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Brook
writes: the publisher "never bothered to tell
me" that she could get discounted books
Okay, I certainly agree with that. In my
opinion, dealing with publishers (often) has some real similarities to buying
used cars. Best advice, pay attention to all the details, and know what's
what.
One comment on the discussion about how we
only make XX dollars per hour and so forth as garden writers: Well, okay,
several comments: 1. I consider it a privilege to get published and to be
read, and it is totally unlike working for wages on almost any other job
imaginable. 2. Even if we're pros, we ought not even be in it unless we love
to write and love to garden. 3. The energy and thought and creativity we put
into our own PR will have an enormous affect on how much $$ we eventually make
as writers. There is the occasional botanical/horticultural book that goes to
the top of the bestseller charts, and if you hit that, you'll make plenty per
hour. Just being "in the game" is a ton of fun and since we're in, we all have
that shot. Beats the lottery.
4. See #1.
Tom
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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