A matter of perspective
Sep. 12th, 2005 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ksmithPaging through this month's--well, October's--VANITY FAIR, the one with a topless Paris Hilton on the cover. Found an article entitled The New Establishment 2005, and saw that Dan Brown, author of the ubiquitous DaVinci Code, is ranked number 46. Seems that prior to taking the book world by storm, he was considered "a lower-midlist thriller writer" who had "reportedly agreed to write The DaVinci Code and his next book for $400,000 combined."
Is $400,000 a typical advance for two books by a lower-midlist thriller writer? If so, how can I become a lower-midlist thriller writer, please?
Is $400,000 a typical advance for two books by a lower-midlist thriller writer? If so, how can I become a lower-midlist thriller writer, please?
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Date: 2005-09-13 03:47 am (UTC)Where is this parallel world where "struggling" artists make orders of magnitude more than I do, and how do I get there?
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Date: 2005-09-13 04:25 am (UTC)As for the woman who wrote that Salon article, I confess that I don't feel the 'how dare she complain' that other folks apparently did. We discussed this in another group--her advances were dropping, she wasn't able to live on what she was making, and she saw the end of her writing career in her headlights. It was as though she wasn't allowed to express her fears about that because she was making what some folks call good money *now* and because she was making money now, she had no right to complain.
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Date: 2005-09-13 04:08 pm (UTC)I mean, I'd be worried if my advances went down, too, no matter how high they were. But I wouldn't go on and on as if those advances were the norm, and my struggles were representative of the sort of struggles writers faced in general. As I recall, she was claiming to be revealing the "real truth" behind publishing, rather than her truth.
But admittedly it has been a while since I read the article.
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Date: 2005-09-13 04:54 pm (UTC)I know more than I used to about how other genres operate, but mainstream to me is a mystery. I tend to think that the expressed shock over her complaints indicated that genre writers lack the sort of knowledge about mainstream that they expected her to have about genre.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:05 pm (UTC)Is there any data out there on mainstream advances? Because I've not seem data to indicate that six figures is a normal mainstream advance, and 40K or so is a criminally low one. I have trouble believing mainstream books would routinely pay 5 to 20 times more than genre books, without any of us being aware of the fact. We're not that indignant of publishing as a while.
If the difference were that large, too, you'd routinely have writers of all other genres trying to make the break into mainstream in hopes of making a living at it, and I've not heard that discussion happening, either.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:18 pm (UTC)I have heard undercurrents for years that if you can, you should go mainstream.
Comparative adavnce data is something I'd like to see, as well.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:56 pm (UTC)My company has five bestselling SF/F authors I can think of offhand, and they are all published under the mainstream imprint, not the genre imprint. Three of them started here under the genre imprint (in some cases, under the older genre imprint) but were moved to the mainstream imprint; one of them came here from another (genre) publisher but got the mainstream imprint here; and one of them was always mainstream-imprint here, but his books usually get shelved in the SF/F section of the bookstore.
I'm not at liberty to discuss advances, obviously. But multiply (the average royalty rate) x (the average cover price) x (the # of copies expected to sell). Any advance in that ballpark is perfectly reasonable. $200,000 for a book? If the pub house is expecting to sell 20,000 copies in hardcover and 200,000 copies in mass market paperback reprint, then that's not crazy. Add a trade paperback in the middle of that, and it's really not crazy.
20,000 copies in hardcover is respectable, but it won't make the Times list. 200,000 copies in mass market may make the bestseller list, but only in a slow week. So yeah, that's why they call it "midlist." And yes, it is an order of magnitude over what a midlist genre book sells.
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Date: 2005-09-13 06:07 pm (UTC)But thanks for the info. Info is good.
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Date: 2005-09-13 09:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 02:36 pm (UTC)Not that it isn't still a princely sum compared to the advances on most SF/F books, but there are many ways to slice that money.
