Re: SF Author incomes

On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 17:28:14 +0100, David Cowie <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 11:57:22 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>
>> I'd agree with that, but was assuming JavaJosh had some reason for
>> limiting his question to royalties. Which is why I didn't mention
>> book club rights, foreign rights, and other fairly reliable sources of
>> income.
>
>Go on then, Lawrence. Tell us about book club rights, foreign rights,and
>so on.

Typically, if a book club is interested, rights go for a four-figure
sum that's split 50/50 between the author and the publisher.

Foreign rights are all over the place, depending where you can get a
publisher interested and how you're perceived there. In France I'm
known only as a horror writer, for example, because my only novel sale
there was THE NIGHTMARE PEOPLE. My French publisher occasionally
wistfully asks me if I'm going to write any more horror, because he
can't use my fantasy but would sure like more like NIGHTMARE PEOPLE
(La Horde du Cauchemar).

Foreign advances can run anywhere from a few hundred bucks for a minor
language (like, say, Polish or Hungarian) to several thousand for a
major market (like Russian or Japanese). They all promise royalties,
but you never actually _get_ royalties unless you're a runaway
bestseller -- like Marion Zimmer Bradley in Germany.

Usually foreign sales are a bonus -- just an unexpected chunk of money
that falls in your lap every so often. Sometimes they're more than
that; Ansen Dibell (Nancy Dibble) lost her U.S. publisher (DAW) three
books into a five-book series, but wrote the other two anyway because
they were a big hit in Dutch, and her Dutch publisher paid her enough
to make it worth her while. (So far as I know, the English-language
originals are still unpublished.)

I've been published, under one name or another, in English, German,
Russian, Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, French,
Czech, Danish, Spanish, Catalan, and probably others I've forgotten; I
was paid for a Portugese edition that never happened, and I've been
pirated in a few languages. I turned down a Slovenian deal once
because the publisher wanted to make editorial changes I wasn't happy
with.

This money adds up. Some years there's nothing, other years it's tens
of thousands.

And there are comic book rights -- I've had a couple of stories
adapted. Radio rights (I've sold those a few times but never actually
got anything on the air). I once sold just a title for $400.
Textbooks -- if a textbook publisher decides they want a short story,
they'll often pay absurd prices, because they're used to dealing with
greedy heirs rather than starving writers. Options -- I got paid a
couple of thousand recently just for a one-year reservation on a short
story; if they actually make the proposed low-budget film I'll get a
lot more.

You never know what's going to pay off; I've had one short story
reprinted fourteen times, at anywhere from $150 to $1,000 a shot,
while another written the same year that I like better has sold
exactly twice. A short-short I wrote as a joke got picked up by a
textbook on writing fiction as an example of effective use of
repetitive phrases; that paid $750.

And then some stories never sell, or sell once and are never heard
from again. Or sell repeatedly to markets that never actually see
print. It's unpredictable -- but if you write a lot of stuff, some of
it is going to generate unexpected after-market income.




--
Read the new Ethshar novel online! http://www.ethshar.com/thesprigganexperiment0.html
.

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