A matter of perspective

[ksmith]

Paging 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?

Comments

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I have heard that mainstream is a different world. The payoff is much, much greater if you hit, but not as forgiving as genre if you fail. I don't even know if changing your name and trying another tack is possible. But with an advance like that, well, if the books bombed and I never sold another, I think I could still live. I'd still have options.

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.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's that she didn't have a right to complain--we all do that. I think it was more, how dare she complain with so little understanding of the bigger picture, or the reality of the field for the people she was complaining to.

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.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I think she was revealing the truth from the mainstream side of the fence, where things apparently operate the same way, but on a larger scale. To her, those advances were the norm. Should it have occurred to her that to some authors, her lower advances seemed huge? I don't know. Unless she planned to give genre a shot, was it something she needed to know? Did she need to care? It wasn't the yardstick her publisher was measuring her against.

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.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I don't get the impression mainstream is like that, though, save for the occasional high advance (and that happens in genre too). The starting point is higher, but not that much higher.

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.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

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.

barbarienne mentioned the romance writers moving into straight mainstream. Greg Bear has seemed to move further away from SF Suspense to suspense-with-SF. I have gotten the impression that genre writers do try to make the jump, whether by changing what they write or having good enough numbers that the word on the book spine gets changed to Fiction. Not an overwhelming trend avalanche, but...

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.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Part of it is self-fulfilling prophecy, too. If a genre author does very well, then they are moved to the mainstream by their publisher. "If it sells this well, it isn't genre anymore" seems to be the thinking. (I have a discussion somewhere about how is the SF/F genre supposed to get any respect if they keep co-opting our best authors to mainstream, but that is a rant for another day).

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.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Wow, that managed to be educational and depressing at the same time. Two, Two, TWO mints in one!

But thanks for the info. Info is good.