Lynne Patrick
Since I’m still on the learning curve after five years, pick up something new every day and feel I still have a lot to take in, I probably shouldn’t be constantly surprised to find how many people associated with the book trade are under the strangest illusions. Some of them, I’m sorry to say, are writers. Dead Guys excepted, natch.
My favourite made its first appearance a few years ago, at a seminar attended by about two hundred writers. And in a roundabout way it raised its head again this weekend.
The panel of speakers at the seminar consisted of assorted head honcho types from big publishing houses, and the theme was pretty general: how publishing works. I think the intention was to give the writers a glimpse of the different aspects of the process of turning their peerless prose into bestsellers. What actually happened was that a few voluble people began to harangue the panel about advances and royalty payments – mainly the paucity thereof in most cases. I mean to say, ten percent! What do these people who didn’t even write the book do to earn ninety percent of the cover price?
The, ahem, discussion became increasingly acrimonious, until someone asked in a shrill, accusing tone, ‘What percentage profit do you make on a book, then?’
One of the panellists replied straight out. ‘On most books we lose money. What we make on one book in ten pays for the rest. On those, about seven percent profit is pretty good.’
The sound of jaws dropping to the floor was deafening. As was the silence that followed.
The problem, of course, is that it’s the one book in ten that people hear about. And one in ten thousand that makes headlines, and a small fortune for both author and publisher.
This weekend’s revisiting of the subject was a lot more worrying, mainly because of the people doing the revisiting: a respected newspaper columnist and a high official no less august a body than the Society of Authors. The columnist was reporting on a large literary agency which has made a deal with a digital printer to ensure some backlist and modern classic titles are always available for order from Amazon; since the digital process means one copy at a time can be printed without expensive set-up costs, it means the selected books never need to go out of print. The author will get the usual 10% royalty each time.
It’s a tad controversial – isn’t every new development? – and the columnist had gone to the Society of Authors for a quote. This time I’m not relying on memory for the details; this is what the high official said, right there in print, in a weekend paper not known for sensationalising:
[…they] seem to be taking 90% of the money for no work.
They being the literary agency.
When I’d picked myself up from the floor I’d collapsed on to at the sheer shortsightedness of this comment, I did the maths.
And concluded that the agency’s share will be 90% of… nothing.
- Amazon’s discount will amount to almost half the cover price. Yup. That's the way it is.
- We investigated digital printing on our own account a few months ago, and the cheapest we found would account for half of what’s left.
- After the author’s royalty, what remains has to pay for cover design and typesetting; an ‘acclaimed designer’ is mentioned elsewhere in the column. They’d need to sell a thousand copies to come close, and selling a thousand copies kind of misses the point of the exercise; if there was that kind of demand the book wouldn’t be out of print in the first place.
So why is the literary agency doing it?
The reason we all do, I suspect. We love books and believe in their future.
Certainly not for the money.
