How do Authors Make Money? More than just advance/royalties!

You’ve written a book. You want to make money. Here’s how. A lot of people talk about how advances and royalties work, but there’s more to it! (Note: Most of this will be described as if you are getting traditionally published (aka the literary agent and publisher route), but it ALSO applies to non-traditional routes such as self-publishing.)

1. Advance & royalties
2. Selling foreign rights
3. Selling movie rights
4. Selling merchandize
5. Paid appearances
6. Online presence and traffic
7. Tax deductions

Advances and Royalties

I could do a whole post on advances and royalties. But here’s a quick and simple guide. An advance is money the publisher gives you upfront. Royalties are monies earned over time as the book sells copies. However, you only start getting royalty payments once you’ve earned royalties equal to the amount of the advance. They’re the same method of earning money (selling books), but it’s just a question of when you get the money. And if you don’t earn enough royalties to equal the initial advance amount, don’t worry. You don’t have to pay it back.

One thing to note about advances and royalties, as well as foreign and movie rights below, is that any money made from this will exclude a commission paid to your agent. Their job is to help you sell, so they get a cut of the profits.

Selling Foreign Rights

Your contract with your agency will state that your agency will help you sell not only your book to a publisher in your own country, but also to publishers in other countries/languages. If this happens, you’ll get paid the same way as above: an advance and royalties. The payments typically go through the agency, which takes care of any conversion concerns and commission/credits incurred by your agency. For example, if your agency pays money to ship your manuscript overseas, that money will come out of the next paycheck you get. (Take note of this for the tax section later!)

Selling Movie Rights

Selling movie rights is a bit different than foreign or publish rights. Firstly, it doesn’t come with an advance or royalty. A producing company will pay you for the rights to your book. These rights typically come with a time limit, which means it may expire after a certain amount of time. This is why buying movie rights is actually called “optioning the rights.” For example: “Studio X has optioned Awesome Book.” This means that the studio now has the ability to make a movie if they want to. The author gets to pocket this money (via their agent who takes their commission). And then if the option expires, it can be sold again. This is because studios typically buy up a lot of options but don’t necessarily make the movie for a lot of different reasons (for example if the book doesn’t end up doing well or if the right director or actors don’t come together).

Selling Merchandize

If you have a great quote from your book or you’ve made some additional art or swag, you can sell these! You might not have a big audience for the merch, so not a lot of authors do this. Many others make swag and give it away for free as part of preorder campaigns to entice readers to preorder their book. And the authors pay for this swag out of their own pocket and don’t make a profit. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an option! You’ll have to look carefully at your book contract though, because your publisher may have also bought merchandizing rights along with the book rights. But if you’ve maintained them, there’s no reason you can’t look into it as an option to make some more money.

Paid Appearances

Once you have a book out, you can work to schedule appearances. If these are at schools, events, conventions, or stores, you can set it up as a paid appearance. It may be a signing, a reading, or a speech. In most cases, the author is responsible for setting these events up, though you may end up working with your publisher if you want to take some of your books to sell.

If it’s an appearance at a book store, you can call (several months ahead of your visit) to make sure they will have stock of your book. Then, if the event is marketed and attended well, you may make some money by selling your book! A lot of book signings though, especially early in an author’s career, are rather small and don’t have a significant profit, if any. And your publisher may or may not help set up these events.

This is where business acumen and networking come in handy. You should be encouraged to connect with local booksellers and librarians, and schools if that’s an appropriate audience for you.

Online Presence and Traffic

This, like merchandizing, may have a smaller audience or range of effect. And you’ll want to think twice to make sure it’s a good path for you. If you have an online presence (like a website or a YouTube channel), you can consider monetizing it by selling ads. If you do this, you’ll want to be careful about what types of ads are running on your content. When you become an author, you’re building a brand. And with your online platform, the wrong ads can reflect poorly on you as a creator.

Tax Deductions

First things first: getting a tax deduction isn’t the same as making money–it just means that you get to skip paying tax on some things, so it effectively costs less for something. So, deducting taxes doesn’t MAKE you money, but it does SAVE you money. It feels appropriate for this list about making money.

Remember the commission you pay your agent on advances, foreign rights, and movie rights? You don’t have to pay taxes on that commission, because it isn’t money that you are netting.

