The past few weeks, publishers have taken a bit of a beating here at sparksflyup. First, many people read my post on excessive book advances as an attack on publishers. (It wasn't, really, but more on that in a second.) Then I criticized a publisher for putting a photograph of a white girl on the cover of a book narrated by a black girl.

While it's easy to demonize publishing companies, I think that we--as writers and as readers--chronically underestimate their value. The truth is usually more complicated than our vitriol.

TRUTH: Authors should not have final control over their book covers.

Letting authors control their cover designs is just bad business. As an author, I feel qualified to make the following generalization about authors: A lot of times, we are pretty stupid. Also, as a rule, we are poor graphic designers.

I do think authors should be consulted about covers. Penguin has always given me a seat at the table in conversations about my book covers, and they've always listened to me when I didn't like a design, and I doubt they would ever print a cover without my approval.

But I'm not a graphic designer or an art director, and if I tried to act like one, it wouldn't help get my books to readers.


TRUTH: Publishers are not to blame for the crap state of the book business.

It is true that for years publishers have spent too much money on too many books. But authors and agents are equally responsible for that.

I would argue that the core problem is ultimately not that publishers are aggressive about trying to acquire books that will sell well, but that agents and writers and publishers all wrongly view money as something we take from each other, when it should be something that we make together.


TRUTH: Not everything that goes wrong with a book's publication is the publisher's fault

We all have a habit of totally overlooking how good publishers sometimes are about getting books to wide readerships. Twilight is a can't-put-down book with uncommonly compelling world-building, so it might have succeeded regardless, but Little Brown got that book into all the right hands in the weeks before its publication.

On a smaller scale: Penguin's launch of Paper Towns was absolutely masterful. They got fantastic bookstore placement for a contemporary realistic novel at a time when contemporary realistic novels weren't in vogue. Everyone was extraordinarily well-organized and diligent, and every opportunity was capitalized upon. And as a result, the book did 1000% better in its opening weeks than either of my first two books.

But what if the book hadn't done well? I know from experience that sometimes a publisher does everything right, and an author works tirelessly, and the book just doesn't take off. At those moments, one wants to blame the publisher, or the cover, or the lack of a publicist, or the lack of a tour.

But the truth is that not all books have huge audiences. Fortunately, a novel's success is not measured only in copies sold.


TRUTH: Publishers make a lot of good books and do a really good job of getting those books to people.

This is actually quite amazing when you think about it. There were maybe two good TV shows created last year, even though thousands of people spent gajillions of dollars creating hundreds of TV shows.

But there were hundreds of good books--really, legitimately good--published last year. Authors were responsible for some of that work, but by no means all: Without Julie Strauss-Gabel, Paper Towns would have been a boring and self-indulgent novel with far too much information about the history of post office boxes. Without book designers and art directors, it wouldn't have had the cool package. Without publicity and marketing and sales, Paper Towns would have reached far fewer people than it so far has.

But forget me. Let's look at a better book, like The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing--a long and gorgeously written but at times challenging historical novel written in 18th century dialect with a largely African American cast. Not the kind of thing we think of as having "teen appeal."

And yet Candlewick got that book onto the New York Times' bestseller list. And while people still line up to say, "Teens won't like that book; it's too smart for them," Candlewick is still there, proving the doubters wrong.

I am very late to the party re. the discussion of Justine Larbalestier's stunningly honest blog post about the cover of her excellent new book LIAR. (I say stunningly honest because Justine is the biggest liar I know. I mean, other than myself.)

Here's what happened: LIAR's hugely unreliable narrator is black. But she is portrayed as white on the book's cover. Justine was (understandably) horrified about this, and never agreed to it, but authors do not have final say in book jacket design.

There are certain cover rules that everyone in publishing believes, including: 1. photographic covers sell, and 2. images of African Americans on covers don't sell. Both of these rules are absolutely idiotic if you think about them for longer than about three seconds. The rules of covers are another cart-and-horse problem, the sort that businesses often run into when they operate via anecdote and "the gut" rather than collecting and analyzing data.

Ultimately, I think retail accounts share the blame with publishers. B&N and Target are gun shy about making big buys of books featuring photographs of African Americans on the cover, and so are independents.

