Writer's Grove

Stuff They Never Told Me About Publishing #2

Continuing the series about stuff I never found out until after I signed the contract. If you missed part one, here’s the link for it.

First, I’d like to give a shout-out to A.B, who commented on the first post—your suggestion was great and the backstage look at creating the cover is in the works. It’s a collaborative effort because it was a collaborative project; you’ll hear not only my side of things, but also my editor’s and maybe the designer’s as well. That’s coming sometime in January. For now, on with the goodies.

Laws in other countries actually apply to writers.

Hmm…that probably didn’t sound right. What I meant was, TAXES. Oh, and ROYALTY RATES. Both are going to be different from the United States if you get a foreign contract, and before you say, “Well, duh,” think about trying to keep track of them all if you sell rights to your book in, say, ten countries. Or, heck, pretend you went the full Rothfuss and got sold in thirty or so. And say that they’re releasing different editions in each one—mass market paperback in Australia, trade in Thailand, hardcover in Russia, etc. What surprised me is that you’ll have to fill out a tax thingy for the IRS to tell all those other countries not to worry, the U.S. will tax you on all that money just fine. If you don’t fill out the tax thingy—well, I’m not sure what would happen, but I’m sure I’d rather not find out. Something to make you rue the day you didn’t fill out the tax thingy. The point I’m trying to make (because I did want to make a point eventually) is that A) I’d never be able to keep track of this without my agency, B) I’d have no sense of what’s a good deal and what isn’t because I don’t have my finger on the pulse of Poland’s economy, and C) I’d probably never have any foreign contracts at all without my agency. I wonder how many foreign contracts unagented authors manage to secure. My (uneducated) guess is close to none. To people who say, “Dude, 20% commission on foreign sales is so whack,” I say, “Dude, I’ll happily accept 80% of any money that I never would have had otherwise.” So, in addition to these excellent reasons why you should get an agent from an editor’s perspective, an agent will open locked doors in faraway lands and prevent foreign revenue agents (also known as ninjas) from confiscating all your worldly goods.

There are known knowns and then there are known unknowns, and it all means we don’t really know

One of the things I’ve found astonishing is that there’s no efficient method in the industry to keep track of book sales. Months go by—yea, even a year sometimes—before people get a semi-clear picture of how your book is performing. All those Bestseller Lists are based on incomplete data and a lot of guesswork. It makes me wonder what arcane system “the people in Accounting” are using. (They are almost always called “the people in Accounting,” by the way, with a sense of mystical dread, and for me it evokes a picture of gray spectral figures huddled around an abacus.) I am sure there are good and sufficient reasons why this hasn’t been modernized; I confess that I’m not sophisticated in accounting practices and any discussion of numbers that lasts more than thirty seconds will send me screaming to find a happy place. Still, I’m suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand, you have that calm, intellectual guy on the UPS commercials doing magic shit on a whiteboard and casually suggesting global domination using his company’s real-time tracking system; on the other, we won’t know for six months if your book got sold in a Kentucky Walmart.

I’m not going to worry. Every other author has dealt with it and survived because that’s just the way it is. But, um, why does it have to stay that way? If there are any smart cookies out there looking for a place to build a better mousetrap, tracking book sales could use the attention of a genius or two.

That’s all for this go-round. Hope that shed a scintilla of light on the business for the uninitiated. :)