Money you spend on merchandizing, whether it’s something you sell or give away for promotion? That cost can be deducted as well! Travel to and from paid appearances? Some of that cost can be deducted as well. The cost of maintaining your website domain or paying for designers to work on it… these can be deductible as well.

Being an author and publishing books is a business, and you should do your research about what is and isn’t deductible, because you could save a lot of money! I really want to stress the research side of this though, because it could be easy to deduct a cost you’re not supposed to, or to deduct 100% of something when you only use it for business reasons for a percentage of the time.

How do Foreign Editions of Books Happen?

With the recent announcement that there will be a German edition of my book, NAMELESS QUEEN, it begs the question: How do foreign editions of books happen?

• What IS a foreign edition of a book? A foreign edition is a version of the book that is being published in a different region and/or language. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in a different language, though. For example, you may sell World German rights to a publisher based in Germany. You may sell US English rights to an American publisher and sell UK English rights to a publisher in England. Or you may sell World English rights to a single publisher. It can be broken out regionally and/or by language.
• How do you get a foreign publisher to publish your book? Depending on who has retained the ability to sell the foreign rights, (this is something specified in a contract), either your publisher or your agent will reach out to foreign publishers or agents in order to see if they’d like to pay for the ability to translate and publish your book. Sometimes these connections happen at trade shows, conferences, meet-and-greets, good old fashion solicitation, or networking contacts. Sometimes Book Spies get ahold of your book first and then the foreign agencies or publishers are the ones who reach out. Regardless of who initiates, there will be a contract. The contract will specify things like the advance amount and the timeline for translation and publishing.

A foreign edition of your book may look different, but it’s still your book!

• Who translates the foreign edition? If you’re working with a foreign publishing house, they will often have in-house or hired translators. This person will translate your book. In less traditional circumstances, such as if you are self-publishing or retaining the ability to sell foreign rights, you may end up hiring a freelance translator yourself.
• Are the covers different? They can be! The foreign edition is a whole different book through a different publishing house. That means they design their own cover, which makes sense! The domestic cover may have been designed in-house at your publishing house, and your foreign publisher would have to buy the rights to use it or just pay for their own. And a different region/language has an entirely different market, so trust your foreign publisher to know what will sell well in their area. If a cover really resonates or works well globally, a foreign publisher may pay to use it, giving it a more consistent look internationally.
• What if something in the book doesn’t “translate” well? There are often words or phrases that literally can’t be translated, but translators do this for a living and can handle it in stride! Sometimes there are things that won’t translate culturally. This can be anything from a sense of humor to cultural references to idioms. In these cases, they may ask you to make some changes.
• When is a foreign edition published compared to the domestic version? Most of the time, when a foreign rights deal is struck, the contract specifies when the foreign edition should be published. Most often, it is scheduled for within a certain amount of time after the original-language edition is published. This is so that the success of the book in its home market will build buzz in the foreign market. It’s all in the contracts, so it can vary from author to author and from book to book.
• Does an author get paid for a foreign edition? Yep! If you’re getting traditionally published on all fronts, then you’ll get an advance. Sometimes a domestic publish deal will pay the author their advancement in installments (part on signing the contract, part on the publication of the hardcover, etc.). Foreign deals are often all-at-once. A couple special money things to pay attention to:
  • If you’re dealing with a foreign country, they may have a different currency. The contract may specify in either their currency or yours. If it’s in the foreign currency, then keep an eye on the exchange rate!
  • If you have an agent, they’ll keep a percentage of what you earn through the rights that they help you sell. This includes selling foreign rights. Most often, if your agency is selling foreign rights, they’ll also work with a foreign agency who will also take a percentage.
• Does the author get any copies of their foreign edition? Sometimes a contract will specify that the author will get a certain number of the foreign editions sent to them around the time of publication.

If you have any questions that aren’t on this list, let me know! Ask in comments, or toss a message my way. I’ll be glad to answer if I can.

Q&A: I’m An Author!

I’m an author! I’m getting a book published! My book comes out early next year. So here’s a quick Q&A if you want more details and how you can learn more or support me and the book. And if you have more questions, please ask in comments! I want to be more transparent and share more with folks!

