Brandon Sanderson - 318R - #6 (The Business of Writing)

okay guys yes class is indeed not cancelled i have made it up for all the way from the provo marriott from l2e um and we are going to do science fiction fantasy writing class yay today is actually a day you can clap for because it is a fun day people are usually very interested in this we have gone through our kind of four concepts plot setting character and prose or the box so today we will take a week to talk about the business of writing um i especially wanted to get this in because while i'm on tour um which i'll be here next week i'm coming back from tour for class um you should all feel very very very very special you know you don't need to clap it's okay i was saying that's a joke but i am flying home from tour to teach but the week after that i will be gone um and then i will be back for a week and then i think i'm gonna be in dubai the week after that um and so one of these weeks um brandon bull will be coming to talk to you so because he's really good at middle grade and i think having somebody who can talk about younger genres is very helpful and we will also have joe vasuchek who is a self-published writer uh who took my class a number of times he's going to come in one of the weeks and talk to you about how to self-publish and what it is in the real world trenches being a self-published writer because you're going to get mostly from me and i am part of traditional publishing and a lot of what we'll talk about today is traditional publishing though i will try to go down um some of the self-publishing things and i'm sorry i don't have my list of things we're going to get to today this is what happens when i have to run here from uh from from a conference and then i'll run back after class today um so um business of writing so when i took this class from dave from years ago one of the big revelations for me eye-opening moments was that here was a writer who was earning their full-time living from their fiction and dave talked about that he talked about contracts he talked about how to sell your fiction he talked about all of these things which i had never heard in any class i had ever taken and so when i started teaching this class i felt this is a resource i need to delve into we can't just talk about the craft of writing we need to talk about what to do with it so i may have given you this metaphor at the beginning of class but if i didn't the idea is while you're working on your stories you should just be focused on what is the best artistic decision for this story what's going to make the best story of the type you're trying to tell you shouldn't really consider market considerations while you're writing i believe that strongly you should just create something you're passionate about once you're done you take that artist who created that piece of work you will lock them in the closet you take their manuscript and you run away giggling and try to find a way to exploit it in any possible manner okay today we talk about exploiting the fiction um so you basically are going to have to make a decision these days between self-publishing and traditional publishing so self and track once upon a time indie publishing was kind of a joke they called it vanity vanity press the main reason for this was without ebooks you had to print like 20 000 copies of your book and just hope that it sells and most of them did not and that's costing you like you know three or four bucks per book at twenty thousand copies or you know five thousand minimum a lot of people printed five thousand you're still investing like 15 grand in publishing this book and hoping it sells it was a bit of a joke because most people who did this just wanted to see their book in print that said several famous writers self-published their books um richard paul evans is often brought up as a big self-publishing success story christopher paolini john grisham apparently like self-published his first story or things like this um but there was this stigma attached to it because so many people self-published by just paying a bunch of money and saying look at my book it's real um indeed publishing came of age when the internet came along and ebooks took off this is about 2010. before that it really wasn't a thing except in rare rare cases about 2010 a bunch of people got kindles for christmas i can tell you on my royalty statements um i believe i went from here of ages without the time and it had sold nine copies and ebook the royalty statement that like ended december uh 2010 or whatever and then the next royalty statement had sold something like 10 000 copies um and so it really was an overnight everyone saying oh this isn't ever going to happen people don't like ebooks it's never going to change things too holy cow it's working um now a lot of you were probably like 20 and so you were like kids when this even happened but uh in publishing terms this is really recent uh there was a gold rush era where a lot of people were indie publishing during this time and made careers out of indie publishing amanda hawking was the big huge one that people talked about early but after about five or six years now it settled down a little bit and it settled down as indie publishing being a completely valid and legitimate way to sell books in fact i think there are different numbers that are bandied about and maybe joe will have the exact figures but you hear things like this that uh on amazon something like 30 to 40 percent of all books sold are published by indie writers and amazon is a very good litmus test for this because though a lot of us don't like it this is nothing against amazon we just don't like that there is one publisher that has such a strong control of the market with my independently published books my indie books uh amazon is 85 percent of the sales if not 90 percent of the sales and everything else is 10 that includes google um that includes ibooks that includes the nook and it includes kobo which are the four main competitors uh we would all like to see there be more competition there we would all like to see um ibooks and google and kobo selling a lot more books than they are now just so that the stranglehold by amazon is not as huge as it is again nothing wrong with them they did build the real a really good e-reader which is why the kindle took off but it puts us in this position where right now indie publishing is