Mid-listless

From: nathaniel stuart

"[…] The true dinosaurs of the new age are authors. Once happily enclosed in the 'stables' of publishers willing to nurture and develop their talent, even if they never wrote a major bestseller, droves of so-called 'mid-list' authors now find themselves roaming among the ever-present throng of wannabes flogging unpublished work in an indifferent market. And that throng is most likely to produce tomorrow’s bestsellers, even if they begin life as obscure, self-published digital texts that, only after they find a following, are taken up and heavily marketed to mainstream prominence by major publishing houses.

     Many mid-list authors have fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated, widely available sales data, according to agents and publishers. Publishers can now assess every author’s lifelong sales thanks to such services as Nielsen Bookscan in the United States and BookNet Canada.
     And once reduced to pure numbers, those track records determine the fate of proven writers looking for cash advances to begin their next books. 'Everybody knows the numbers now,' Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski said in an interview. 'You can’t lie about the numbers.' Retailers don’t order books from authors whose previous work sold indifferently, she added, so publishers respond by cutting them loose.
     The upheaval is such that an author like Dan Brown 'would never get published now, because his first three books sold nothing,' Bukowski said. But as everybody knows, Brown’s fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, has sold more than 80-million copies.
     Even when they agree to publish the fourth book of a mid-list author, publishers today hedge their bets by paying minimal advances based on past sales of the author’s work. In that respect, Bukowski said, it is better to be a beginner. 'At least a first novelist doesn’t have a track record,' Bukowski said."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
Read more…

The Best of a Bad Lot

From: The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, UBC

"[...] And unlike musicians, authors are not commonly charged for production expenses.
     A recording contract typically requires musicians to sell enough to pay for all the production, publicity, and marketing before they see a penny in royalties. In publishing, the publisher pays these expenses out of its pocket, and the author isn’t expected to pay it back.
     Finally, authors’ advances are (usually) only charged to their current books, or sometimes across a single deal. Unlike musicians, who are often required to pay back shortfalls from their last project before they can start earning on their latest one, authors’ balance sheets are zeroed out with each new book. If your last book tanks, your next book usually doesn’t have to pay back its advance. Publishing doesn’t do debt slavery."
— Cory Doctorow, Publishers Weekly
Read more...

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." — Chinese Proverb

Papyrus fragment from the Book of the Dead; spell number 18 written for Nes-pauti-taui. Thebes, Upper Egypt: c. 1000 B.C.n

— from the Dallas Public Library

"Advances are quickly going to zero. Margins are going to zero for publishers. There’s no financial benefit for going with a publisher if advances are going to zero and royalties are a few percentage points. The publishing industry does minimal editing. The time between book acceptance and release is too long (often a year or more). That’s insane and makes zero sense in a print-on-demand world when kindle versions are outselling print versions."
— James Altucher

Read more...

Not Our Typical Rejection

Photo: Michael Hale

"I don’t know many writers who would say it’s easy. Each day is still a kind of torture. Writing fiction is qualitatively different and harder, in my view, than memoir, narrative non-fiction, essays, criticism and advertising copy—all of which I’ve done. Every morning requires facing failure, picking up something half-made, working at it, pushing it forward, trying to advance and to not feel too discouraged. I send stories out and collect the rejections months later. I watch as my beloved novel makes the brief, dismissive rounds."
— excerpt from We Ten Million by Alix Christie in "More Intelligent Life"