Authors, royalties, publishing, and e-books?

Some questions for the Trek authors, but anyone can feel free to chime in here as well; I know there's a lot of you who aren't authors necessarily but have specialist knowledge to educate. I do understand if you're not at liberty to reply in depth, or at all, as you do have to work with the publisher and perhaps can't necessarily speak of certain things.

(And if you do wish to respond but cannot do so in public forum for whatever reason, feel free to PM me if you wish. What's said on PM stays in confidence on PM.)

But please pardon me for having the curiosity to ask some questions that I don't recollect having seen previously, in no particular order.

(1) How has the advent of e-books affected an author's earning potential? On one hand, I can see that as e-readers become more prolific and are less expensive than the hard copy (at least that's my understanding, please correct me if I'm mistaken...I'm not an e-reader myself), an author may receive wider exposure as more and more people shift to that venue, but on the other hand I can see illegal downloads and file-sharing and the like cutting into an author's, and publisher's, bottom line. By no means am I asking how much you earn in your profession...but I am curious if e-books have helped you to earn more.

(2) It's my understanding that the publishers of Trek books don't reveal sales figures, numbers of how many of which Trek titles are produced and/or sold, that they're internal and proprietary numbers (or at least they used to be, based on what I can recall from an old Lit thread several years old now...or has that changed?). I can understand that to some degree...but how do the authors know conclusively how many copies of their books, hard copy and/or e-book, are sold? Don't they get royalties beyond the advance if numbers sold exceed those contracted for in the advance? Without those numbers, how do the authors receive assurance that they're not being told that sales were X-minus-10,000 copies, rather than X, or otherwise shorted on royalties?

(3) And are you informed of how many copies your book sold per format, i.e. how many in e-book form versus how many in hard copy?

(4) Do you expect at some point that e-books will be the defining medium of the future and that hard copies will be in very limited release?

(5) Have you personally discovered an upward trend in sales thanks to e-books, versus what you were earning with only mass-market paperbacks or trade paperbacks?

(6) Is the royalty structure for the e-book side of publishing vastly different from that for hard copies? I can see a publishing company offering royalties for, say, excess of 50,000 hard copies sold, but significantly less for anything over, say, 100,000 e-books of that title sold, since there are substantially less material costs.

(7) Do you have agents? Or is the process of writing and publishing Trek established to the point where agents aren't necessary, or desired in terms of paying agent fees or portions of royalties, etc? I don't have the slightest clue how that works. And have any of you had to change agents, if you use them, because your old agent didn't have a grip on how to exact royalties from e-publishing?

(8) There are some Trek titles that have only been released as e-books...well, a Typhon Pact one by Christopher is the only one I can think of at present, though I'm sure there's more. At some point, are we expecting that those titles be gathered up and published in hard copy, for those of us who don't do e-readers?

(9) This isn't related to e-books and I'm virtually certain this has been asked and answered elsewhere, but please refresh my memory...for those of you writing outside of Trek, do you earn more from Trek, or from your original non-Trek books? On one hand, I can see you earning more royalties by not having to pay a portion to those powers-that-be who own Trek; I have no idea what their take might be, but I would imagine it's substantial. But on the other hand, I can also see a Trek (or any media tie-in) publisher granting a larger advance because they know the book may be more likely to sell larger numbers of copies to the audience of the show who devours them regularly, as opposed to those who might or might not purchase an original, non-Trek work, and depending upon how many copies of the Trek book sell, the advance might be the only earning. And I've seen a dozen copies of an author's Trek book in the bookstore, but not a single copy of one of his original works and had to special-order it, suggesting that the author may earn more from Trek. Again, I am not seeking specific monetary amounts or attempting to evaluate the quality of your work, merely curious which you've found to be the better payer thus far...original work, or media tie-in?

(10) If you wish to share, I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts on what you authors think of e-books, now or in the future, whether from a personal, financial, or professional viewpoint. Personally, I'm not a very tech'y guy, tend to drop things so am reluctant to purchase something that might end up broken in short order, so buying the hard copy is the way I'm going until it's no longer possible or becomes prohibitively expensive. And I have more books than I will probably be able to read in the remainder of my lifetime. But I've had these questions for awhile concerning e-books and their impact on the publishing industry, so I figured I'd take 'em to the professionals and get their input.

(11) And if you've gotten this far, a nosy bonus question...what do you do for a day job? Or is this it?

