Harper Collins Says: No Advance for You, POD People.
April 5th, 2008 | by Brad King |I’m a big fan of print on-demand for several reasons:
- It doesn’t make sense to print more books than you’ve sold;
- It doesn’t make sense for authors to give up their copyrights for no good reason;
- It doesn’t make sense for newspapers to simply publish their work on news print;
- It doesn’t make sense for book publishers to take fliers on authors, because in the end, that reduces the number of books they could publish.
I’ve written about 1 and 2 in a general sense and 3 in a specific way. But the fourth may be the most important for authors — or anyone who wants to pursue a career in writing.
The great benefit that POD offers is that it reduces the barrier to entry for people who don’t want to go through the traditional publishing outlets because they want to retain their copyrights. This is a big deal for some folks (me included), particularly as we continue our now 15 month struggle to have the copyright for Dungeons and Dreamers, which is rightfully ours per our negotiations, returned to us from Osborn/McGraw-Hill.
It’s an even bigger deal for publishers, though, as they have the opportunity to publish more books than ever before.
Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal story makes this notion sound like a revolutionary idea, despite the fact that POD publishing has been happening for several years — and is quite lucrative.
The best part — although I’m sure some people will feel offended by this — is that by not offering advances, and instead using the POD revenue sharing model, more people will have the opportunity to publish their work.
As my teacher once told me: the key to having a successful writing career is having your first book sell a million copies, then you can do what you want.
The POD revenue-sharing, if Harper-Collins does this correctly, means that selling somewhere in the neighborhood 2,000-3,000 books would net authors about the amount of a small advance.
When I ran the numbers for a start-up I was trying to get off the ground in Austin — a POD publishing company — here is what I found:
Hardback books will generally be priced to sell around $25. Online retailers will mark that down to $16.25. That translates to $5.60 per sale for the company.
In other words, 3,000 books would net in the neighborhood of $16,800 dollars.
Even if authors only received 25 percent of those sales (and those figures already take into account the money for the POD distribution and retailer cuts), that’s still roughly $4,000. Not a bad haul for a writer.
If the book sells more, the author revenues go up.
The POD model also allows authors to negotiate for their copyrights back. This is tricky, as most contracts have some form of — when this is out of print — but not necessarily a distinction for what out of print means in an POD world. It’s important to negotiate that.
However, the new model — the POD model — should be a great boost for a publishing world that Steve Jobs believes is dying.