And, sadly, the answer to your last question is "write a thriller." I don't think it's coincidence that many old school Romance novelists moved into Romantic Suspense and then into just plain Suspense-with-female-protag.
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Date: 2005-09-13 02:57 pm (UTC)Which is why I have been working over a thriller outline in my mind for the last few months. Not much written down, but it tells me something that when I ran the idea by Madame My Agent, she said that there were several possible markets for it.
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Date: 2005-09-13 03:15 pm (UTC)I know. Payout can take years--$400K spread out over four years, with taxes, agent's commission, other expenses. Still a decent income, but you won't be buying that Cape Cod cottage anytime soon. Unless you can keep it going at the same level or better for 10 years or more and shepherd that money carefully and if you can do that, you're doing damned well. It's the career I dream of.
And even if I reached that point, I would still not be in the upper reaches that most people think of when they think of a successful writer.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:23 pm (UTC)At least writers can hold down regular day jobs while pursuing the writing career. Actors have to be ready to drop everything to chase the audition or take the short-term gig.
And even though the upper echelon of writers probably doesn't earn anything close to the upper echelon of actors, they at least don't have to deal with paparazzi...
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Date: 2005-09-17 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 04:34 am (UTC)Snicker. Cape Cod is in eastern Massachusetts. Eastern Massachusting housing prices are very bad jokes--if you don't already have a house in Eastern Massachusetts, rotsaruck being able to afford to buy one! It's the land prices underneath the houses...if there is a small house up for sale on anything other than a postage stamp lot, watch a developer buy it, tear it down, and stuff a McMansion full of cookiecutter gabling--gingerbread houses without the gingerbread decor (for old-fashioned gingerbread houses, visit Martha's Vineyard, where the lots in one of the towns are all owned by the Methodist Church and the picturesque cottage houses owned by people who lease the lot. There is an empty lot in that town, where once lived a woman of ill-repute. Since she was violating the standard of the community she was required to leave, and did so, taking her house with her--she did own the house, but not the lot. The houses are small and have lots of bric-a-brac on them, but then the lots are also quite small. Once upon a time there wree quite a number of old gingerbread houses with incredible amounts of bric-a-brac all over then exterior on the mainland, but that went massively out of fashion in the 1960s--the upkeep was very expensive for painting, for example, so the houses that had it, almost all were stripped of it, and often resided with aluminum or later vinyl, or sometimes plain wooden clapboards or shingles, or the concrete-ish stuff). Back in the 1990s Painted Lady houses came back into fashion--big old Victorian houses with multiple colors of paint on them and wooden siding. But the really gingerbreaded houses never did get put back to their full gingerbread configurations, and new houses, didn't get any but occasional bits of bric-a-brac on them. Now they get all those overdone gables and eaves, and I've heard comments that those things are highly promoting of leaks over time.
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Date: 2005-09-17 12:59 pm (UTC)I knew the prices were through the roof, which was why I used it as an example. I used to have a manager who would tease me about writing that Big Book and moving to Cape Cod, where I'd wear sunhats, big sunglasses, and artistic earrings and foster my Young Protege (tm). Both he and his wife came from Money, though--not W-level Money, but maybe enough to edge into Town & Country. In any event, they probably could have afforded a cottage, but for the fact that gingerbread was so not their style.
Not my style either, come to that. Former Manager grew up in the Seattle area, I *think* on the San Juan Islands. I like that area a lot.
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Date: 2005-09-18 05:59 am (UTC)Ah, but a Methodist originally retreat on Martha's Vineyard is part of an island, as opposed to Cape Cod, it's "Cape Code and the Islands" and the they're separate mindspaces! Cape Cod traditional houses typically are clapboarded or had cedar shingles, with the clapboard houses painted, and the cedar shingled houses and cottages, weathered bare wood--either it started bare, or the weather stripped the paint off. There's a paucity, if any, of gingerbread, and in the shingles houses tend toward being rustic cottages, with pine interiors.
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Date: 2005-09-13 05:28 pm (UTC)