On Writing

  • Can authors make a living?

    ByJohn Brown

    A lot of folks hear I’m going to be published and automatically classify me with J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, or Dan Brown. Heck, I at least ought to be categorized with Joe Schmo who was featured on Oprah.

    And why shouldn’t they think that? Those are the authors they see. That’s what it means to them to be published.

    For those of us who have actually gotten a peek behind the curtain, we realize it just ain’t so. Those are best-selling authors. See my post on best sellers to understand the quantities that have to move to make a best seller. Those are huge numbers, but very few authors sell that many books.

    So what do you need to sell to make a living?  Let’s do some math.

    Let’s say you want to make $50,000, the median household income in the US at this time. I know, I know, that’s nothing in some places, but if you’re a writer you don’t have to live in San Francisco. So you want to take home $50k after taxes. That means you’ll probably need to make $62,000 before taxes. That’s our goal.  

    So here are some numbers with conservative royalties.

    What authors make on a paperback
    8% royalty (authors usually make 8 – 12 % on paperbacks)
    15% agent fee
    6.8% net royalty rate

    To net $50k with only PAPERBACK sales would you need:
    $911,765 in sales required in the year
    $7.99 per book
    114,113 books sold

    What authors make on a hardback
    10% royalty (it’s common to make 10-15%)
    15% agent fee
    8.5% net royalty rate

    To net $50k with only HARDBACK sales would you need:
    $729,412 in sales in the year
    $25.00 per book
    29,176 books sold

    If you have previous books that are still selling, they all count. Make foreign sales, they count. Can produce two books per year, maybe one in a different genre, they count. Of course, this doesn’t factor in discounts and the corresponding reduced royalty rates. Nor does it factor in costs of being in business for yourself, including taxes, insurance, etc. But this is enough to get a rough idea of numbers.

    100,000 paperbacks is a BIG number. However, you usually mix and match.

    Let’s say you sell 5,000 hardbacks. 5,000 x $25.00 = $125,000. $125,000 x .085 net royalty = $10,625. $62,000 – $10,625 = $51,375 to be made by the paperbacks when they come out the next year. At a 6.8% net royalty rate you have to make $755,515 or sell about 94,558 paperback copies.

    Here it is in an easy to read list. Given the hardback sales shown below, you’d have to make up the rest of the $62,000 with the paperback sales on the right.

    5,000 HB: 94,558 PB
    10,000 HB: 75,002 PB
    15,000 HB: 55,446 PB
    20,000 HB: 35,890 PB

    I know those seem like small numbers compared to the Publisher’s Weekly 2007 numbers I link to above. But most authors don’t sell that many books. Most authors are happy to sell 5,000 hardbacks.

    But it’s not all bad news. I looked at a few authors on the PW list comparing hardback and paperback numbers. It seems any given author will sell twice the number of paperbacks that they do hardbacks.  So perhaps selling somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 hardbacks is the magic number.

    20,000 hardbacks is a lot. But it seems doable for a writer who has been publishing for a few years. It’s not the 700,000 of  a James Patterson. But it just might be enough to make, hold your breath, what the average household in America makes in a year.

  • “The Only Law of Literature” by James Maxey

    ByJohn Brown

    james-maxey

    You already know how I feel about writerly rules. So when I read James Maxey’s “The Only Law of Literature,” I had to share it.

    I want to quote the whole thing here. But I’ll resist and quote only the conclusion.

    [In response to critiquing stories that don’t work for you] All the literary analysis of writing techniques, of style, of world building, of creating characters–it all has it’s place, but it’s almost completely useless as a guide to writing a good book. You are never going to be able to think or study or analyze your way into writing a book that people love.

    There is only one law of good literature: Write what you’d love to read.

    Not what you have read and loved. What you love, but haven’t yet read.

    To quote myself from the Impish Idea thread:

    Every thing you write should be a love story. Not a romance. But a story written because you loved it.

    Follow your passion. Don’t worry about pleasing everyone. Fill your book with the stuff that makes your heart race and leave out the stuff that bores you. If you don’t make it into print, at least you’ll have a book you can look at with pride as being truly your own.

    Once you’ve learned this secret, everything else falls into place.

    Go read the whole post.

