created equal and that there are no bad ideas and etc.

But kids are not in school so that they can tell us what they think about Holden Caulfield. They're in school to learn what to think about. And whether or not you like Holden is not, imho, the most important or interesting thing you might be thinking about when reading Catcher.

It's not Holden's fault if people read him poorly.


UPDATE: I'm not saying that there's only one good reading of a book; I'm saying that not all readings are equally good. More in comments. Also in comments, Scott points out that according to this link, Catcher is the fifth most popular book on college facebook profiles (behind Harry Potter, The Bible, Angels and Demons, and To Kill a Mockingbird). Since the NYT report was based totally on anecdote and that site contains actual, you know, reporting--I think I'll rest easy that Holden is still speaking to "the kids."

In his sermon today, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei said, "If the difference was 100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?"

I'm not saying the Ayatollah is bad at math, but let's begin by correcting his figures.

According to the official vote tally, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad won by a bit more than 11 million votes. (Ahmadinijad purportedly received 24.5 million votes; reformist Mir Hossein Moussavi received 13.2 million votes; two other candidates combined for about a million votes.)

But if the margin of victory is 11 million votes, you don't have to rig 11 million votes. You only have to rig 5.5 million votes. That is, if you take away 5.5 million votes from Mousavi and give them to Ahmadinijad, your problem has been solved. (In fact, you don't even have to steal quite that many, because Ahmadijinad avoided a runoff by a little less than 5 million votes. But let's pretend he needed 5.5 million.)

So, then. How do you rig 5.5 million votes?

1. You begin in Tabriz, the hometown of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, where Mousavi was expected to win at least 2-1. You steal 600,000 votes there.

2. Then you steal 1.3 million votes in Tehran, giving yourself just over 50% of the vote when in fact you got beat almost 1.5 to 1.

3. Then you steal 300,000 Mousavi votes from Lorestan, a province where your support inexplicably went from 20% in 2005 to 71% in 2009.

4. In the rest of the provinces--most of which you really did win--you take a little more than one of every ten Mousavi votes and pretend it's an Ahmadinijad vote. This gives you 3.3 million shiny new votes.

But wouldn't someone have noticed? Only if the Interior Ministry counted all the ballots, which it strongly appears they did not.

If Khamenei and Ahmadinijad are so confident this was a fair election, why wouldn't they just offer to recount the ballots? It's not like it would be that time-consuming. After all, they supposedly counted millions of ballots by hand in a few hours last week.

But why such a big margin of victory? Why not keep the numbers a little saner, so people wouldn't question the legitimacy of the victory?

Perhaps so the Ayatollah Khamenei could go to Friday prayers and say, "If the difference was 100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?"

(Those of you who know my biography will know that I studied the Islamic world in college and then spent six years reviewing books about Islam for Booklist Magazine. Hence the interest in all this.)

For a very long time now, Americans have been imagining Islam as a single thing. The nature of that single thing has changed over the years--Islam was a fabulous curiosity that bridged the divide between savage and civilization; Islam was empowered black men; Islam was terrorism; Islam was the opposite of freedom and representative democracy; etc etc.

When we hear--as we all have--that Islam is a religion of peace, it doesn't quite compute. Because we can't help but think to ourselves, "Well, I know that as a liberal open-minded person, I'm supposed to think Islam is a religion of peace, but on the other hand I sure see a lot of swords and suicide bombings!"

The truth is that Islam is not a religion of peace. And it is not a religion of violence. Like all world religions, it is too diverse to be either violent or not. Religion is not so much a set of beliefs as it is a response to revelation, and as we see in Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism, the response to revelation varies endlessly.

The last words of the 9/11 terrorists were, "Allahu Akbar," which means, "God is most great." Many Americans associate these words with radicalism and violence. "Allahu Akbar" was also shouted from roofs at night during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

30 years later, Iranians have taken up the cry of "Allahu Akbar" to protest the Iranian government's (possible) electoral fraud. All night in Tehran, they chant back and forth to one another, risking arrest and worse to tell one another and the world that they will continue to fight for their votes.

Watch this video, for instance. According to the translation I saw, the young woman is saying, "They can take our phones and our forms of communication, but we will still be able to find each other by calling out for God's help."

Those who feel the guidance of God as revealed through the Quran are protesting for freedom and political representation. And the people savagely beating those protesters also feel the guidance of God as revealed through the Quran.

You would think we could accept this complexity, since we have seen it so many times in American history: As Dr. King's faith led to him being jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, my mother heard from the pulpit that segregation was God's will.

And maybe now--as we see and hear Muslims on twitter and youtube (and, occasionally, even on that pathetically decrepit technology known as television) calling out to God for peace and for justice--we will see that Islam is no monolith.

