Charlie Stross is one of the smartest guys writing science fiction today (if you haven’t read any of his work, by all means run out and grab something! And please pay for it after you grab it.). He also writes a very interesting blog on which he discusses a fairly wide and eclectic variety of topics, from technology and politics to the craft of writing.
His recent few posts have been about the business side of writing. His latest post is about how books are sold. For anyone interested in how this works — what rights writers have, what rights they give up, and the details of an actual book contract with a publisher — should head on over and check it out.
Here is, for me, one of the key passages of his post that many people outside the biz simply don’t understand:
When you “sell your novel” to a major publisher (or even a small one), what you are actually selling is the right to reproduce the work in a variety of specified formats in the English language in certain designated territories for a specified duration. In return for signing the ten-to-fifteen page contract, you receive royalties, which may vary depending on the format and the volume of sales, usually based on the publisher’s net receipts from the work. You may also receive an advance against royalties: this is effectively a loan against the anticipated value of your future royalty earnings.
Note that sensible authors do not negotiate contracts themselves, unless they have a day job as an intellectual property lawyer; they go through a literary agent. Literary agents have a lot more experience of contractual negotiations in publishing than any author, usually have a contract lawyer on tap, and their relationship with the author is a symbiotic one: that is, they take a percentage of the author’s cut, so they have a vested interest in maximizing the author’s income. (SF author Tobias Buckell’s survey suggests that agented first novels receive advances that are on average nearly twice the size of unagented novels; the literary agent’s cut is typically 15%. This is one of the reasons why authors use agents.)
There’s a lot more. Head on over to check out the post in it’s entirety.
This post is actually part three of a series.
You don’t necessarily have to read them in order, but anyone interested in commercial writing should absolutely read all of them.