So, okay. I'm going to argue that 1. Book cover design strategies are currently driven by short-sighted misassumptions, but that 2. (un)fortunately, it won't matter much longer anyway.

Argument 1: U Guyz R Doin It Rong

Right now, book covers are intended to get a book to the broadest possible audience without being too dishonest about the content of the book. (Publishers are regularly somewhat dishonest, which is probably why Bloomsbury thought they could get away with the LIAR cover.)

An example: The original cover of An Abundance of Katherines featured math on it, because it is a book about math. The new cover features clone-like images of pretty girls. Now, there can be no question that pretty girls appeal to a broader audience than abstract mathematics.

But but but but but but: I would argue the job of a cover is not to get the book to the broadest audience but instead to get the book to its best audience.

Cover design is important at point of sale, but most books are sold by word of mouth--friends recommending the book to friends. The pretty girl cover will sell more at point of sale, but will it sell to the people who will like the book and recommend it to their friends? That should be the first question about a cover.

The centrality of that question gets lost in bookstores, which by their nature overvalue point-of-sale purchases and undervalue word-of-mouth purchases. (After all, a word-of-mouth purchase may or may not occur at your store; a point-of-sale one definitely will.) So by overvaluing the opinions of retail accounts, publishers can end up hurting their overall long-term sales.

Argument 2: (Un)fortunately, it won't matter much longer

So, like, no one seems to have noticed this, but publishing is, like, dying?

(Quick observation: The market capitalization of Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Books a Million COMBINED is about $1.75 billion. The market capitalization of the video game store Gamestop is $3.92 billion; if you include the market cap of independents, our entire brick and mortar retail business is worth less than half of Gamestop.)

So here is the bad good news: It's pretty difficult to imagine physical bookstores being a widespread phenomenon in 10 years. There will be some stores, of course. (More independents than chains, I suspect.) Publishers will finally throw off the oppressive yoke of free returns, whereupon they will discover that they still can't make money. They will shrink or go out of business.

All of that will suck, but this won't: BOOK COVERS WON'T FREAKING MATTER SO MUCH AS A SALES TOOL. Designers will be liberated to design the coolest jackets without so many commercial constraints, because the focus will be on the right audience instead of the broad audience. Word-of-mouth will be king again.

We've seen this happen in the recording industry. And we'll see it in ours.

That said, publishers and retail accounts shouldn't wait to abandon racism as a marketing strategy.

1. Come see me in Chicago this Thursday at 11 AM. Tickets are free if you call 312-747-4780.

2. Prediction: The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, will be bigger than Twilight. (Also, it's good. I will expand upon this argument at annoying length later this week.)

3. I made a video about Harry Potter and how much better nerd life is than regular life.

1. If you live in or near Chicago, please come see me at the Harold Washington Library Center next Thursday (July 23rd) at 11 AM. (I know that 11 AM is an unusual time for a meet-up and discussion, but hey, it's summer.) To preregister a seat, call the Department of Children and Young Adult Services at 312-747-4780.


2. I was very disappointed to learn that the Australian Productivity Commission has recommended lifting territorial copyright restrictions for Australian books. The issue is complicated, but it boils down to this: The productivity commission thinks books originally published in Australia should have to compete against American and British editions of those books, which will decimate Australian publishing.

In a truly free market economy, goods and services can travel without any kind of restrictions, and this makes prices cheaper for everyone. If books were like this, the theory goes, they'd be cheaper.

But of course no one has a free market economy. There are all kinds of things that corporations are not allowed to sell. Like heroin. As a community, we come together and decide that there are certain things corporations can't sell, because selling them--while good for the free market--would be bad for the community. (In this respect, credit default swaps on securitized loans are similar to heroin.) Territorial copyright is similar, I think: Australia might get slightly cheaper books, but there would be fewer (far fewer) Australian books by Australian authors.

And that would be a shame not only for Australia but also for me, because much of the best YA literature is being written in Australia. (Think Markus Zusak and Margo Lanagan and Sonya Hartnett and Garth Nix and Justine Larbalestier and on and on and on and on. And now imagine that some or all of those authors could never have gotten their start without an Australian publisher.)

