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Sarah Rees Brennan

@sarahreesbrennan / sarahreesbrennan.tumblr.com

A perpetrator of great cruelty against innocent words. Yes, that's right! The author of UNSPOKEN, the DEMON'S LEXICON trilogy and co-conspirator on Team Human

That Xiran Jay Zhao video about the amount of time it takes to get paid by the publisher, a couple of time she says "that's just the way it is." Are there actual, legitimate business reasons for holding off paying someone 6 or 8 or more months what they've earned for their book? Or is it the publisher basically going "We'll pay you when we pay you. What are you gonna do about it?" because they're essentially the one in charge?

And is it the same for all authors? Or is there an unofficial "tier" system based on your name? Are they telling people like Stephen King or James Patterson or Neil Gaiman "you'll see your money in 8 months" or are they more likely to be getting monthly checks just because of who they are?

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There are some legitimate business reasons, yes.

Okay, so let's look at the way a book is sold to a publisher. I'm going to use very round numbers, because I don't want to do a lot of math right now. So say I sell a book for $15,000 under the traditional three installment contract--signing, delivery/acceptance, and publication. What this means is I sign the contract, I get a $5,000 check! Yay! I will also get checks when the book is turned in and accepted, emphasis because it means I can't just give them a word jumble and claim I turned the book in, and then again when the book comes out. We're ignoring side situations like "book is never turned in" and "book is never published."

But wait! My agent gets 15% off the top of each of those checks, which isn't a whole lot at $5,000--$750--but means I'm receiving effectively a $4,250 check, and then waiting maybe a year for the next one.

In the US, 1/3rd of that check goes automatically to taxes, and I cannot math that very well, but it's about $1,416. So I'm left with $2,834 as my payment for the year. This is why most authors will have day jobs.

This structure makes sense. They pay you to call dibs on your book: they pay you when the dibs pan out: they pay you when they can start making money. Now, recently, some publishers have started going to a four stage advance payment, and I can't see any real justification for that. Maybe someone will give me one. I'd be fascinated to know what it is.

So here's the thing: until the book is out, there is no more money. You've been paid for the book, but it's not making money for the publisher yet, and so of course you're not getting more money. It used to be the expectation that your advance would pay your bills while you wrote the next book; that is clearly no longer the case. I live in Seattle. A single check from a three-stage advance isn't paying my mortgage for a month. But.

Once the book is out, it can start making money, and that's when things get complicated. Say a bookstore places an order for 10 copies of AWESOME NEW BESTSELLER. Yay! That should be ten sales, and ten units of whatever your royalty is, right? Only these are physical items, and bookstores can return them, so your publisher marks it down as "ten sales, five reserve against returns," meaning you're only getting credit for five sales until the return window (usually a year) runs out. Where it gets a little hinky is when the bookstore sells all ten and orders ten more, and the publisher still has it marked as "five (now ten) reserve against returns." Basically, you're only getting credit for half your sales until that reserve window closes.

Sadly, thanks to certain retailer policies, this has been grandfathered into applying to electronic sales as well.

TL,DR: The delay in royalty payments is to give bookstores time to sell the books, and mean that your publisher doesn't pay you for a hundred sales, only to ask for the money from fifty to be given back when books are returned. This could happen faster in the modern world, but that would involve publishers paying us faster, and they like to keep the money in their hands as long as possible.

To the best of my knowledge, no one is A Big Enough Author that they can demand their money now, right now. And this is why trad publishing continues to self-select for the wealthy and the young.

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So @softness-and-shattering asked "why the young?" and followed it with "bc theoretically more able-bodied and able to work three jobs?" and yes, that is exactly it.

I was thirty-one when my first book came out. I was no longer as spry or resilient as I had been at eighteen, but I was basically flooded with endorphins at all times, brought on by getting my heart's desire, and so I was "able"--quote marks intentional--to burn my candle at both ends and in the middle for several years.

I kept working a forty-hour a week day job, with a three+ hour commute, and writing effectively forty to sixty hours a week, for those several years. I wore myself thin as paper. You could see through me. But I still had the resilience to burn, and I wanted this badly enough to burn it.

I am not saying that's a good thing. It was terrible for my health and for my relationships. I barely survived. I would not survive it if I were trying to do the same thing again, today. All creative industries eat the young, because the young are willing to be eaten. Some of us just survive to crawl away and keep going.