And now a little disclaimer. I'm not an author, don't wish to become one, don't have the imagination or the skill for it (as my propensity for run-on sentences should suggest...), so my questions are out of personal curiosity in the publishing process as a long-time reader, with a little professional curiosity tossed in vis-a-vis how technology has affected your work. Several years ago I participated in a thread in Lit in which I asked authors how much they made in this line of work. I wasn't necessarily asking for specific figures, but was curious if they earned enough to, say, leave their day jobs and write full-time, having read of a Trek author who was apparently able to afford to leave what appeared to be a well-paying full-time day job in order to devote to writing full-time. I know there are authors out there who make millions per book, but I also remembered my old boss at Waldenbooks Back In The Day tell me that there were significantly more authors who put out 2 or 3 or 4 books per year and made enough spread out over a few books per year to be able to live comfortably on it. I can't remember chapter, line, and verse on how conversations with the authors on that thread went, and can't find it using the Search box, but I do remember that a few of the authors gave me a dressing-down over some things I asked, thinking me excessively curious about their particular financials.

By no means do I need to know how much you earn in this work you do for love. That's none of my goddamned business. Besides, if you knew how much I made annually, you'd probably think me grossly overpaid.

My curiosity here is in how things have changed with the addition of the recent medium of e-books and how it has affected your work, and your bottom line, for ill or good. As a locomotive engineer, I've seem technology both enhance and complicate from my job and my paycheck, with still more changes looming ahead before retirement, if indeed I am so fortunate. I'm just wondering how it affects yours.

Thank you for your time and patience, folks.

 

I think that adding more potential markets can only be a good thing. As far as illegal downloads go, since most print books are simultaneously published as e-books these days, it's kind of a wash. I've had one or two encounters with piracy of my books, and they've been print books that were electronically pirated. In essence, all modern books are e-books, even when they're also printed on paper.

Publishers don't publicly reveal sales figures, but they're required to reveal them to their authors. We get biannual royalty statements reporting on the sales of our books in all formats, and some publishers have websites that let their authors track sales figures.

To the former, inevitably. Books are information, and information is overwhelmingly more convenient to store and deliver electronically. How many of us still listen to physical CDs rather than just calling up music tracks on our phones or iThingies?

To the latter, I think paper books will last as long as there's a market for them. It may be more of a niche market in the future, but with the rise of print-on-demand services, anyone who wants a physical copy of a book should be able to get one. (Just to throw in a plug, my novel Only Superhuman is unfortunately out of print in mass-market paperback, but it is available as a print-on-demand trade paperback as well as an e-book.)

I can't really tell, due to insufficient data. It can take a long, long time to earn out an advance and start earning new royalties. But for what it's worth, most of the royalties I have gotten have been from hardcover reprints of my e-book-original novellas. And I'm currently looking into the possibility of getting some of my out-of-print original fiction re-released in e-book form, which would definitely increase my potential profits. One advantage of e-books is that they allow a wider range of marketable lengths between short story and full novel, so that absolutely gives authors more opportunities to sell their work. It also lets books stay in print indefinitely, so, again, that improves an author's profit potential.

I know it's calculated differently, but I don't know the how or why of it.

Most novelists have agents, but I've never managed to acquire one yet. As for royalties from e-publishing, those have been around long enough that all the basic contractual wrangling has probably been done by now, since all the contracts I've seen have come with clauses covering electronic reproduction along with pretty much all other possible forms that a book might end up in (e.g. book club editions, overseas editions, audiobooks, etc.).

My Typhon Pact entry was the first in a line of Trek e-novellas that have been coming out pretty steadily ever since -- the latest one being another one of mine, DTI: The Collectors, which just came out yesterday.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/EBook#Original_eBook_publications

We've already gotten hardcopy collections of the entire S.C.E. e-book series (not counting the final eight installments under the rebranded Corps of Engineers banner) and the Mere Anarchy miniseries. As for the newer e-books, it's always possible that they could be reprinted in collected form someday, but nothing's been announced yet.

In theory, original work would be more lucrative if you were successful at it. The royalties are higher, and you have the option to sell the rights to get it translated overseas, adapted for audio or comics, sold to the movies or TV, resold to a new publisher after it goes out of print, or whatever you want. The holy grail, financially, is to sell the movie rights to an original book, something you can't do with a tie-in book. Do that and you'll make enormously more than you could ever make doing tie-ins.