controlled and dominated by amazon now there are two kind of in-betweeners there's what we call hybrid and there is what we call what you do with a small press which are kind of ways to have one foot in each world right hybrid authors are generally people who are professional authors who have a contract or two with new york but then publish a lot of their own fiction at the same time a lot of people are saying this is kind of the way to go um and we'll talk about pros and cons we'll mostly talk about traditional publishing today because joe is going to cover a lot of the the indie publishing stuff small press can be a way to get contracts that are more favorable along the self-publishing lines but still have some of the things that you love from a traditional publisher and what are those why would you pick a traditional publisher versus self-publishing well um as i'm sure joe will talk to you about the big cell on self-publishing is twofold one control when you are self-publishing you have absolute control over what the cover looks like what ends up in the final edition of the book nobody can tell you you know we're putting this strange cover on your book uh nobody can tell you we really have to cut this chapter that doesn't happen very often by the way but the cover thing happens all the time that you get a cover that you just don't agree with or something like that nobody can put on the back of the book a spoiler for the book that they think is good marketing copy that happens all the time in traditionally publishing you have control over all these things you get to decide where it's sold you can say i want this released worldwide rather than you know traditional where you usually will sell us rights to one company uk rights to a different company then who gets to release it in india well it's usually uk writer publisher but maybe not you saw a different publisher in this language in that language it gets very uh very complex everyone's kind of fighting over the rights with indie publishing you select one button published worldwide everyone can get my books you can set the price so cover um price um and distribution all controlled by you uh the other big thing is generally you will make seventy percent of cover so whatever it sells for seventy percent of that goes to you um the the caveat on this is an amazon again gets to decide how this goes because they're the they're the 10 000 pound gorilla or whatever you have to price it between 299 and 9.99 to get 70 percent otherwise you get 35 okay um so they want it in this price range your bulk that is what they've determined is their magic number if you go below 299 they feel that that undervalues the books too much and they don't make enough enough for sale if you go more than 9.99 then they're not looking like the cheap bargain that they are that's how they sell kindles is by at least in the early days they sold them by convincing everyone your books will be cheaper now you invest in a kindle and now all your ebooks are cheaper um that's been a big struggle between traditional publishing and amazon at these price points but you get 70 of that so you can quickly run the numbers and say maybe traditional publishing can sell 2 000 copies of my book and sell publishing can only sell sell 1 thousand but if there's at the same price you're going to make more with self-publishing um so control and um and price two big advantages over here uh the advantages of traditional publishing will be they do the stuff you don't want to do okay this is kind of the primary reason the others are all good but this is the primary reason particularly is a new author that you can expect they do stuff that means they do the cover design they know what a good cover looks like and they will have an in-house cover designer they will edit your book and assign you an editor they will handle a lot of these annoying things that go along with publishing a book that a lot of people just don't want to deal with so that's number one number two and we'll go into in depth in these things is advanced they will if you sell to a traditional publisher a big one they will pay you in advance that if they don't pay you in advance then something is wrong means you're probably not getting an actual deal with a big publisher you're getting a deal with like some subsidiary or something that events may not be huge average first novel advance um in recent years people talk about 5k is about average first novel advance that is negotiable depends on how interested they are in the book elantris was 10k it's not that uncommon to see a 10k it's not that uncommon to see a 2k either but a first novel you can kind of expect unless something happens which we'll talk about that you're going to get paid five thousand dollars up front an advance is not free money and advance is an advance against royalties this means that off of every book you sell instead of seventy percent of cover you will get between six and fifteen percent of cover okay you'll get between six and fifteen percent and that number will count up toward whatever they paid you in your advance you will start earning royalties once you have what we call earned out your advance it's a terminology to learn about the business so if a book has earned out that means the advance they paid earn enough in royalties to get paid out it's usually one of the best things that can happen to your book is that you earn out your advance there are certain cases where very high profile authors gets bigger bigger advances than they can possibly earn out and that's okay but for most writers if you never earn out your events basically they will pay the advance based on their expectation of what they can sell of the book up front you will negotiate they'll run something called here's more terminology for you a p and l profit and loss this is part of the editor's job um you aspiring editors this will be part of your job if you go to work for a book publishing company is to run p ls profit and loss what the p l is is they go and they look at similar books to yours released by new authors and the editor will try to guestimate about how many copies they can sell they will then determine the profit based on a theoretical print run um because the higher the print run the cheaper the book per that it is to print the books it's cheaper per book to print ten thousand that is to print five thousand it's way cheaper to