Q: Like, legit published?

A: Totally legit! I’m getting traditionally published (through an agent and publishing house). That publishing house is Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the WORLD.

Q: What kind of book are you publishing?

A: It’s a “YA Fantasy” (The Y.A. stands for Young Adult. This means it’s for teenagers, technically, even though YA is read a lot by adults too! The Fantasy is the genre, like magic and the supernatural!)

Q: What’s your book about?

A: My book is called NAMELESS QUEEN. It’s about a street thief who suddenly ends up on the throne of her city, while a weird and impossible magic tattoo appears on her arm. Now she has to try to survive her reign long enough to save the people she left behind on the streets. There are magical hallucinations, sword fights, a twisted conspiracy, and the mystery of how she became queen in the first place.

Q: Can I buy it?

A: Not yet! It goes on sale early next year. Sometime later this year, though, it’ll be available for PREORDER, which means you can buy it early and have it shipped to you on the day it comes out! And even better news: the audiobook will be released at the same time as the book comes out, so both formats will be available!

Q: What can I do to support your book?

A: You can add my book on GoodReads (if you’re into that kind of thing), and you can follow my Author Page here on Facebook. My author page is mainly where I’ll be posting about the book and sharing updates as we get closer to the publish date.
(goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28173303-nameless-queen)
(author page: https://www.facebook.com/McRebecky/)

Q: Okay, and if I DO buy your book when it comes out, will you sign it?

A: Absolutely! I’ll be doing book signings, and if you’re a friend or fam, send me a message and we can probably work something out! There might even be places where you can buy a pre-signed copy! I’ll keep updates on my Author page.

Q: Are you going to move to New York like a millionaire if you become a bestseller like Harry Potter?

A: Nope. Hitting the bestseller list just means you had a great week of sales, but the plain truth of it is that even if that happens, it’s nowhere near a million bucks. You’d have to stay on the NYT list for MONTHS to earn that much. And there’s only one JK Rowling. She’s the exception, not the rule. Sorry to dispel the myth of being an author! It’s hard work, typically doesn’t pay much, and isn’t very glamorous. But! It’s a lot of fun and rewarding, and it’ll be totally worth it if there are any readers out there who enjoy the story of a thieving con artist who takes over a city.

More questions?

If you’re curious about any of the following, leave a comment with a question!

• Traditional publishing
• My journey as an author
• What a career as an author looks like
• My book
• Me as a person (I promise I’m human probably)
• Future lottery numbers (I don’t believe in the lottery, but I will absolutely pretend to know THINGS about THINGS)

–by Rebecca McLaughlin–

What is Creative Control?

No one likes losing control. Or sharing control. Or thinking about losing or sharing control. But! Giving up some control is an important part of producing and sharing art.

How Long Does Getting Published Take?

I’ve been pretty quiet over the past year about my book. So what’s been going on? When’s my book getting published? WHAT’S GOING ON??

Getting Published: Setting Achievable Goals

My life goals typically look like this:

• Acquire matching socks.
• Acquire fingerless gloves.
• Buy a stupid mango and actually eat it instead of forgetting it exists and throwing it away two weeks too late.
• Acquire fresh produce and cook a meal. It’s been a while, and I’ve gotten lazy at this.
• Accomplish list of things required to maintain the frimbly facade of being an adult (including, not limited to: go to bank, schedule ophthalmologist appointment, research cars, probably call internet company?)

Basically, my lists are now-oriented. I’m not a big fan of Bucket Lists or Life Goals. Why? Because I want attainable goals that I know I can accomplish. I want to dangle the cookie just within reach, because then I’ll fight for it. I don’t want to hang the cookie on a distant star in outer space where I can only see it through a very expensive telescope that I can’t afford.

There’s a metaphor in there, I promise.

Anyway, my goal lists are always concrete and reasonable. This goes for things like basic human functions, and larger scale goals that are linked to my passions.