But the tricky part is "if you were successful." Success as a tie-in author doesn't guarantee success as an original author. The advantage of tie-ins is that they come with a built-in audience. To date, I've made more from my tie-in work simply because I've done so much more of it.

Books are books. Having more ways to read them can only be a good thing. These days, e-books tend to be "in the cloud" so that you can read them on any device you want -- once you pay for it, you can read it on your laptop, your tablet, your phone, whatever's handy at a given moment. The reader software is free and available for any device. There are even some ways you can read ebooks on your TV, if you have the right kind of TV or the right kind of attachment for it.

And again, it's increasingly possible to get print-on-demand editions of many e-books. I see a future -- a rather near future -- where a printed paper codex is seen as simply one more of the array of "devices" that you can read a given book on. The technology is increasing your options as a reader, not limiting them.

This is it for me, but I don't recommend that. Better to have a day job if you can get it. Well, unless you manage to sell those movie rights.

 

The best part about ebooks, from what I've seen so far, is that they can bring new life to older books that might otherwise be out-of-print or hard to find. I'm starting to see ebook royalties for books that I haven't seen on sale in bookstores for years.

In general, though, royalties don't pay the bills. Royalties are like lottery tickets; if you luck out and write the next HARRY POTTER, you might be talking serious money, but usually it's just pizza money. Once in a while, you might get a check in the mail for $23 or some similar amount, which is always appreciated, but it's not something you really want to plan your budget around.

The advances are what you can count on. Royalties are the icing on the cake . . . if the book earns out its advance.

 

Thanks for the 'Heads up' Christopher - I just grabbed Only Superhuman off Amazon UK while they've still got a couple !

 

Bless you. Be sure to post a review on Amazon! Probably too late at this point to make much difference, but it couldn't hurt.

 

Many older titles, published before ebooks were even a thing, are starting to show up as ebooks now. Does the publisher have to come up with a new royalties arrangement for that, or does the original contract cover that like a reprint or something similar?

 

In general, and let me make it clear that I'm NOT talking about Pocket Books or STAR TREK here, you do need to go back and amend the original contract because, yes, an older contract may not cover ebooks at all. Speaking as an editor, I've had to handle this more than once.

Often it's in the author's best interests to amend the contract to include ebooks because, hey, more royalties from an old book, but this does need to be hashed out with the author and/or agent before you can release an electronic version of an old book.

Funny story: Many years ago, when I was working as an assistant editor at a mainstream publishing house, I had to go digging in the contract files to find out what rights we had to an old book. Imagine my surprise to discover that the contract actually granted us, among other things, exclusive publication rights "on Earth's moon."

Huh? I have no idea how that got into the contract, or why the agent agreed to it, but that was a new one on me. I confess I had fun spreading the word that we still controlled the crucial lunar rights on that title!

 

Don't forget that in North America the rights might be one thing, but in other parts of the world, the rights are completely different. I don't know about book rights, but in Television and Film there are different rights in different countries. This is how you see "Quantum Leap" or "A Muppet Family Christmas" get released with their full soundtracks in the UK, but in the US and Canada the TV shows and specials are so chopped up, or have music replaced, since in Europe, for older shows and specials made before home video and digital video, unless there was some stipulation in the original contract, UK and European law views a written contract as covering all rights, whereas US and Canada law requires that each right be agreed upon. So in North America, if you only cleared a song for broadcast without clearing the rights for home video, and then at a later date decide to release the broadcast on DVD, you need to re-clear the rights to that song or person's likeness before releasing it on DVD. because you only had the right to show it on broadcast TV. So I would assume that with electronic versions of older books there might be different copyrights in terms of the country in which the ebook version is to be released that would have to be cleared before the book is released.

But with ebooks, I also see another problem, especially with Trek. Trek to begin with is a niche market, and with ebooks (or even physical books sold through websites), unless someone was looking for that particular book, or just "Star Trek" in general, then most people might not even see the book, unlike physical copies sitting on a book store shelf where people passing by, even if they have never read a Trek book before, but remember seeing an episode, and finds the back cover blur interesting, would probably be more likely to pick up the physical copy right then and there, instead downloading it. So there are still somethings that physical copies can do that electronic copies just could not do.

 

When was the contract written? There was a time in the late '60s and early '70s when it was assumed that permanent Lunar colonization was inevitable in the not-too-distant future. Maybe the contract was written in the spirit of that sense of optimism.

Of course, these days, contracts are even more ambitious. They tend to contain clauses ensuring the publisher's rights "throughout the universe."