print ten million than it is to print five thousand and so each book um sold determines what their kind of a theoretical profit is and then from that p l they will determine here's how much we can afford to go up to an advance assuming we sell this many copies if we instead assume we're going to sell this many copies we can maybe go up to this amount and that will give them kind of their range that they're offering on the book thing about p l's is they're imaginary right you can make a p l for a book and say this is going to sell like the hunger games did therefore we can afford to pay a four million dollar advance or you say this is going to sell like you know this indie book did and sell a thousand copies so because it's gonna sell a thousand copies in hardcover we can afford a p l advance of two thousand dollars they're gonna look for trying to hit the magic number of giving you as much as the book will earn in the first one or two years so that in year three or so you start in your royalties it's kind of where they'll go all of these things are flexible but so that's what advances um so um they will give you between six and a half and fifteen uh for paperback it's like six to ten and for hardcover it's like 10 to 15. uh margins are much better on hard covers so that's why it's such a wide range uh trade paperbacks are usually ten percent mass markets are often about eight percent of cover now the nice thing about this one is um you get this even if it's discounted um so if you go to amazon and they are selling the um the book the hardcover normally is 30 and they're selling it 40 off for whatever you get the royalty off of the 30 not off of what they're selling it for ebooks are different if you discount your book from 499 to 299 you make 70 of 299 and ebooks are going to be 17 and a half percent of net as net as defined by what um i don't know uh 17 and a half percent of cover but with discounts factored in 25 of net if you run those numbers it's 25 of the 70 is what you get so if the publisher decides to move your ebook down from 499 to 299 your ebook earnings go down but if the store decides to discount your hardcover then you get the money off of what the cover price is except if they put it on deep discount to be on the bargain bin shelves and then everybody nobody earns any money off those okay so really what you're giving up right here is this you're getting 70 this you're getting 17 and a half percent but you get this print edition most evil um self-published books do not sell very many copies at all if any in print um and what they do sell are very low margins because they're print on demand which is uh which is very low margin so you're gaining the print um distribution you're getting the bookstores you're giving up the majority of your money hoping that they will do stuff for your book okay are there questions about what i've done right here this is kind of fire hoses huh so if um like say barnes noble buys a thousand houses yes when he sells 500. okay good question excellent question so let's talk about returns um as i understand um you guys can look this up and see if i'm wrong i believe that the return system began back in the depression publishers were printing authors new authors it was the depression none of the bookstores wanted to take a chance on new authors they said just give us this old standbys and they're like ah but we need new revenue from new authors otherwise the publishers are going to go under so they came up with this system where bookstores can buy a certain number of copies and then return any ones they don't sell for a full refund in credit to the publisher okay so in your case barnes noble decides to take a thousand copies of your book that's a pretty good number not fantastic but pretty good for barnes noble to take that means that's about one copy per barnes and noble which is good for a new author really what it means is the ones that sell science fiction will get two copies and the ones that don't sell very much will get zero but on average there'll be a copy in every barnes and noble um maybe a little under that so they take a thousand copies they end up selling 500 that's not terribly good you probably want to sell more than that but they can return your 500 copy cut those chiropractic copies to the publisher they go in the warehouse to be sent out to other stores who hopefully are selling more copies then you have to on your return statement there is a debit right that oh 500 copies came back you lose that advan that that amount of the money of royalties now if they've already paid you they don't come knocking on your door for the money but it means against your next um royalty statement you're going to have to count up past those 500 that came back does that make sense so all right right here those percentages change if you earn out your advance no but what they do where they do change is by how many books you sell for instance this is going to get complicated guys i'm sorry for instance hardcovers are generally 10 on the first 5k copies 12 and a half percent on the next 5k and 15 thereafter what that means is if you are selling really well you will start earning a higher percentage of the cover price on things there are mythical stories of people getting more than 15 percent um the only one i've heard it confirmed by several sources but not by the people actually involved is lucasarts um getting 22 percent i don't know if that's true or not you'll have to look online there's all sorts of wild rumors these are all closed door deals you don't know what people are getting i've never had any friend of mine or myself get higher than 15 percent there um but there are other places in the contracts where you can get more wiggle room so it kind of becomes effectively a little bit higher um and stuff like that but 15 is kind of the cap on that and then paperbacks do the same thing the these what we call break points here's another terminology thing for you these are break points the 5k and then the 10k are the two break points the breakpoints vary a lot on a bunch of my paperbacks it's 75 000. um and so it's like you know six percent it's really it's eight percent now we've argued eight percent on the first seventy five thousand ten percent thereafter or something like that um they are really the battleground is this one right now they are hardcore on this one um because they know that if they start to