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Re: [GWL]: Agent or no agent?

In a message dated 01/18/2002 10:16:31 PM Pacific Standard Time, tloallergyfree@earthlink.net writes:


I get a 50% discount on any books I buy AND I get royalties on the ones I buy, too. Really, I only think this is fair.



"Fair" is what you can negotiate, Tom. There is no objective standard for it.

But that wasn't the point. What we had was the original poster contending that she didn't know, and the publisher "never bothered to tell me" that she could get discounted books.

My contention was that if she didn't read the contract (which, after all, is how the publisher bothers to tell authors), it certainly wasn't the publisher's fault. The issue of whether royalties are paid on books bought by authors was given as an example of how some houses work. If your publisher uses that as a standard approach, and it's in the contract, you shouldn't be surprised when you are not paid royalties on those books. It wasn't offered with any value judgement attached.

I am not a fan of most book publishers' business practices, for various reasons. But I've found that most of the time, when an author complains about how his publisher screwed him, it turns out that the author didn't read, or didn't understand, the contract.

Too often authors---especially in hobbiest fields like gardening---write books for the ego gratification involved, rather than as an income producing project. Nothing wrong with that so long as the author goes into it with his eyes open. But I lose patience when somebody takes this amaturish approach, but then bitches about how the publisher took advantage of them, etc.

You can't have it both ways. If you write as a hobby, then keep it as a hobby. If you write professionally, than you approach book writing like any other job, and consider the dollars and sense of it before you sign the contract. That's not a typo, btw. Most of the time, book writing does not make sense from an income-producing point of view.

There are ways you can make book writing pay off. But it's rarely through normal-channel book sales.

To understand whether or not you make money on a book, forget the gross figures. Look at it from a return on investment basis. As writers, we only have one commodity to sell. It's called "time." There are only 24 hours in a day, and once you spend them they are gone.

So, you start out by figuring how many of those hours it takes you to write a book. Then divide the amount you earn by those hours. Turns out to be a pretty low figure, most of the time. But it gets worse. You now have to look at your lost opportunity figures. That is, if you hadn't spent those hours writing a book, you could have spent them on other projects. Here's an example, using admittedly silly figures, just to make the point.

You normally earn, through magazine writing, speaking engagements, and other venues, $100/hour. From the book, you earn $60/hour. You have a lost opportunity, therefore, of $40. Deduct that from the $60, and it turns out that the real value of the book project was only $20/hour, or one fifth of your regular income.  

One of the reasons author's discounts is such an issue is because of the incredible effect it has on this relationship.

Using the above example, the $60/hour is earned based on royalties. Typically, these work out to only a buck or two per book sold. But if you suddenly jump from making $1/book to $10/book, you can see how the relationship changes.

Nor does it stop there. One of the things I teach my book-oriented freelance writing students is how to increase that $10/book even more, and they realize almost 100% of the book's retail price.


Brook


Brook 
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