3. If you don't know about Wizard Rock, Time Magazine gives you an education.

"Why don't you post videos anymore?! I loved them! They were so funny!"

Hi, Emily. Do not fear. There are many videos for you to watch--hundreds, actually. The web site you are reading represents less than one percent of what publicists would call "my web presence." I post about two videos a week on the vlogbrothers youtube channel, which I share with my brother, Hank.

(By the way, Hank's wife, who is known in nerdfighteria as The Katherine, just became a Master of Science. I heartily congratulate her, although I am sad to now be the only member of my family without an advanced degree.)

I also help run this site called nerdfighters, where you can watch all of our videos and also join tens of thousands of fellow nerds in talking about (and making art and videos about) books and other things that don't suck.

Also, you can follow me on twitter, where you can bear witness to such interesting events as the brief feud I had with noted American author Maureen Johnson. Here's an excerpt:

Maureen: Oh, @realjohngreen has declared a feud! *whirr of blender* I'm making a bitchjuice smoothie, Printzboy. Here, have a glass!

Me: To be fair, @maureenjohnson's books also awards. They often win "Best Book Cover" from the Decapitated Girls with Sexy Bodies Association.

The conversation about the business of publishing and the failure of the current business model will continue in the comments of the post below this one, where I'm still answering questions and comments. But if you've had enough of all that, here is the best song ever written about Twilight and Edward Cullen.

Okay, quick background: Last week I wrote a post arguing against outrageously high book advances and in favor of better royalties for authors. I followed this up with a post arguing that the widely held belief that big advances cause big marketing budgets does not really hold up to scrutiny. (Big advances and big marketing budgets are obviously often correlated, but that does not imply any kind of causal relationship.)

Then I promised a mathy post explaining to publishers why this model makes more sense for them, after which I decided that my numbers were perhaps not as lock-solid as I previously believed them to be, so I decided not to publish that post.

For the record:

1. One thing that keeps getting overlooked here is that many big publishers would currently be OUT OF BUSINESS if they were not owned by gigantic media companies that can absorb the losses of their idiotic up-front gambling. It's not like I'm fretting about some on-the-horizon crisis in publishing; the crisis is here. The model is not working, and it isn't changing, which historically bodes poorly. (I'm looking at you, record companies.)


2. That said, my radical proposal was wrong enough to be relatively easy to dismiss. But if you lower advances and increase royalty escalations dramatically (at least according to my calculations which might be wrong because I am bad at math), over the last five years EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHER IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EFFING WORLD would either be more profitable or lose less money except maybe Hachette.* So I just want to make it clear that I am not backing away from that fundamental belief.


3. The comments to these posts have been fascinating and wonderful and I am deeply grateful to all of you for them.


4. I wanted to pull one comment out and respond to it in pieces, because it raises a lot of important questions and also brings forth the obvious but as-yet-unstated fact that I am writing from a particular POV. So okay, from commenter writeon:

"If (like most authors) the only money you'd be making from a book is the advance (since most books don't earn out their advance or stay on shelves long enough to make royalties) why on earth would an author want to turn down money?"

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing against advances. My beef is not with $30,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back. My beef is with $500,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back.

The reason to take less money upfront and get more in royalties is pretty simple, I think: Your publisher is owned by a company that wants to make money. So long as you make money, you make sense. If you don't make money, you don't make sense.**

"Authors don't have a crystal ball where they can see into the future and say, "Well, in three years I'll come up with this Book X which will make me money, so, for right now I can sell Book Y and Z for pennies."


Again, I'm not proposing you sell any book for pennies; I'm proposing that you sell a book for a reasonable five-figure advance and the kind of escalating royalty that allows you to share fairly in the profits from the book, if there are any.


"Most authors don't know if they'll get the chance to publish another book. They can't count on publishers doing anymore than putting their book in a catalogue as their 'marketing.' You want THAT author to turn down money?"


Probably not, because that author probably hasn't been offered a huge advance. But I think that author is mistaken if s/he thinks that an antagonistic relationship with publisher will help get the book to its audience.