Allahu Akbar.

If you aren't on twitter, you really should be. Not because it allows you to keep up with the daily goings-on of Khloe Kardashian (although it does!), but because we are seeing for the first time what happens when a government that needs to control information to survive can't control information. Iranians are using twitter to organize, to share information, and even to discuss which routes to take to rallies to avoid confrontations with the police. Although foreign journalists have mostly been kicked out of Iran, we're still able to get pictures like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. And this, from Tehran University:



The police and the basij think they can shut down the Internet if they destroy the computers. (Actually, it looks like they only destroyed the monitors. I recall a similar mistake in Zoolander.)

The regime has more sophisticated ways of stopping the flow of information, but so far at least the Iranians on twitter have stayed remarkably organized, and they've found ways to vet information. When false rumors have spread, they've been quickly debunked.

So, yeah. Twitter is not about what you had for breakfast, or Khloe Kardashian, or me. It's about evening the playing field.

A real person goes to a real place that isn't real.

(This won't make sense unless you've read Paper Towns.)

So in 2005, the novelist David Foster Wallace gave the commencement address at my alma mater, Kenyon College. Within a couple days, everyone was sending everyone a link (it was here) to a careful transcription of the speech complete with off-the-cuff jokes and a couple [indecipherable]s.

Anyway, I really like the speech. It inspired a lot of the stuff in Paper Towns, and also I basically try to wear the glasses of the speech when looking at the world around me. To be totally honest, the way I think about the speech is not dissimilar from the way I think about, say, the Bible--i.e., a text can be flawed and incomplete and at moments [indecipherable] and still be revealed. I realize that is kind of a bold and awkwardly spiritual thing to say about a collegiate commencement address, but it's true.

Anyway, the speech has just been printed as a book called This Is Water. So now it is harder to find on the Internet (although still not quite impossible), because the book's publisher theorizes that you will not pay $15 to read the speech when you can read it for free.*

Because the speech is fairly short and people generally like to feel as if they are getting many pages of thoughts in exchange for their $15, the book is laid out like one of those books of trite marriage advice: On each page, there is a single sentence.

And then to read the next sentence, you go to the next page.

Then you turn the page, and there is another sentence.

It goes on like that for a little more than 100 pages. Unfortunately, this is (imho) a terrible way to read the speech--splitting up the sentences makes them appear more independent of each other than they actually are. It also obscures the fact that the speech was a speech before it became a book. I'm going to hazard a guess here and say that DFW did not walk up to the podium on that day in Gambier, Ohio with his speech written on 114 separate sheets of paper. The pace and rhythm of the speech's languages is totally screwed up by bite-sizing it.

I certainly sympathize with the desire to publish the speech--both so it can reach a new audience and so that DFW's family (he died last year) can have money they may need. (I don't know the particulars of their financial situation.) But it seems to me that one of the many problems with contemporary copyright law is that now we are stuck with** this weirdly cutesy and inferior reading experience. The job of the speech, after all, was not to make money. The job of the speech was to lead people toward better lived lives. (David Foster Wallace was a fan of the writer and Kenyon professor Lewis Hyde, who wrote about this at length in the classic book The Gift.)

I've never had such a visceral reaction to a copyright issue before, because generally the stuff I care about the most is either available for free or I can purchase it in a format that suits me.

Which brings me to this: I'm a little worried that I'm a gigantic hypocrite--particularly since I benefit from copyright law.

I've always justified it by saying that my books are available for free in public libraries. But what if someone would really benefit from a non-book reading of Paper Towns? Like, what if some kinetic typography version of the book*** would be a better gift to some reader than the book Dutton printed?

Is there some justification for copyright that I don't see? (I hope there is, because I do love money.) Or am I, in effect, doing the exact same thing as DFW's publisher just by copyrighting my novels? (These aren't rhetorical questions; please help me puzzle it through in comments.)


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* Which I don't actually believe, for the record. Like, Shakespeare is still selling okay even though you can read him online. I would imagine that the first wave of people who are buying This Is Water have--like me--already read it over and over and over again.

** Except not quite, because even the hard-working lawyers at Hachette will have a difficult time scrubbing the Internet clean. This means that people who really want to find the speech will always be able to find it, but the people who might stumble upon it anew and have their lives changed forever will probably have a more difficult time finding it--which, again, I would argue actually hurts book sales in the long run rather than helping them.

*** I would be delighted if someone took the thousands of hours that would be necessary to turn Paper Towns into a seven-hour kinetic typography video (although I would probably want a share of any proceeds because I am a greedy bastard), but my publisher would be all pissed off and litigious about it.