let the 25 of net on ebook slide that they'll have to do it for their biggest authors and so they put a stake in the ground and this is the big argument and this is where the small presses are able to come in and say hey you know what we will do the stuff that the big publisher will do and we will give you 50 of that so we'll give you like you know 35 percent of cover price instead and a lot of indie publishers or small presses are using this to kind of walk the line between andy publisher um and traditional publisher what they can't do is the big stuff which we'll get to in a minute that are kind of like if you get the good deal from the um from the traditional publisher what that means okay and yeah there are other questions on this yeah um if you say never earn out your advance do they they then have to pay back do you have to pay back under in advance good question no you do not ever have to pay back unearned advance unless you fail to turn in your book as long as you turn the book the advance is like a bet of faith the publisher is making on you and this is part of the reason why advances can be really a really weird science for instance a book that was paid a fifty thousand dollar advance and earns the author a hundred thousand dollars is a wild success right that's a huge success every publisher in new york would drool over getting that deal a book that the author was paid a hundred thousand for that earns a uh that was paid 150 000 that earns a hundred thousand is considered a poor success like a poor a failure of a book um they did had a poor showing the expectations were this and it didn't sell those two books sold the same number one is a wild success now this person they're not going to refuse to publish but internally it will be considered a failure and you'll everyone will kind of be like ah that book never did as well as everyone thought it would do uh you know we were overpaying this person and that person's advance this person who got 50 000 and sold a hundred thousand their next advance might be a hundred and fifty thousand this person who sold the same number of copies but started with a hundred and fifty thousand dollar advance they might offer them 75 to be like we got to be really careful with you now just in case so part of this is deciding to go traditional once you've got an agent of things which we'll talk about a little bit later how much are you going to push for the big deal that we'll talk about in a minute because the big deal can carry its own momentum but it also can put you in a position where you sold a lot of books but are still considered a failure generally what's considered a successful book in traditional publishing a very successful book is 80 percent sell through sell-through sell-through is a magic number for you guys to uh to learn sell-through means that that is what they sold of the number that they printed and shipped out to booksellers generally they will print about as many copies as the the bookstores will order they'll print about double that so if you get all the barnes noble the amazons and all the indie bookstores together look at what they ordered and then they will double that number they will print that number of copies they'll ship out the orders and hopefully sell through so they print 10 000 which will be kind of on the low end but for a new author that's about reasonable it's about what elantra's was it would be less these days because e-books are about half the market um but let's say they print 10 000 of your book and they sell 8 000 of those consider it a good success right that's a that's a successful book even if the advance you know the advance is rarely going to be higher than that because they'll know they'll push it to the retailers if you get a hundred thousand dollar advance and they're only printing ten thousand something horrible has gone wrong already um but let's say that if they sell sixty percent you'll be okay but that's underperforming okay anything under sixty percent sell through is kind of a failure everything over eighty percent is also a failure does anyone know economics to tell me why that's a failure it's a small failure it's not a big deal but it is a failure does it just mean that the price per book that they had to pay per book was higher than they wanted yes the price per book was higher they should have printed more they could have sold more economic theory says that if you sell out of something in retail space it means that you didn't print enough of them and there was scarcity and there was demand and it was it's bad for a market like this where the prices don't fluctuate right it's good for a market like where if you're selling gold and that drives your prices up that can't drive these prices up so what it means is there were people who went to the bookstore to find your book and buy it and couldn't buy it and you lost sales that's rarely going to happen um but it's something to be aware of that that's why that's why having your book on the bargain bin is not a bad thing most wheel of time books in fact all wheel of time books went to the bargain bin because if you're printing like the wheel of time book you're printing 300 000 hardcovers and you expect to sell 80 of those and that's that's a successful sale sell through how many are left that's 60 000 books 60 000 books then get sold to barnes noble and these book warehouses for two dollars a piece and as many as you want to buy by the way at two dollars a piece um then they're sold for four dollars a piece and you make like six cents off of each of those and the publisher makes like you know a dollar or less but it's all waste because it costs them three dollars to print them or something like that it's all just to recoup a little bit from that excess um that you had left over all right go for it um for a benchmark about how many copies you have to sell to make it to the best seller list oh good question okay bestsellers benchmarks it's really weird nowadays because the ebook bestseller list has kind of thrown everything into um a weird jumble books sell fewer copies in print but overall books are selling more copies than they used to because e books made it convenient don't believe doomsayers by the way from the point that publishing started everyone in publishing figured that within five years they'd all be out of jobs and they've been saying that every year since okay everyone in publishing