I think the miscommunication is that you are only looking at it from the perspective of a NYT best-selling author. Of an author who is writing the movie script for his own book -- and presumably being paid for it. Of an author who does get ARCs given out at BEA and ALA, and gets invites to speak everywhere. That's why the argument doesn't hold up.

Your books will make money regardless, a different author, with only a book in a catalogue can't afford to "offer to take less," because it is the only money they will earn from the book. You've been spoiled, that you don't know this.

The reason authors don't make royalty money is that contracts are structured incorrectly; they're structured so that publishers make A LOT of money on blockbusters and lose money on almost everything else. This hurts niche books much more than it hurts successful books, and much more than it hurts potential blockbusters.

(Also, I am technically only able to see it from my perspective, which is the actual and literal problem of humanness that books were invented to address. But when I try to see it from other perspectives, which is all a person can ever really do, I find myself still coming to the same conclusion.)

Also, I want to note that my books will not make money regardless, that many authors who are far more successful than I have books that lose money, and that the reason they lose money is ridiculous advances.

(For instance, I'm going to hazard a guess that Charles Frazier, who sells better than I do and also writes better, did not earn back the eight million dollars Random House paid him for Thirteen Moons.)

Now I'm not going to tell you to turn down an 8 million dollar advance. I'm telling Random House not to offer 8 million dollar advances. (Ever. For anything.)

What I'm saying is this:

1. Taking a smaller advance should not (on average) affect your sales negatively or positively.

2. The current model of buying overpriced lottery tickets in hopes of acquiring the next blockbuster is costing publishers more money than it is making them.

3. Better royalties with smaller advances is better business.

I think I'll stop posting about this now (except for maybe a Q&A with a real live publisher!), but let's continue the conversation in comments.


* Twilight.

** But to expand on that a bit: You have to begin with the (reasonable) assumption that your publisher wants to make money and would not have acquired your book if they did not feel that it could be profitable. It may be that they think it can only be profitable if they don't pay to hand out galleys at ALA, which is disappointing and annoying and etc., but it's irrational to assume from the outset that your publisher wishes to lose money on your book.

Yesterday, I promised to update the blog with a very mathy and impossibly boring post explaining why publishers are better off with higher royalty rates, and decimating their argument that with a 20% hardcover royalty, they "wouldn't make any money."

There will be no such post, for three reasons:

1. Really, how many editors read this blog? And how many of them will be convinced by the calculations of a total amateur? (On the other hand, if any editors privately want to be blown away by how not-almost-out-of-business they would be if they'd emphasized royalties instead of advances the last five years, they can email me at sparksflyup --at-- gmail dot com.)

2. The more I played with the numbers, the more I felt that my original proposal was...well not wrong, exactly, but overly simple. The upfront costs to publish a book are so significant, and they decrease so much over time, that starting the hardcover royalty rate at 20% now seems unreasonable* to me. (Although less unreasonable than six-figure advances for first novels.)

3. I don't trust my math, and my resident mathematician Daniel Biss is unavailable.

It's been very interesting to see all the ideas in comments for improving efficiency in publishing and bringing transparency to the relationship between author and publisher. I will try to post about that soon.

But for now, let me just say: I really believe that if we write with an eye toward book deals or royalty structures, we are screwed from the start. The business is important, because writers want to make a living and want to share their work with the biggest possible audience. But writing itself never works for me unless it feels like a gift, something I am trying to make for people. And you don't make gifts for money. You make gifts in the hope that they will matter to the recipients.

So I'm going to go to the coffee shop now and try to write something you'll care about.



*For publishers, I mean. For authors, it's a goldmine.

(If you don't want to read a long and boring blog post about the business of publishing, scroll down for a delightful video in which I help two nerdfighters get engaged. The couple is awfully cute. She's a writer; he's in the USAF.)

Thanks to everyone--nerdfighters, first-time authors, old salts, anonymous editors, heroically nonaonymous editors--who commented on my blog post arguing that smaller advances with better royalties would be better for publisher and author alike. Three counterarguments emerged:*


1. "The only way to quit my day job is to get a big advance."

It was interesting to read Nancy Werlin's reply to this, that she finds having a day job helpful. I think Nancy and I are alike in this respect, but for writers who need to quit their jobs to write the best books they can, large amounts of upfront money may make sense (although I still think it's a bad bet financially in the long run, at least in my currently-imaginary world).


