Last month’s announcement that Penguin had signed Pippa Middleton to write a party-planning book for an advance reported to be close to £500,000 caused a bit of a stir in the writing-related corner of the internet. For a couple of days Twitter was clogged with editors, agents and writers despairing about the deal and even…
Tag Archive: advances
Advances: Bit By Bit By Bit
When I hear of books being sold for huge amounts I go through the same old routine. First I envy the writers their success; and then I go out and buy the books which have attracted those gigantic advances, hoping that some of their magic might rub off on me! The point is, though, that…
Big Advances: Are They Really All They Seem?
Stories about big advances make good publicity, and so it’s in the publisher’s interests to make these advances sound as big as possible while keeping their actual expenditure as low as they can possibly manage in order to satisfy their accountants and shareholders. So when publishers announce these big deals to the media they’ll often…
Reverse-End Vanity Publishing
There are vanity publishers out there which insist that they are not vanity publishers because they don’t charge their writers anything for publication. PublishAmerica, a notorious reverse vanity publisher, even pays its authors a token advance of one dollar in an attempt to signify its good intent. As is so often the case, all is…
Paying Back Your Advance
Very occasionally, a publisher will ask a writer it has under contract to pay back the advance that was paid. This might happen if, for example, the deadline passed months ago but the writer still shows no sign of submitting a finished manuscript; or if the writer submits a vampire novel about World War I…
Perpetuating The Myths
While browsing recently, I found an article called How Amazon Could Change Publishing, written by Sramana Mitra. According to her biography she has no direct experience within publishing, and it shows. Mitra’s article is full of the sort of errors that just ten minutes of basic research could have avoided. Most of her errors have…
The Case Of The Imaginary Big Advance
Many of you will have seen various media reports this week about Lorna Page, the 93-year-old woman who published her novel A Dangerous Weakness with AuthorHouse, which supposedly paid her a £310,000 advance for it. It seemed unlikely to many people, including me, that AuthorHouse would have paid any sort of advance to Ms Page,…
How Huge Advances Go Wrong
Some time ago, I read a piece online in which an anonymous writer revealed how her writing career had failed despite her receiving advances that most people would be thrilled with. You can read that piece here. I’ve just stumbled upon another piece* that was written by SF writer Charlie Stross in response to it,…
Earning Out
As I’ve discussed before, a book is said to have earned out when the amount of royalties due exceeds the amount of the advance paid. Most books—perhaps 70%—don’t earn out and it’s often assumed that they therefore don’t earn a profit for the publishers. This isn’t necessarily the case. The amount of advance paid is…
Kristin Nelson's Agenting 101
There’s a fascinating, detailed series of blogs about the agenting process over at Kristin’s blog, Pub Rants, which I’ve only just discovered. The first one is here. There are twelve in all, in addition to her regular blogs, and you can find them all in the bar on the right-hand side of her blog. Go…
Advances
When a commercial publisher signs up a new writer, it is usual for the publisher to pay the writer an advance against future royalties. This advance will usually be paid in stages: on signing the contract; on the publisher’s acceptance of the completed manuscript; and on the book’s publication. If the writer has already submitted…