Making Light blog archives
Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 09, 2005, 01:23 PM:
My first offer for my first Science Fiction novel was $2,500 in 1972 for “The Ten Teeth of Terra: The Decadents” per an offer from Pat LoBrutto when he was at Ace, later retracted. I’ve written since to thank him: it would have been a Very Bad first novel, albeit written when I was 15.
Correcting for inflation, according to the Consumer Product Index, is an important normalization of the data. According to The Inflation Calculator
“if you were to buy exactly the same products in 1972 and 2003, they would cost you $2500 and $10853.36 respectively.”
Since then, my average SF novel submission sits on the desk of each editor for between 2 and 3 years, with roughly 1/3 of submissions lost outright, and I don’t yet have good statistics on how many editors per sale. The $8,000.00 book contract I had from Jim Baen was for nonfiction, even though it had plenty of SF references and style. Several chapters of said nofiction book “Computer Futures” have appeared in Science Fiction venues, such as “Human Destiny and the End of Time” [Quantum SF, No.39, Winter 1991/1992?, pp.??, Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877; ISSN 0198-6686] which in turn was acknowledged by Greg Benford who used a dozen excerpts, transfigured into italics, in his novels of the galactic core.
Moral 1: a contract in the hand is worth N in the bush, for some value of N being experimentally determined.
Moral 2: really cool ideas propagate more rapidly in smaller particles than books, with articles faster than books, excerpts in other peoples’ novels faster than in your own novels, letters to the editor faster than articles, and blogs approaching the speed of light.
Moral 3: editorial submission is a stochastic process, apparently following Markov Chain statistics, with several absorbing barriers, namely sale, return of mansucript, death of editor, and/or loss of manuscript (lossy transmission).
Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 03:55 AM:
Andrew:
“You can get paid for books?”
The paradox of academic publishing is that the publishers get the work from the writers so cheap (even negative cost) and then turn around and sell the work profitably to the very universities that employ the academic writers.
For Mathematics and Science journals in the USA, where authors typically have to PAY the journals a “page charge” – tell me this isn’t vanity publishing! – the total profit for publishers is estimated at $300 to $400 million per year. An editorial in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society speculates that mathematicians accept this without complaint because they feel that, since the articles are written by mathematicians for mathematicians, they are “our” journals.
Dr. Geoff Landis, OTOH, says he’s seen a study somewhere that the indirect lifetime value to an academic scientist for a published journal article is roughly $10,000 in terms of getting promotions and tenure sooner.
Can anyone help me and Geoff with the reputed myriad-dollar figure, while I dig up the AMS editorial for a skeptical reply?
The VP of Academic Affairs at Woodbury, where I taught Math for 2 years until recently, thrilled a Faculty Senate meeting by saying that he was close to Presidential approval to issue awards for faculty achievements: “publish a book, win $1,000.” The Dean of Faculty, who’d just published a small book about kayaking the last California wild river, beamed. I started counting my chickens on the grounds that my 360+ short math/science publications in 2004 alone, including refereed and edited online pieces, must be the equivalent of at least two or three books. Then came the pink slip…
Charlie Stross ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 08:57 AM:
Getting back to Patrick’s original topic …
I have, in the past couple of years, been asked to keep quiet about the money at stake in a book deal …
… by my agent. While the offer was on the table but not yet officially accepted, and she was trying to get another publisher to make a counter-offer.
(Funnily enough, I went along with this :)
Otherwise, no: I don’t think I’ve ever wrriten for an organization that asked me not to discuss what they were paying me.
Paul Robichaux ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 09:55 AM:
The norm in computer book publishing, which is the only publishing sector I know anything about, is for contracts to have a confidentiality clause that forbids disclosure of advance or royalty amounts. In the last few years, contracts I’ve seen from Microsoft Press, Sybex, and Pearson have included this language; I don’t remember offhand if O’Reilly’s contracts have it or not (but I doubt it).
Castiron ::: (view all by) ::: February 11, 2005, 01:07 PM:
JvP:
“The paradox of academic publishing is that the publishers get the work from the writers so cheap (even negative cost) and then turn around and sell the work profitably to the very universities that employ the academic writers.”
Profitably? *scratches head* On what planet?
Okay, if you restrict this statement to scientific publishing, as JvP’s further comments suggest, then that may be accurate, depending on the publisher. However, I doubt that many academic presses make much if any profit on, say, Latin American literary criticism books.
The university press I work for has no confidentiality clauses on advances (on the rare occasions where they happen) or royalties; our authors are welcome to brag about how their royalty check enabled them to supersize that burger combo.
Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 12, 2005, 02:17 AM:
Castiron:
“… Elsevier and Academic Press journals are a highly profitable part of a big corporation. Bertelsmann has recently divested Springer, and now Springer, Kluwer, and Birkhauser are owned by an investment company (who did not buy these publishers in order to make less profit than before)…. [The] AMS [American Mathematical Society] charges under 22 cents per page for its primary journals and makes a decent profit that subsidizes other AMS activities. The Annals of Mathematics, Pacific Journal, and geometry and Topology are cheaper yet. On the other hand, the big commercial journals typically charge in the range of 40 cents to over 100 cents per page….” A good source for price information is either
http://www.ams.org/membership/journal-survey.html
or
http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/BIB/AMS/Publisher.html
“In an article in The Mathematical Intelligencer, John Ewing writes: ‘a rough estimate suggests that the revenue from each article in commercial journals is $4,000.00.’ (Imagine a 20-page paper sold at 50 cents/page to 400 subscribers.) ‘Therefore, the 25,000 mathematics articles in commercial journals in 2001 generated about $100 million in revenue for the commercial publishers.’ This is serious money, much of it profit. Roughly speaking, it takes a billion-dollar business to get that sort of profit….”
“Fleeced” by Rob Kirby, Notices Associate Editor, University of California Berkeley
Notices of the AMS, February 2004, p.181
Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: February 14, 2005, 10:20 AM:
Charlie’s Diary [Stross]
has an interesting posting for Wed, 09 Feb 2005 that ties together “a rather neat article in First Monday, musicians and artists for the most part don’t earn their living through intellectual property rights; there’s a power law at work, with maybe the top ten individuals in a given country earning twice as much as the next 200 put together, and more than the bottom 10,000 professionals in the field put together” and Tobias Buckell’s survey of SF writers’ book advances (in the USA), with “Galambosianism.”
This latter was a short-lived doctrine of intellectual property absolutism, founded in the 1960s by Joseph Andrew Galambos… and descended from libertarianism and/or the teachings of Ayn Rand. The primary concept of Galambosianism was that one’s ideas were one’s “primary property”, a higher form of property than physical assets (which were merely “secondary property”), and second only to one’s life (one’s “primordial property”).
Re: Journal Publishers Hire the “Pit Bull of PR”
I like the Dr. Evil-style picture.