2. "The royalty structure you propose is impossible and unthinkable and will never work and you understand nothing about how much books cost to publish."

It is neither impossible nor unthinkable (and in fact it is an open secret that it's already working at several big publishing houses). But I'll post about that tomorrow, with math and everything. Ooh, math. I know, right?


3. "Big advances are important because they lead to big marketing budgets, which in turn sell books."

As I pointed out in comments, this may or may not be true, but it certainly shouldn't be true if publishing companies behave rationally.

(Obviously, no corporation behaves rationally, or else Citigroup's stock wouldn't be trading at $2.97, but let's at least begin thinking rationally, and then we can move on and try to think like a publishing company.)

Let's say that Editor A is publishing two books in the Fall of 2010.** One book, A, was advanced $10,000; one book, B, was advanced $100,000. For which book will she fight harder? Which book will she badger sales staff to read and promote?

The only rational answer is that she will fight harder for whichever book she thinks can sell better. Editor A is functionally in debt $110,000. It doesn't matter which of her two books makes back the lion's share of that $110,000; it only matters that the money is made. If she thinks the $10,000 book has a bigger audience, that is the book she should push.

Which is, in fact, precisely what happened to my first novel, Looking for Alaska. Dutton paid $8,000 for LfA, but my (amazing brilliant etc.) editor Julie Strauss-Gabel thought it could have a big audience. Sales and marketing agreed. And so there was a sizable (not huge, but significant) marketing push behind the book, and it became the lead YA title on a list full of much more expensive books.

Certainly, a book with a huge advance is more likely to get a marketing push than a book with a small advance. BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT the reason for this (again, if we're being rational) is not that big advances cause big marketing budgets, but because publishers usually pay more for the stuff they think has a big audience.^

So if an editor thinks highly enough of a book to pay $100,000*** for it, she probably still likes it enough to give it a big marketing push when it comes time for publication.

Big advances do not cause big marketing budgets. Expectation of sales cause big marketing budgets (and often cause big advances). This is why turning down money will not hurt your marketing budget, if a publisher is behaving rationally.****

As for the other point, proffered by the talented and wickedly funny Ally Carter, that a big advance is buzz in and of itself: True enough. But it's overpriced buzz. And it's important to note that for every Twilight, there are dozens of books that sold for mid-six figures that never approach profitability.

"Okay," you say, "but publishers don't behave rationally. If they behaved rationally, they wouldn't be massively overcommitted to a business model that has failed so spectacularly that many of them would be in real danger of bankruptcy if they were not owned by gigantic media corporations that can absorb the losses."

Oh, you. With your overlong and underpunctuated sentences, you could almost be me. But right, yes. This is very true. Do editors push books merely because they foolishly paid too much for them? Maybe somtimes. But am I the only person who worries that exploiting that irrationality for our short term gain is harming our business at the very moment of its greatest fragility?



* Well, I'm sure others emerged that I just didn't understand; you can reiterate them in comments.

** I know that in this day and age, no editor would ever publish a mere two books in a season; I'm just simplifying the math.

*** I realize this sounds like a lot of money, like an unreasonably disgusting amount of money, and the fact that I keep using this dollar figure in and of itself makes you a little bit sick to your stomach. But bear in mind that if an author pays for her own health insurance and publishes a book every two years, a $100,000 advance works out to a pretax annual salary of about $32,500. (I'm assuming a 15% agent commission and $10,000 a year for health insurance.)

**** However, there is something I kinda skirted in my previous post because it causes a huge problem for my argument: If an author gets a 20% royalty, the publisher--while they still make money--makes less per book than they would with a 10% royalty, and thus is less motivated to sell the book than they would be with a standard royalty. So you can make your $110,000 back faster by selling Book A. This is a real problem. (But so, of course, are big advances.) And I will address it in a massively boring mathy post tomorrow.

^ UPDATED attempt to be more clear: If the $100,000 book earns $100,000 and the $10,000 book earns $10,000, that is EXACTLY the same thing as if the $100,000 book earns $10,000 and the $10,000 book earns $100,000.