Seanan explains the structure of publishing payments very well here! In Xiran Jay Zhao’s video they explain excellently the priorities these payments led them to adopt.

I am rotten at calculations but I did want to chime in on the young and wealthy thing. A few times I’ve seen (lovely!) readers who wanted to see more of my work wondering why I wasn’t producing like Author X or Author Y, and I would sit stricken with the knowledge Author X or Author Y was wealthy, and thus had leisure to write I didn’t. I was young when I started publishing (24) and I was fast and worked hard, but I also thought if I just worked hard enough that would BE enough and had no idea what toll that would take on me. I love writing and I’m a people pleaser (which often ends in ‘the people around you do not seem that pleased’). I was running around going ‘I’m fast! I can do this! Coach put me in!’

One project I went basically without sleep for a month, and I caught pneumonia. That project was cancelled, so it was for nothing. I kept working too hard, and I kept getting pneumonia. For years. My writing went off a cliff. Eventually I was diagnosed with late stage lymphoma. Now, I don’t think working too hard on that project gave me cancer, I think cancer was always coming, but I do think maybe it reached me earlier than it would have. I lost most of my thirties to cancer, and trying to come back from cancer working the same way I had, and realising I was chronically ill now and simply couldn’t. I made my choices. But I would say, think carefully about how you expend your energy because you don’t know when you might hit your limit. The arts are beautiful and rewarding and tough, so burn strategically. I really thought I wasn’t coming back: I thought I would die and then I thought I couldn’t write because my confidence was shot. A lot of people burn up and don’t survive, either literally or as artists. I thought I would try anyway, one last time, and I am so, so excited to have Long Live Evil coming out next year, a new book of my very own, and good things happening for it! But it was such a close-run thing, and I’m still terrified. Be wary, my doves.

Hunger Games didn’t really eat holes in my brain the way that it did for some other people but god the opening lines. The opening lines. Katniss wakes up in bed and immediately, instinctively reaches beside her, only to find the bed empty and cold. Before we even know her name – before we know literally anything about her or this world or her place in that world – we know that she loves someone. We know that she is reaching for where Prim should be, sleeping safe and warm beside her, but Prim is not there. She is not there, and her half of the bed is cold and empty. People talk about characters being “doomed by the narrative” when most of the time the character was literally just a well-foreshadowed death, but Prim WAS doomed by the narrative. It’s the very first thing we learned. It’s the most key, integral, important piece of information we’re given about everything that is about to happen: Every single choice Katniss makes is to protect her little sister, and it isn’t enough. In the end, Prim still dies. Prim was dead before the story even started. Katniss, reaching. Prim’s side of the bed was cold and empty. There is no version of this story where Prim could have been saved. Katniss, reaching. The very first thing she does in the series. She wakes, and she reaches, but Prim is already gone. THAT is how you do Doomed By The Narrative. Edit: Also it is key that there was literally nothing Katniss could have done differently. If she had not acted to save Prim, Prim would not have survived the Hunger Games. But by acting to save Prim, Katniss accidentally kicked off an entire rebellion and ultimately massively increased the amount of danger Prim was actually in. The key is that this is irrelevant. If Katniss had done literally anything differently, Prim still would have died. If Katniss had faltered or changed course at any point, Prim still would have died. There was never a point where Katniss could have changed Prim’s fate. There’s no version of this story where Prim lives to see the end of it. She’s dead before the story begins. That’s doomed by the narrative.

i have three responses to "how is your writing going"

1) it's not

2) it's going

3) i am ENTHUSED. i have been BLESSED with the POWER of the MUSES. i am an UNSTOPPABLE FORCE OF CREATION i am the MOST ULTIMATE OF ALL WRITERS

there should be more fic about serene and luke girl best friends. they are soooo stupid and lovesick together. they talk endlessly about wooing and never do it. give them a break from their pick-up master boy best friend. we can’t all be so unintentionally good at flirting.

Luke and Serene, beautiful jocks: why can't we hit on people successfully

Elliot, loner nerd, emerging from a makeout sesh with a mermaid: what? like it's hard?