So when I set the goal as a wee child to publish a book, I knew I had a lifetime to do it. It was my cookie in the stars. But as I grew up, I broke that goal down into cookie-on-a-string tasks. Here’s a brief list of goals I set:

• Write 100 poems and 100 short stories during high school.
• When, among one of those stories, a premise had enough promise to potentially be a longer story, I set the goal of writing a novel.
• I set the goal of finishing it while I was in high school. Two years later, as my high school graduation neared, I finished it with less than a week to spare.
• My first year at college, I set the goal of writing my first NaNoWriMo book during my first year of college, where I wrote 12,000 words on the first day, and I finished the book by that January.
• I set a goal to revise my first book and write my first query letter.
• Then I read the entire Query Shark archives to actually learn what a query letter is supposed to look like.
• I set the goal of researching and querying 10 agents.
• After I graduated college, I had written three books, and I gave my first manuscript another pass on revisions.
• Then I gave myself an end-of-year goal: apply to grad school for creative writing or get a job. I got a job as a technical writer three months out of college (which I love).
• Instead of moving on, though, I entered Pitch Wars 2015 on the last day of submissions. I’ve talked a lot about my Pitch Wars experience here (and feel free to ask questions about it here), but a hop, skip, and boat ride away, I got multiple offers from agents. Then I got multiple offers from publishing houses. Then, suddenly, I had a book deal for two NAMELESS books.
• But my goals didn’t stop there. Now, my goals have been things like:
  • Cut the opening 100 pages to 50 pages.
  • Write my first outline (it ended up being 13 pages long!) to guide my revisions.
  • Write an outline for book 2.
  • Do line edits for a friend’s book (which I’ve never successfully done before) ((and guys, she’s awesome))

Things are crazy. This place I’ve found myself is crazy. Setting goals makes it seem less crazy and stressful and makes it seem possible. It makes it achievable.

At times, it’s incomprehensibly and phenomenally lightning fast. Sometimes it trudges like dregs of unmixed hot cocoa: delightful and painfully out of reach. Sometimes its simplicity is astoundingly sharp.

Sometimes I get to write blog posts about the hundreds of tiny steps and goals, the relentless and torturous ambition, and the unending thrill of finally being so close to my sky-cookie that I can taste it.

And guys? It tastes like starlight.*

 

*not literal starlight, which tastes more like electric blue and unsaturated nebulas… so I’m told.

Writing & Small Life Updates

…in which I chat about petty (temporary) theft, chapter breakout summaries, outdated technology, talking with potential new clients for my agent, and the art of multitasking.

I’m Getting Published!

I don’t have enough energy to squeal with the amount of delight currently contained within my VERY SOUL.

But guess what?

I’M GETTING PUBLISHED.

Can we take a moment to faint? Okay.

This is me. I’m the Doctor. (I wish)

When you’ve regained consciousness, come back to me.

Come back to me and hear the story of the FOREVER SECRET PUBLISHING JOURNEY.

I wrote a post about this months ago, but it didn’t contain nearly enough gifs or squealing. So I’m rewriting it on the fly.

When I fly, it’s often via Ear Plane as well.

*attempts to reign in the gifs*

This story is filled with SECRETS AND SECRETIVITY started back in December. That’s when I got the lovely bombshell from my agent that about a day or so after going on submission, we had our first offer. Then we had plural offers. Then I was at auction.

!!!!!!!!!!

Those exclamation points are my emotions. As soon as we got that offer and then plural-offers, THE NAMELESS QUEEN was going to be published. It was just a question of where. Like a bomb you know is going to go off, if that analogy helps.

Pete Knapp, my illustrious agent, did some negotiations, which I picture as a high stakes poker game in a New York warehouse where the dealer is an enthusiastic, well-contained auctioneer throwing down pages of my manuscript like playing cards. Pete exchanges poker chips with terms written on them in black sharpie, non-nicotine (probably cotton-candy scented) smoke clouds the air, and there’s a lot of small nods and winks.

[There does not exist a gif for this, but there should.]

In reality, it was a lot of back and forth emails and other business-up-front type of things. The party in the back was me screaming with excitement far away in Michigan.

We settled on the basic terms. I chatted with some editors on the phone. I made a decision.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then….

Well, then there was a lot of waiting. And secrecy.

Sometimes things move fast (like getting an agent, going on submission, and going to auction in a number of days), and some things move slowly. In my case, it was a question of contracts.