    It’s important to learn craft. You cannot get away from it. But craft is only useful as a tool to tell this cool, wonderful, poignant, amazing thing we’ve invented and discovered.

  • Some lessons from Tom Clancy’s first novel

    ByJohn Brown

    tom-clancy-the-hunt-for-red-octoberTom Clancy is one of the biggest authors of our time. How did he break in? It’s an interesting story that Deborah Grosvenor, the editor who acquired The Hunt for Red October (Clancy’s first book), tells here.

    And this early interview provides more insights.

    So what conclusions can you draw from this? Here’s what I picked up.

    1. Writing a good book is one thing. That book finding success is quite another.

    2. Endorsements from the right people make a huge difference. More here in my blog Is Product Popularity Random?

    3. Know what you write. And if you don’t know it, do the research. And then invent what you have to.

    4. It’s not always a bad thing to start with a small press, especially if they’re going to put as much $$ into marketing and PR as this one did.

    5. To finish your novel, you’re going to have to set aside time and get it done.

    6. Finally, follow the zing. Clancy loved this stuff. Notice how his book was fed by the stories he heard and read.

  • “Would I be more excited about this book if I…”

    ByJohn Brown

    As new writers we want to do our best but because we haven’t yet internalized all the principles, we often want to create checklists of rules. We want to list out all the the aspects of a golden story and make sure we include them.  And these lists can help.

    Everything I’ve learned about building expertise suggests that experts have internalized guidelines, patterns, and concepts. But in the beginning we don’t have those internal constructs. And so we often are benefited by exetrnal support in the form of diagrams, lists, etc. Sooner or later we internalize. And what used to be conscious becomes automatic.

    Case in point: Dean Koontz. In his book on how to write best sellers he states in so many words that you’d be in idiot not to have an outline. That was back in the late 1970’s. In an interview almost 30 years later about his Odd Thomas books, he says he never outlines. I suspect he’s so familiar with the form outlines are redundant for him now.

    So lists can be good. But lists can also hinder us if we’re not careful.

    For example, James Maxey, a great author, likes characters with dark secrets. He states: “One of my tricks for making my characters interesting is that the primary characters are usually motivated by a dark secret. Vendevorex in Bitterwood desperately does not want Jandra to learn that he killed her parents. Rail Blade in Nobody Gets the Girl doesn’t want anyone to know that she killed her brother with her superpowers in a moment of anger when she was still young. The key revelation for me is that the thing that the world most wants to know about a person is often the thing that a person least wants anyone to know.”

    Dark secrets are kind of cool, right?

    But if we then said, okay, a great story must have a character with a dark secret, and we put that on our list, that’s when we start to work against ourselves. The “must” is the problem.

    Not because we don’t have tests and guidelines. Tests assume objectives. And I, for one, certainly do have objectives for my books as a whole an in their various parts. For example, I sure as heck want to make sure my opening chapter starts with a strong draw. I sure as heck want an ending that leaves me feeling some poignancy, cosolation, and a telescoping of possibilities. I most definitely want characters that intrigue me. I have some definite musts.

    But any one of the techniques or elements we might list (dark secrets, 3 acts, 7 acts, the players in Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” characters with an internal problem, etc. and ad infinitum) are nothing more than options that might or might not serve any given objective. They’re not necessary (of course, monkeys may be necessary). And I don’t mean that in an anomaly way.

    I’m not suggesting it’s counterproductive to say, well, I love characters [fill in the blank] or plots that [fill in the blank] and I want one in this novel. I’m saying if we begin to think that all (or most) good novels must have these elements, then I think we’ll end up limiting ourselves.

    So when you find something that works, when you hear about a technique, or some writerly rule, put it on your list of option prompts. Not on your list of must haves. And then ask this creative question, which I got from another great author, Luc Reid: “Would I be more excited about this book if I…”

    Another version might be: “Would I care about and believe in this story/character/scene/etc. more if I…”

    Would I care about and believe in this story more if had a character with this [insert option]? Would I care more if this plot line had [insert option]? Would I believe the story more if there were monkeys hiding in the attic?

    If the answer is yes, then add it. If the answer is no or maybe, then put it aside. That option can go back on the shelf for another time.