is convinced that that it's going to collapse at some point and if you look at the actual statistics people are reading more now than they did 10 years ago okay so it's it's good now what's happening is generally it's um it's more people are making a living but the top is making a little less it's almost kind of like bernie sanders got in charge of publishing a little bit um topical joke yeah um what's happening is because um ebooks allow people to find books that are of more specialized interest to them people can you can publish a very niche book sell 500 or a thousand copies to a very select audience and those people who might have bought just whatever generic bestseller is because they want to have a book to read can instead buy something that's very tailored to their individual needs which is really good for indie publishing and kind of good for the consumer as a whole it's been it's been a good thing but what it means is the top has shrunk just a little bit and the bottom has has raised up a little bit okay um so best seller lists all right we will let joe talk to you more about self-publishing when he comes um and then i will talk about bestseller list so when i got on the first time i got on the best seller list it was um i got on place number 31. back before the e-books were were a big deal it was war breaker um was warbreaker no wasn't warbury i can't remember which ones i got on like number 31 and i sold 2300 copies in hardcover that week um that got me on the bottom of the list i think the list went up to 35 back then it now only goes up to i think 25 because they've added the ebook best seller list and things like that the best seller list new york times changed forever i changed all the time it's really crazy how many lists there are and things like that but that's about what i got um the first time that i hit number one what was number one i think i was about eighty thousand um copies first week and that was the number one spot um and the next person behind me was 32 000 that week um and so that could have gotten you number one you could have gotten on with less uh the least i've heard of someone getting on to getting number one is in the mid-20s this is all in flux because e-books and things like this right and that was 80 000 print copies that was number one on the hardcover print list but the ebook and print combined is separate and then the ebook list is separate i'm number four on the teen ebook list right now with steelheart because they put it on a 299 promotion and a ton of people bought it and so i jumped back up onto the new york times list um if this book had been released for instance when uh when uh was a memory of light when a memory of light went to number one it was something like 150 000 copies and john grisham was 130 000 at number two and that was in november so it can vary a lot based on what month you release as well right and if john grisham is releasing a book the same month you'd better have something huge you can see i would not um beat john grisham that this is words radiance words radiance would not have beat john grisham but um it beat you know when we released it in january or whatever it beat the next person by like a ton okay so this is all really flexible with best seller lists and things like this amazon's a bit harder and easier at the same time because amazon has all these like you know your win your your sub category to be a number one amazon best seller you might be the number one best seller in sci-fi fantasy uh fantasy teens boys and men experiences um books set on mars right i'm exaggerating but they do go pretty specific it's still pretty competitive but not as competitive as the new york times list the new york times list is not nearly as competitive as things like the the usa today list which is just all books the same thing happens in the sunday times in london it's all fiction it's just on one or all all books i think are on one list or something like that so you can see if you the new york times is like hardcover fiction hardcover nonfiction self-help books are their own teen middle grade middle grade uh paperbacks there's like 20 lists um so so there you go that's kind of boy this pen is not working i'm going to get a different one it varies to get to number one best-selling author on amazon is really tough um because you've got people like jk rowling still selling a ton on there like a couple weeks ago i was number five on amazon um and like i was selling a ton of books so i don't know how much bella forest is selling but bella forest is selling a lot of books that's a teen vampire romance stuff um so so yeah how do you even find out where you are how do you find out where you are you will get a call from your publisher um on wednesday a week and a half after your book comes out it comes out on tuesday so not i guess it's two weeks the next week no you'll donate the next week but it'll come out and print the week after it's really weird but your book comes out on tuesday not that wednesday but the following wednesday the new york times results for that the week before we get really released you'll get a call from your publisher if you made it and then they'll send you champagne unless you're a mormon and then they'll be really con confused about what to send you and so you might get a fruit basket or you might get steaks i've asked people um sometimes they'll send you champagne anyway cause they're like ish it's champagne when i was in france um as an aside i um i had every time with my host family they'd serve a meal they'd asked if i wanted wine and i'd say no and they're like oh but it is so good it's good for you or in france now you can have wine our laws are different i know i'm the police chief he was the police chief um i'm like no i don't drink i don't drink it was really bizarre to them and finally they stopped serving it and at the end they brought me a glass of champagne when i was leaving i'm like i don't drink guys he's like but it is champagne it's not wine um so yeah they were even more baffled um and you know what you think i'm doing like a bad french accent but my host dad sounded just like that like the stereotypical bad frenchman accent it was great um so all right uh so you do that amazon how do you know you just go look on amazon amazon has a top hundred authors list um and it has just on the page of a given book it will show what best seller list it's