If you’ve never heard the term “boilerplate,” just know that when it’s being revised, it takes an infinitely looping eon for it to get finished. But that’s okay! Because book writing is both a fast and a slow industry. So while the contract was being worked on (I like to think the contract got a trip to the spa and got a Swedish massage or something, sipping a delightful drink), I started the SEQUEL.

Because YES! The deal is for TWO BOOKS!

THE NAMELESS QUEEN will have an as-of-yet Unnamed Sequel! (pun completely intended)

So while I was waiting for my edit letter and for any news on the contract, I made a decent 1/3 – 1/2-ish dent in the first draft of the sequel. And let me tell you, things get COOL. Familiar faces, familiar world, and a dash of the unexpected!

And now I’m doings edits on THE NAMELESS QUEEN, and polishing it to a shiny rock. It’s mega-levels of excitement. And the deal has finally been announced!!!! YAYYYYY!

I’m still early on this road of books and authoring and authorial booking of booky authory things. But it’s a long road, and I’m going to enjoy the journey! Somewhere ahead, we’ll get to do final revisions, the cover release, the proper publication date announcements, and all sorts of exciting fabulousness!

Have questions for me on any of this? Ask me!

The Lie of the 1-Step Process

Looking at any process from the outside is simple. I come at this from two perspectives: having explored a hefty portion of the “Writing a Book” process and having made my first real “Process Tree” for my job as a Technical Writer.

The process I’m making at work is how our team handles documents that we are rewriting and remodeling. Outsiders think the process goes like this, a one-step process:

Our team makes stuff more awesome.

And even I was fooled by its outward simplicity. I thought it went like this:

Draft > Layout/Design > Final Proof > Publication

It turns our the process vaguely (and pixelated) looks like this:

As you can see, it’s way more complicated than it first seems. It goes more along the lines of:

First Draft > First Proof > Content Consult > Design/Layout > Final Proof > Interactive Test > Storage

So I figured, what other process in my life did I at one time think (oh-so-naively) was simple? Only to then discover, en medias res, that it was anything but?

Writing. A. Book.

I thought it was a one-step process. Like “update documents” was a one-step process, right? Write a book. Easy peasy. Well, easy until I was in the thick of things. Then, of course, it got more complicated. I figured, okay, it’s a FIVE step process:

Write book > Revise book > Get representation > Get published > Write more books

I thought it was straightforward. Let’s explore how wrong I was. Without getting too far into the weeds, let’s see what this process actually looks like.

Into the Weeds

This is what the process looked like after about an hour of process-mapping. And I only made it up to the “querying” stage before it all exploded.

Here are the basic stages (probably): Drafting Zone (orange) > Revision Hell (blue) > Query Trenches (purple) > Agent Land > On Submission > Editor Land > Pre-Publication Stuff > Publication Destination > Post-Publication Road

And because I love a good terrible-rendition of my process, here’s a brief idea of what my person journey through these stages looked like for the first book I wrote/trunked. Note that this process took me a culminating of 4 years.

 

And here’s the one that actually made it (purple), when I finally got my awesome literary agent. I spent a good deal of time in the Revisions, and you can see a bunch of other trunked or unfinished books along the way. You should always be spending more time in revisions than anywhere else, I think:

I’m thinking maybe I’ll do a flowchart for each major stage (at least the first four, since those are the ones I have managed to get through) and post them separately. Thoughts?

Query Letter FLOW CHART + Star Wars Example

As always, I begin my post about query letters by pointing you directly at a better, more awesome, and more reputable source than myself: the almighty Query Shark (and what she says about effective queries).

I’ve been working on doing a How To Write a Query Letter type post for a while. Before you can write the query, you have to know what goes in it. It’s like cooking. You need to decide on the ingredients before you start cooking, or else you end up with a mutant half-breed cake-steak-soup.

So. I decided to distill it down to its basic form. The most basic form looks like this (a la Query Shark):

1. Who is your Main Character (MC)?
2. What does your character want?
3. What’s stopping them from getting what they want?
4. What must they sacrifice to get what they want?

This is a lovely and superb tool. If this helps you, then that’s AWESOME! It helped me. But as with most advice, I tweaked it a bit after a couple trials and errors didn’t seem to capture the whole conflict.