Can we talk about how in zombie shows/movies/books they always find a veterinarian and not a surgeon? Are veterinarians deemed more likely to survive the apocalypse?

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Yup.

  • One of our professional skills is ‘not being bitten by patients’
  • We actually have a good broad knowledge base for both surgical, medical, and GP things
  • We’re used to improvising equipment because a lot of stuff is just not made for animals
  • Meat safety is part of our training
  • Our cars are often full of equipment, especially in mixed practice
  • We probably weren’t in the human hospital at the initial outbreak

😈 You are not bound by the Hays code.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

😈 You are not obligated to teach your audience a moral lesson.

✨ a film for every year of my life ✨ | A Room With a View (1985) dir. James Ivory

He’s the sort who can’t know anyone intimately, least of all a woman. He doesn’t know what a woman is. He wants you for a possession, something to look at, like a painting or an ivory box. Something to own and to display. He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.

A duke, tormented and brooding over the loss in war of his best friend since childhood, the boy who was the joy of his life. A lady of modest means with whom he forms an unexpected connection… and the lady IS the childhood best friend lost in war. I didn’t read Alexis Hall’s A Lady for a Duke for ages because I feared nothing could live up to that amazing premise, but it does! My favourite thing is our hero and heroine’s conversations, both painful in their openness and showing the fun of fitting together. One of the great romance novels of my year.

Okay I'm biting, I'm chomping down on the hook - could you tell me a little bit about the queen's thief and why I should read it?

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hm. ok. so the queen’s thief is about a trickster who wants to go down in history but as soon as it starts happening he’s like NO NOT LIKE THAT. and also about the people he befriends against their will :)

it’s an ancient greece/byzantine era-inspired world that starts off very focused on one person and then as his significance grows it zooms out to show you more and more of what it becomes increasingly clear are history-making events of this land, gradually gaining perspective and quickly gaining layers and layers of political intrigue, all of which is connected on thematic levels to the mythology of this world

...but it all starts with a grimy teenager sitting in prison because he got busted for bragging about how good he is at stealing

you should read it if you love mythology, courtly intrigue, and ruthless politics being no match for the saving power of trusting those you love. if you don’t love slow, classic fantasy quest road trips maybe don’t start with the first book tho

featuring characters such as:

  • a thief who wants to be famous. what kind of thief wants to be famous for being a thief. gen that’s so dumb
  • a pure beam of sunshine who will commit acts of international violence
  • a guard who is having a very bad day
  • an accountant who is having an even worse day
  • a queen whom i love and adore with all my heart
  • a queen who has murdered many people whom i also love and adore with all my heart
  • many tired old men
  • and more!
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“Such threatening states of mind are also characteristic of the Gothic villains—Montoni, Schedoni, Ambrosio—who loom large, with a fairy-tale intensity, in the ancestral worlds created by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Parental tyranny as a romance or novelistic convention was of course not new, but these figures differ from their prototypes in the works of Walpole and Reeve in a significant respect. Unrestrained, either by rational sensibility or by external controls, and endowed with ‘a perverse kind of strength and intellectual energy’, they hold firmly to values radically different from the norm, ‘defending their conduct by their own peculiar logic’. This enables them to remain absolute and inscrutable in their offences against individuals and society, so that they are, as Sir Walter Scott noted, ‘in some sort as fabulous as fairies or ogres’. Montoni’s face, for example, with its ‘fire and keenness of…eye, its bold fierceness, its sudden watchfulness’, is said to betray ‘the spirit and vigour of his soul’. As chieftain of a band of ‘Condottieri’, Montoni seems unable to feel, unlike Walpole’s Manfred who alternately lusts and repents. Montoni is ‘a stranger to pity and fear’; ‘delighting in the tumult and struggles of life’, he possesses ‘a sort of animal ferocity’.” [Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach, pp. 108-9]

concept: being abused is a Gothic experience

It’s not a Discworld joke unless you read it, don’t parse it as a joke, and then carry on with your life for ten years until someone stops you to say something like “It’s a pavlovian response because the dog ate a pavlova” and you scream Terry’s name with enough indignant rage you hope it rattles the pillars of the multiverse so wherever his soul is he’ll hear it.

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I read Jingo for the first time when I was 13.

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

Terry was a comedic genius

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When I was informed that “Vetinari” is a pun on “Medici”. That pun was so painful I couldn’t even see it.