on and where it's ranked really easy to find it'll also list the author and what their best seller as an author rank is so it's kind of hard to miss if you ever go look at an amazon page all right other questions there are some more questions go for it how do pre-orders fit into all that um pre-orders are counted as day one sales so pre-orders are awesome creators are how you're going to get on bestseller lists if you ever do is because on day one boom doesn't work as well on the amazon bestseller list because they will count you on the day that the person actually pre-ordered but new york times sunday times usa today we'll count that as week one sales okay yes what about audiobooks audiobooks audiobooks are sold almost exclusively through audible um you will have the the percentages you get vary pretty wildly widely based on whether you sell the book to audible directly because they have a publishing platform that they're a publisher or if you sell it to your publisher and they sell it to audible but everyone's basically selling through audible you will get somewhere between 20 and 40 usually more like 20 of the credit of the 10 the person spends on the credit um it's actually generally uh considered pretty good deal the audiobook stuff is uh you you come off pretty well you may earn a little bit less but it's a captive audience and they the people who buy the audiobooks they generally only buy audiobooks or they buy a lot of audiobooks and so um you want to sell your audiobook rights once upon a time only truckers who you you know could afford to buy an 80 wheel of time audio book and listen to it while they're trucking across the united states could afford these things nowadays a lot of people do audio books it's been a big boom in audio books and the money is very good uh the money is not as good as print but that's because they also have to hire all these people to do these wonderful audio books and a lot of the money is going to them as deservedly so so you can expect aaron around two bucks an audio book um and that's that's good money considering that they're all selling as discount price um and things like that if anyone actually ever goes and buys the thing for 50 bucks then you make bank but nobody does that right okay yes this might be part of the big deal but where's the marketing fit yeah that's part of the big deal um what i'm gonna we'll go into that now this is what you can assume that they will do for you anything else should not be assumed you're going to get it but it is within the realm of possibility okay so do you all have these percentages if you wanted them and things like that i can start erasing this so the dream and the real reason that people are willing to go traditional instead of self-publishing these days is that the the potential high is much higher in fact you will notice that a lot of people who do self-publishing eventually end up taking traditional publishing contracts to try to shoot for this and see how it goes not everybody uh some people like if you can never find him track down hugh howie who did the wool series he managed apparently to get an ebook i mean a print only deal with a major publisher where he kept the ebooks so he's getting the best of both worlds right he's got the 70 of the ebook sales which and but he couldn't sell very many print on his own but then a big publisher is selling his print books and giving him all of this stuff and so that's like the dream that we would all like to live i ca i don't know of anybody who's done it except for hugh howey and he made it huge as a um as a indie guy and then went and said well i don't have to take your deal i'm earning so much right here so why don't we see what you can do but most people to end up taking a traditional publishing there are various arguments online to never do that they're decent arguments i would go read them i'm not the one to make that one to you because i'm very well entrenched in this side okay so what can they do they can do a book tour book tour is they fly you around to a bunch of bookstores and you do a big book signing and you say well i'm a brand new author no one's going to come to my book signing and that's true but but if you have good buzz a few people will come and as a brand new author they might do what they they've been doing more recently which is send two or three authors together and then it becomes an event to go see these authors plus if you get to the right bookstores certain bookstores like mysterious galaxy in san diego have a devoted following of people who just come and see whatever their reading is that friday or whatever that's their date and they don't have to know who the author is they just comment if you're going to the good bookstores who have a good reputation like that some people will show up even though you know when you go to the barnes noble on your list no one goes um you will have some places that people will show up that you'll be able to redo your reading for they'll be interested they just like books they like people who write books and they'll try your book out and you'll get some sales more importantly you will meet store managers like the people at mysteriousgalaxy you go and you do a big book signing there or a small one if you're a new author or whatever and the staff is like wow that book sounds interesting i'll use my staff discount buy a copy i'll read it i love the book suddenly you have somebody hand selling your book to the next 50 people who come into mysterious galaxy saying hey i know that you have good taste like you have you like books like i like what have you read lately that you like um this has been the the way that a lot of books have become bestsellers particularly in science fiction fantasy which has kind of a narrower audience it's these people who read a book and then start talking about it um steve diamond we call him bookstore guy uh he's runs the latest book reviews website he he used to be the manager at the um what was the the bookstore in the the mall the new mall what was it called the borders it was in the borders though it was nose walden books walden books it was the walden books over there before they got consumed by one of the publishers he read elantris he liked elantris he personally sold 100 copies of elantris and i had a book signing there like my first few book signings like you know isaac came the isaac didn't even come he didn't know