Earning Out Your Advance - Catherine Baab-Muguira Shares on Electric Lit

Traditional publishing deals generally work where the author gets an advance from the publisher against the book's future earnings. The publisher accounts for each sale (holding back reserves for returns, though that's a topic for a different blog post), and once they have earned back the full amount of the advance, you are said to have "Earned Out" that advance.

At which point you start earning royalties on sales of the book.

Everyone wants their book to earn out, but the sad reality is that many books don't earn out. Ever.

And there's a delicate balance, where agents and authors like the idea of a large advance, but if it's too large and the sales don't materialize—if the publisher loses too much on a book—it can be hard to get that next deal.

With this context, the essay “My Book Earned Out in Two Years and Nothing Happened” by Catherine Baab-Muguira over at Electric Lit is well-worth reading. 

Catherine writes about earning out the advance of her debut book:

And all it had cost me was incalculable time and energy, weekends with my family, the opportunity to finesse and sell another book.

And

I didn’t shatter my advance with record-breaking sales. I didn’t go on late-night television shows. I didn’t become a household name. I just became one of the 25 to 30 percent of authors who do earn out their advances, and who still remain nobodies, midlist maybes, yesterday’s “some personal news” tweets. Of all the hardships that characterize the writing life, I’m not ashamed to say this one has hit me the hardest.

I share not to bum you out, but in the face of Catherine's noting:

I’d always thought writers were full of shit when they said publishing a book doesn’t change your life. Now I know what they mean.

It's worth acknowledging that writing (and yes, translating and illustrating as well) cannot be just about the money. For us to stay sane as we create works for kids, tweens, and teens, we have to have other goals in mind. 

We need to really think about what constitutes success for us. For each book.

Catherine's focus of the essay was that it took her two years to earn out. Another focus might have been that she sold 10,000 copies of her book -- 10,000 copies of her book that reached readers. And if some of those copies were shared, or acquired by libraries, maybe her words and story reached many more than 10,000 readers.

And that's something worth celebrating, too.

What about the impact on a single reader? Harder to quantify, but that's another focus of success as well.

Food for thought on this publishing adventure,

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

The Wall Street Journal Writes About Debut Novel Advances For Over A Million Dollars

"There is no science to it, or even art. It's a business of hunches." 

-Agent Bill Clegg, an agent whose September literary debut, "Did You Ever Have a Family," sold for seven figures in a two-book deal, as quoted in Betting Big on Literary Newcomers: The publishing industry's hunt for the next blockbuster has given rise to an elite new club: the million-dollar literary debut.

Citing nine literary debut novels that will be released between 2014 and 2016 with "advances reported at $1 million or more," what sounds like a trend in the article by Jennifer Maloney is a mix of wish-fulfillment...

"The lack of a sales track record is one of the factors that makes debut authors most appealing, publishers say, because there is no hard data to dampen expectations. "You can pin all your hopes and dreams and fantasies on a debut novel," said Eric Simonoff, an agent known for negotiating seven-figure advances.

and cautionary tale...

"...if the book doesn't turn a profit, the relationship between the author and publisher can sour. And those disappointing sales figures are available for any other publisher to peruse when the author tries to sell her next novel. "That is a scarlet letter that you don't get out from under," literary agent Luke Janklow said.

And while it's good for the nine authors (and their agents) -- so long as the book is deemed a success -- it's certainly open to discussion if this is good for other book creators and the industry as a whole.

As Morgan Entrekin, publisher at the independent house Grove Atlantic put it, "It's not that they're betting on the wrong writer, it's that the bet's too big."

Got a Six-Figure Deal? Agent Jennifer Laughran helps us do the numbers...

A six-figure deal sounds impressive. And it is. But when you break down your actual income from a two-book, six-figure deal the numbers are... well, as Jennifer puts it in her blog post, REAL TALK: $ix Figure Book Deal$, 

it's not exactly "bathe in champagne" time.

After factoring in commission, taxes, expenses, and the multi-part payouts, in Jennifer's hypothetical $100,000 two-book deal signed for a client in March 2015, that client would earn about $60,000 --spread out over the course of four years. As she writes,

"In this example, $24k in 2015, $12k in 2016, $18k in 2017, $6k in 2018."

The point of the exercise isn't to rain on anyone's parade, but to help us have more realistic expectations about the money side of writing for young people. Both what the average advances might be (she covers PB, MG and YA) and even what it means when we DO land one of those impressive six-figure deals.

As Jennifer writes,

SO, what to do?

The single best thing you can do for your career is KEEP WRITING GREAT BOOKS. 

Enough of me telling you about the blog post. Go read it yourself. Knowledge is power.

Illustrate and Write On,
Lee