Yeah. Like record labels, publishers lend advances and charge interest. Their crazy accounting tricks diminish royalties until it becomes next to impossible for an author selling tens of thousands of copy to earn a living. They do next to no marketing, unless the book is a sure fire win. And they've even stopped offering real editing. Cut your price in half and sell an ebook. Build audience share. Ten to twenty thousand copies for $5 @70% royalties through Amazon and you're earning enough to live on. Sure, you've got to hire a freelance editor. You'll need to hire a freelance graphic designer for a decent cover photo. But the way things are going with the publishing monopoly, you'd have to do all that anyway. Just fuck them all.
It's a wide-open question and one that interests me a great deal. I started mixing bands in clubs the year Fraunhaufer leaked MP3 into the world. I started mixing television the year Netflix Instant came out. And I finished my first novel the year the Justice Department busted Apple for price-fixing the eBook market. As they say, opportunity is in the delta and I'm fuckin' riding that turmoil and have done for pushing ten years. The music industry has been annihilated. Mick Jagger put it best: "*…people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.*" And it's true enough - the number of middle-class musicians has plummeted, the number of "rock stars" has diminished to near-nothing and the number of doing-it-for-fun musicians has skyrocketed. Making money in music is no longer an aspiration - it's an unlikely dream. The motion picture industry is in the same boat, they just don't realize it. I'm friends with people who have discovered how to make a living on $100k - $300k movies. It's a lower-middle-class living, but it's a living. There are still the Lone Rangers of the world but there are fewer of them, they are more expensive and they provide ever fewer jobs. Books are perhaps a little different. Musicians and movie makers have never had the clout authors enjoy at baseline. "work for hire" is simply not a phrase one hears in book circles. Not only that, but the number of technicians involved in authorship is tiny - I know two NYT bestselling authors and neither of them use editors. People also read more now than they ever have before, strange to say. Harry Potter raised a generation of readers. So unlike the declining markets for television and movies, there are more people reading now than there ever were before. The trick is that "build audience share" part. It's a crowded market. Getting noticed requires straight-up SEO. It's a thought much on my mind - I will likely have an offer on the table for traditional publishing, with advance and all. I will also make 15% of the 70% that the publishers make off eBooks. OR, I eschew traditional publishing altogether, hope on a wing and a prayer for an audience, and self-publish. The math works out like this: a $5000 advance is a better payoff if I think I'll sell 7,000 copies at $9.99. If I think I'll sell more than 7,000 copies, it makes more sense to go direct. Ten thousand copies at 70% of $5 is $3500. It took me a year to write 200,000 words. That works out to less than $300 a month, which is NOT enough to live on. On the other hand, I know a guy making $30,000 a month off ebooks, but it's a volume business. Thinking out loud, no real conclusions.
And it still won't fly? That's rough man. Are you sure it's the writing? The story you posted before seemed publishable, if not in the current climate, certainly in the past. Then again, my experience is in poetry publishing and not fiction (which often, is also political, albeit in different ways).
No one has seen the book yet. Not a soul. My wife has read about a third of it. It's all theoretical until I edit it and unleash it on the world. The story itself (which the novel follows precisely, with elaborations) was previously optioned for thousands of dollars, and courted by three comic book companies. But in its current incarnation, nearly all of it has been seen by no one but me.
Comic book writing is odd in that you pay the companies that make them and then you get all the money. If'n you want a comic or graphic novel, you front the illustration and publishing costs. The estimates we had for turning this script into a book were between $15k and $50k. I was at William Morris when Endeavor took over and my agent got the sack. He passed me along to another guy at WMEE, but that guy, too got the sack eventually. My original guy - a friend - is now at CAA, but he's die-hard into video games and not so much on the comic side. Besides which, the comic-to-movie route was a short-lived gambit; it doesn't work any more. I have a graphic novel in the works with Youngluck but it's tough when one of you is fresh out of prison and trying to make ends meet.
Huh. I did not know that. I'm not surprised that the comic-to-movie thing doesn't work well these days, though I am hopeful that the TV adaptation of Bendis and Oeming's Powers will be good. It's such a good series. Anyway, hope your projects work out, they sound pretty interesting.
Bullshit. It might be shit - I haven't seen it. But if it doesn't sell it could be any number of other reasons too. Poor cover art; marketing failure; subject matter; etc. It might take several books anyway. I've committed to writing until my work catches on. Period. Just don't give up.