me then like eric did you you came yeah yeah i had book signings where it's like two or three friends yeah that's right because it was out but we knew each other by then um then i went to the signing at steve store and i expected two or three people and there were something like 70 people at that signing and we sold another 90 books this is the difference that a book seller loving your book and hand selling it will make the difference between a week before i had a signing with two people i went to that one and there were there were 70 people okay so meeting the bookstore staff can be very useful the issue is that ebooks are now 50 of the market so the effect they can have is decreased but i still think they're really really useful people to have in your trenches selling your books okay you also sign copies and leave them on the shelf signing copies and leaving them on the shelf that little sticker i remember one of those early signings where only my friends came and nobody you know i wasn't selling any copies it was at the borders that used to exist down at the shops at riverwoods selling no copies just miserable well not that miserable nothing my friends show up and then one of them says there's a sign neil gaiman book right there were you there that one and all my friends like my six friends swooped around and went looking through all the neil gaiman books found all the sign ones and ran off and bought them even though they all had copies of that book already leaving signed books means that the bookstore will probably feature them on a little end cap or something like that for a couple of weeks it's a great way to get publicity for people to go and say hey i'll try this book because it's signed yada yada and then you can start to meet a few of your fans and maybe build a mailing list meet those people who love your books i met one of them in denver this is denver paul by the way i met one of them in denver like a year after i got published he said that he'd given copies of mistborn to all his friends um i guess it was two years because right when miss burns came out in paperback i went home i called tor and i said send him a case of 80 copies of miss foreign and paperback they sent him a case of 80 copies of misfortune paperback and he over the next two years gave them to everyone he met who wanted a book to read finding people like that is the only the sort of thing you can only do really they'll email you but meeting them in person is better so the book tour can be good and it can generate its own momentum as you get some publicity and um things going on people will be like i've heard of this book usually they won't tour you until there's some of that momentum like they might buy your first book and then two year for your second one or something like that so there's book tour there is actual marketing so are these all things you can expect them to do no no no no no this is all in the this is the this is all in dreamland okay um it's not in dreamland that it's not impossible but it is not to be expected that you will get it and you will have to fight for it and i'll tell you how to do that but marketing there will be a marketing budget assigned to your book it will probably be like 50 bucks don't expect a lot of marketing there's a good reason for this a advertisement in the new york times cost fifty thousand dollars all right um and that's cheap nowadays because you know there's not quite as much distribution if you run these p l's on a book that got a ten thousand dollar advance how much are they expecting that book to earn probably around twenty thousand dollars which they'll give you ten and they keep ten if they spend fifty thousand dollars on advertising that's a real risk now it's possible once in a million that that advertising money can generate it into a bestseller if they have a hit on their hands and once in a while they'll do it but most of the time when they've done that that just means that instead of each of you making ten thousand dollars in being happy they are 40 000 in the hole on your book that marketing for books is hard it is really really really really really hard um because most marketing is set up to charge the people who are selling products that everybody uses or everyone could use not everybody reads fantasy and science fiction books social media is now how much do they most of it they don't spend things yeah they don't spend things in your times anymore they spend it on targeted ads on facebook or on audible or things like this part of marketing is also something and this is what they will spend if you you can get some targeted ads um the advertising budget for uh for one of my books these days is around a hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred dollars um they can afford that because the book's so long a lot of that's going to be at targeted ads the other thing is going to be called what we call co-op co-op is every bookstore including e-book stores have limited shelf space at the front now if they just decide to carry your book there's no pay no payment for that it just goes onto the shelves it's carried by amazon but the front page of amazon or itunes is all paid advertising space if you walk into the barnes noble and you see a rack of books at the front that's paid advertising space that little what they call the octagon you guys know this is in the beginning in front of barnes noble that's paid advertising space everything the end caps are paid advertising space though those are a little more flexible that if you do like a signing they can just the store employees can just give you an end cap for a little while because that's not all the end caps are sold but but some of them are and it's sold through something we call co-op where it's not the publisher giving them money to do this it is the publisher giving them a higher percentage off of each book it doesn't come out of your percent it comes out of the publishers percent so for instance um barnes noble usually barnes noble or amazon have to initiate it they come and say all right we will feature you on the octagon but instead of giving us the normal you know you we get 40 percent of what it sells for you have to give us 45 percent of what it sells for while it's on the octagon that's co-op money that's considered marketing money amazon might come and say okay we will feature your book um in this kindle newsletter thing um but you need