(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.