The goal in a query letter is simplicity. Introduce the character/world, give us the premise and stakes, and the terrible decision the MC faces. It takes a lot of trial and error.

Because what if you’re not quite sure how to articulate what your character wants? What if you’re more of a visual learner? Do you find it easier to follow a flow chart?

Adapted from the above sharkly process, is the following visual flow chart:

Don’t freak out! It’s a lot of blue, but it’s not that complicated. You just fill it out from top to bottom. Whiteboards are good for this, but I’ve also included a text format below that you can copy/paste (also in blue).

Essentially, Sharkly Step 2 (what does your character want) is broken out into the choice they face and what makes that choice difficult. Then, Step 3 (What’s stopping your character from getting what they want) is captured in “Obstacle that complicates MC’s choice.” Then Step 4 is broken out into the complicated choice/consequences.

The reason I broke it out like this is because the initial conflict of the story generally persists throughout the entire book. It just gets properly tangled up and escalated, which is great! And I wanted a way to show that shifting conflict in the query letter without giving anything huge away.

A couple notes:

• The inciting incident is generally plot-based (like an extraplanetary attack or a letter in the mail or a meteor crash).
• The initial conflict is generally a character conflict.
• The obstacle can be either plot or character conflict, but I typically find that it is plot-based.
• The final complicated conflict is almost always character AND plot conflict.
• When going through the flow chart, try to only use one character. You can go through the same process with ANOTHER character if you have multiple POV, but each character should be able to stand on their own.

Let’s pretend I numbered my handy flow chart:

1. Who is the MC?
2. What does MC want?
3. What’s stopping MC from getting it?
4. What choice does MC face?
   • Choice A
   • Choice B
5. Consequences:
   • Of Choice A
   • Of Choice B
6. Obstacle to choice
7. Complicated Choices:
   • Complicated Choice A
   • Complicated Choice B
8. Final Consequences:
   • Of Choice A
   • Of Choice B

 

Let’s do a quick example, eh?* (mild Star Wars: Force Awakens spoilers ahead)

[BLUE SPOILERS ZONE]:

1. Rey
2. Rey wants to survive her hostile desert planet until she can reunite with her family.
3. A droid is in need of her help and her home planet is attacked by enemy forces.
4. (Choice A) Does she leave the planet to aid those who need her help, or (Choice B) does she stay home to wait for her family?
5. If she leaves, she will be risking life and limb for strangers, leaving behind her only chance at finding the family that abandoned her. If she stays home, she will be ignoring her natural instinct to help those in need and consigning herself to a difficult scavenging life. (This is where we really develop sympathy for the MC. There has to be a reason we are invested in their struggles.)
6. She discovers that she has the potential to fill a greater role in a war that stretches across the stars. She has the Force. (Being more specific here runs the risk of spoilers. But if you hedge it well enough, it’ll be tantalizing instead of spoiler-y.)
7. (Choice A) She can quit the rebellion and return home to wait for the family that may never come, or (Choice B) she can embrace the dangerous adventure ahead and do her best to move on and convince others to join the fight.
8. If Rey can’t embrace the power within her and her role in the deadly war, millions of people over several planets will die. If she does embrace her role, she will be directly in the path of the darkest enemy she has ever faced. (It’s always best to try to frame the final decision in a way that makes it unclear which decision they will choose. I always frown at dust jackets that say “will the hero do heroic things or be a coward?” because the answer is often obvious.)

*huge disclaimer: this is by no means a comprehensive analysis of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In fact, I’d say that Finn has an equally vital role in the story. If you want a practice run, try going through the flowchart for Star Wars: The Force Awakens as if Finn were the main character.**

**If you do this, totally post it in the comments section!

[/END OF SPOILERS ZONE]

 

After this, it’s a task of reformatting these things into the body of a query letter so that it flows and builds tension. The goal is to get an agent to say, “Man, I have to know what happens next!” Now, I know I’m not a Star Wars expert, and I left out any number of proper nouns that would have elevated my Pro Status. But this is just a rough outline (and a first draft of a rough outline at that), so take it with some salt. Not that much salt. Just a pinch. Just enough to sweeten things up.

Next Post: Compiling a Query Letter — In which I go over how to put the above elements into a query letter and smooth it over. And I’ll probably be using the above starry example.