...are you FUCKING KIDDING ME.

*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*

get out here Terry I just wanna talk

Twurp’s Peerage made me throw a book (gently) at a wall.

In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u. 

The Book of Silly and Annoying People, based on the real thing with a pun on the name thrown in for good measure.

OMG I FUCKING *KNEW* VETINARI WAS A JOKE ON FUCKONG SOMETHING I JUST COULDNT GRASP IT. I THOUGHT IT WAS A REFERENCE TO WIND SOMEHOW

I am not a talented punster so I was today old when I realised about Vetinari.

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At @dduane's Ebooks Direct, now in progress: the Summer Solstice "Get Our Whole Store For $44" Sale!

(ETA: I'm reposting this because some folks have been getting the non-discounted version of the sale, and I want to make absolutely sure the right version of the sale URL is in place. Obviously I don't mind refunding people the overpayments, but I think we'd all rather they didn't happen.) :)

(Sound up for Vaguely Inspirational Music!)

The Solstice arrived a little more than an hour a day ago, so we're celebrating the best way we can think of: by making the ebooks at Ebooks Direct even cheaper than usual.

That's right: we're reinstating the "Get Our Whole Store For $44 Sale"! That's 36 of Diane Duane's ebooks (@petermorwood's are still with another e-publisher, sorry, though there's a freebie of his in the package...), all DRM-free and with free replacements included in the price if they're lost or you change platforms. The package on offer includes the 9-book set of Young Wizards New Millennium Editions and the LGBTQ-centered Middle Kingdoms books, along with much more fantasy and SF. So if you've missed out on this offer previously, now's your chance to take advantage of it! (And us. We don't mind.) :)

Also, in honor of Pride Month—and much earlier than we'd normally put a new release into the whole-book package—we've added Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2: Overdue to the offer. The only other place this new work appears at the moment is in the 2023 Pride Month package. (If you've been looking at that package, please note that everything in it appears in the Whole Store bundle, at a similar discount level. But the Whole Store offer will only last for 72 hours. The Pride package will be available until Irish midnight [GMT+1] on June 30.)

Interested? Then just click here to put the $44 whole-store package in your shopping basket and grab yourself a bargain! The product page will say it costs $55. But the link above has the discount baked in. Use it and the store will show the $44 price when you've gone through all the checkout steps before payment. (Sorry about this: it's how the store behaves when there are two discount offers running at once.)

If you go through to the just-before-paying stage and are still seeing the $55 price, please put the discount code EVERY72 into the "gift card or discount code" field on that page, and enter it. That'll sort things out.

Meanwhile, If you're not interested in the offer, would you consider reblogging it so that others in your timeline can have a look? Thanks! (And one final note: due to Brexit, unfortunately this offer isn't valid in the UK. Details about the situation are here. Our apologies, as always, for the inconvenience.)

Meanwhile, happy day-after-Solstice to everybody! (Bearing in mind that there's another one going on in the Southern Hemisphere... though probably not so sunny.) And here's hoping that our offer will make your longest day (or shortest one) a little brighter.

your tools do not have a morality but you do

such a bad argument around AI where folks ask: 'what is difference between human finding inspiration and AI scraping data?'. BUD how is this not obvious? despite what we call it AI is not human or intelligent. there are different moral expectations between human and object

AI scraping data is theft but it is not the AI who is guilty of this because IT IS NOT A HUMAN IT IS NOT A REAL MIND it is the illusion of a mind. it is a tool. if you believe AI stealing data is morally just because ‘humans get inspried too’ then gotta believe that of all tools

if someone fires gun to murder are they not guilty because THE GUN DID THIS not the person? gun is also tool and only difference is there is not huge group of scoundrels tryin to say gun is ‘intelligent’. you do not get to do bad things and call your tool 'intelligent' for a pass

in other words, whole discussion is actually attempt to create appearance of 'sentient brain'. when we create a real sentient brain the discussion will immediately be about philosophy and the rights of the brain, whether or not it is ethical to turn off etc. we are not there

where we ARE is that capitalism has found new tool to suck heart out of everything it touches like dang vampire, and it is shocking to see buds fall for it. wes anderson making star wars is not fun it is ghoulish and sad.