 

That's what I always figured. (I can't remember the title, btw, but I'm pretty sure it was a self-help book of some sort.)

 

And I'm sure the book was heavily bootlegged on Europa and Titan.

 

Code:

ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
DMCA CLAIMS THERE

 

^

 

Pirated books existed before eBooks, and have always been a problem that we have to keep fighting.

As for the first question, it's just another format via which the author can get sales. So it's affected our earning potential by improving it, especially since eBooks don't need to be warehoused and so can stay "in print" in perpetuity.

Sales figures aren't revealed publicly, but we receive full royalty reports twice a year. Most publishing contracts stipulate that the author receives such reports every six months (even small press ones, though some small presses do it once a month). Sales numbers are generally internally proprietary, but the author is entitled to those numbers.

Yes.

Generally formats only go away completely if something comes along that completely replicates the experience but is demonstrably better -- like discs over tapes in both music and video. Codex books are demonstrably different from eBooks in terms of reading experience, so they're likely to stick around for the same reason that theatrical performances stuck around after the invention of film.

Depends on the book.

That's not remotely how it works, as a general rule. Royalties are a percentage of the listed cover price of the book in that format, period. It is not common practice for royalties to kick in after a certain number are sold -- rather, the author is paid an advance and then a percentage royalty as I just described. Once the number of sales is such that the royalty equals the amount of the advance, then money starts going to the writer -- what's called "earning out."

For example, if a publisher puts out a book of mine. They gave me a $10,000 advance, and a 5% royalty on each copy sold, and the cover price of the book is $10. That means I wouldn't actually receive any royalty money until after the book sold 20,000 copies, because then my advance would earn out.

The last question is nonsensical (sorry) because the process of getting royalties is EXACTLY THE SAME regardless of format. The notion that eBook royalties is some weird arcane alchemy that is radically different from other royalties is a false one -- it's all the same process: a percentage of the cover price of a book sold goes to the author, regardless of the format. The eBook royalty setup is no different from that for hardcovers, trade paperbacks, or mass market paperbacks.

Anyhow, I have an agent, though I didn't get one until I sold Dragon Precinct, because an agent is useful to manage the property when you own the IP. Agents are also useful for contract negotiations, though there's less of that in tie-in work, and they're especially useful when you need someone to play bad cop with the publisher, thus freeing the author to maintain a good relationship with the publisher.

No idea.

The answer is "It depends." There's certainly very little correlation between sales of original work versus sale of tie-in work.....

However, the tie-in books generally have a lower royalty rate. As a general rule, an author of a tie-in book gets 1-3% royalties (or sometimes no royalties at all), while original fiction usually earns 6-8%.

More formats are better. Plus, eBooks don't take up valuable shelf space, are easy to find, and has changeable type size, which is handy for folks whose vision is failing.

Been freelance since 1998.

 

Is the advance just that - i.e. a loan against future earnings, or is it just a phrase for an initial payment ?

In the music industry, bands can often find themselves owing the record company money if they don't sell enough copies to clear the advance.

 

We get to keep the advance. Period.

 

It should be noted that the reason authors get smaller royalties on tie-in books than on original novels is because the publisher also has to pay royalties to the licensor, which means any royalties get split between the author and the copyright holder. Same slice of the pie, but cut into smaller slices to serve more people.

For example: Let's say a publisher is offering a 8% percent royalty on paperback copies. On an original novel, the author would get the whole 8% (provided the book earned out), but on a tie-in novel that 8% would be divided between the author and the licensor--with the licensor typically getting the lion's share because it's their characters and universe after all. So the writer might get 2% and the licensor would get 6%, adding up to the same 8%.

 

That's good.

It would be a pretty unattractive prospect for a career otherwise.

Presumably the rationale being that it balances out - you have an automatic sales base for a tie-in, whereas you'd may well sell less copies of an original novel.

 

^Well, the rationale is that the licensors are the ones who actually own the property, and the royalties are how they make a profit from licensing it. From a legal standpoint, they're the "author" of the work, and we're their subcontractors. So they get the lion's share of the royalties and we get a cut as compensation for our efforts.

It's actually a lot harder to earn out an advance on a tie-in, because the royalty percentage is so low. But the compensation is that the advances are relatively large.

 

The other advantage is that, in general, you don't actually write the book until the outline is approved and you have the contract in hand. At which point it's a sure thing.

Whereas if you wrote an original novel, you might have to write the whole thing on spec, shop it around, and hope it sells.