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[GWL]: Timber advances and "respectability"

Someone mentioned that Timber could publish these small-audience books 
because they pay the author practically nothing.  As I point out in my 
earlier analyses, Timber is probably paying authors a share that is 
greater than most publishers do for the kinds of markets primarily 
involved.  What Timber DOESN'T do, however, is pay much of anything at 
the front end.

It isn't accurate to figure that because "most books don't earn much 
more than the advance" this means that most Timber books pay little or 
nothing because they have small advances.  This statement is in error 
because it confounds two different business models.  

A major NY publisher that pays high advances generally has only 20% of 
the books earn out.  So the advance is all most authors get.  Nearly all 
the books go out of print quite soon.  (Basically, most books and most 
authors end up being considered failures.) That's one model.  

Certain smaller publishers, of which Timber is one, use an entirely 
different business model.  They publish only books they consider of 
perennial interest, they keep their books in print forever, and they pay 
low advances.  But most of their books earn out and pay royalties.  
Their average book probably pays far more in royalties than the advance. 
 (And most books and most authors end up being considered successes.)

The average Timber author is an academic or someone else who has a 
full-time job.  Timber couldn't pay such people enough as an advance to 
make any serious difference in their lives.  For professional writers, 
though, a substantial advance is often essential.  

Low or no advances is undoubtedly part of the strategy required to 
publish small-market books.  If you have a book that potentially has a 
huge audience, you or your agent will probably take that book to 
publishers that can pay serious money at the front end.  If you took 
that same large-audience book to Timber, you might get as much or more 
money in the long run than with a bigger "more competitive" publisher.  
But you would not get it at the front end.

The average Timber book will make only modest amounts of money not 
because the Timber offer is inferior, but because small-market books 
don't make a lot of money, whoever publishes them.  

Likewise, if your (academician) authors don't really need the royalty 
money, and/or modest payments are involved because of the small market, 
it makes a whole lot of sense to keep your paperwork and overhead down 
by calculating royalties once per year instead of four times per year.  
There are trade-offs.  Would you rather have a lower royalty 4 times per 
year because the small publisher is spending four times as much time 
doing paperwork, or would you rather have a slightly higher royalty once 
per year?  There is a convention among big publishers that you pay four 
times a year.  But big publishers can't afford to publish small-market 
books at all.  So small publishers of necessity operate by different 
rules.  There is nothing immoral about it.    

For most Timber books, the alternative publisher would have been an 
academic publisher, not a bigger lay publisher.  Academic publishers 
frequently don't pay advances that amount to much more than an 
honorarium.  And academics with full-time jobs don't need the money.  
(Not in the same way as writers without other jobs do.)  Timber and 
academic publishers are "respectable" publishers; they just operate in 
and serve different niches than do the big lay publishers.

I have many Timber Press books, and consider myself something of a fan 
of theirs.  They do a real class act.  (Brian Capon's Botany for 
Gardeners is one of the all-time great works of both gardening and 
science writing, I feel.)  I'm glad Timber has figured out a reasonable 
strategy for publishing such high-quality specialized-market books, and 
manages to survive doing it.    

Carol Deppe
Author of BREED YOUR OWN VEGETABLE VARIETIES:  THE GARDENER'S AND 
FARMER'S GUIDE TO PLANT BREEDING AND SEED SAVING (See table of contents, 
excerpts, & reviews at http://www.chelseagreen.com.)  

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