to give us a higher percentage for that amount of time i don't know what the numbers are there those are none of these numbers are exact numbers uh this is you know proprietary information that amazon and barnes noble use that i don't know the exact numbers but that's consi you know they'll either say you have to discount it for us to do this or they'll say you have to co-op it the trick is not everything that you're getting as a kindle email or something is co-opt some of it they just decide hey this person is buying a lot of these we'll send them an email to try and sell them some more um but in general this is how you get featured on the front of something with uh with things like ibooks they've come to us and said you know we will give you the space but we want an interview with brandon or this sort of thing um or we want you to let us do this or such and such or things like that um this is all kind of comes in under the marketing budget the other thing that comes under marketing is um bookmarks giveaways all of that kind of stuff um sorry i might go off camera for a second i can't remember if you guys can get over here or not but i brought some of this for uh what we're doing for the new reckoners book coming out on tuesday um so i'm gonna oh thank you i'm gonna pass a few of these around don't eat them so so these are our i'll send some just send them up like that these are postcards that would were paid for by the marketing budget right um and what they are is there you can see they're lenticular they change from you know this nice pastoral scene of chicago to holy cow chicago's been destroyed um bookmarks um giveaways all the stuff comes into your marketing budget and if you're a new author you can usually pitch them on one of these things they might give you co-op they might give you any of these things these are all in the in the negotiations that you can get um and you can go to them and say i'd really like to do this kind of bookmark could you print maybe 500 of them for me through goodreads yeah goodreads is another place for targeted ads and they do those um now this is all separate from your own from publicity again fire hose i'm sorry guys publicity is different from marketing you will have a different person who's your publicist to your marketing person generally if it costs money it is marketing money if it doesn't cost money it's publicity so your publicist job will be to publicity interviews um you know social media q and a's and the publicist is usually the one who arranges the book tour even though it costs money um so the publicity is in charge of you want to be on oprah well two bags don't do a show anymore but um you want to be on stephen colbert your public sister pitches that to the colbert show right um by the way i was on colbert report my face was so he was really mad about zeppelins um and he held up the usa today that had an article about me and screamed about the zeppelins and you can actually see my face if you freeze frame right down there i've got a screenshot i i know i know contain yourselves on how famous i am but my face was on the colbert report um so getting on that that's all you know pitch pitches one of the best places you can be by the way is uh is npr uh npr people who read listen to npr and it's one of the best things you can do if you can ever get on national npr that's like a trump card very hard to get on but even a local affiliate npr is going to be way better than anything else you do like my publicists have gotten me on morning zoo programs before those don't work real well nobody listens to the wacky morning zoo to hear the fantasy novelist but they do to listen to npr to find out what kind of books they would want to get so interviews and things like that and if you want to do a book tour i mentioned strategies for making this happen you are free to pitch anything you want to your publicist whether you get it or not will depend on kind of how corporate the publisher is and what their feel is tor my publisher is not very corporate my my publisher of my adult books they let people get away with all kinds of stuff my first book they didn't do a book tour rarely with your first book is it going to but for the next one i like called them and said hey can i have a book tour and they're like ah sure you live out in the west right all right we'll get you we'll get you some signings and then they called back and said great news we got you a signing in fresno um and it's on this weekend and then there's another signing the next week in san francisco we don't have a budget to fly you but you can drive that right so i drove to fresno for like a 12 hour drive did a signing and drove home because i couldn't afford a hotel room and then the next weekend drove through president really right past it to san francisco did a signing and then drove home the year after that i called them and said what if i went on a book tour with david farland who is a friend of mine and who is another tour author um could we tour together to draw more people what kind of budget would you be able to give us they're like you really there's not any money in your publicity budget brandon like we could give you like a thousand bucks hint to their minds that's nothing right um it's rule of thumb is that touring an author costs two thousand dollars a day touring may cost two thousand dollars now turning me costs more than that um but uh that's because they have to fly me first class um but but touring an author if you count the flight um the meals and then having someone to pick them up at the airport and take them to the bookstore and things they budgeted about two thousand dollars it's probably a little bit cheaper but that's what they budgeted i said you give me a thousand dollars and i will get in a car with dave and i can do 10 signings on a thousand bucks because we'll share a hotel room and then it's only gas and food money and they're like sure if you could do that and so we did um and they were really excited they said we want to do this next year um so for three years in a row i toured with dave with a thousand dollar budget um for each of us to tour up the coast and you know you're well positioned here in utah because you can drive what we did is we drove to las vegas did a signing drove to san diego did a signing did a signing in l.a did a signing in san francisco did a signing in um in portland seattle boise idaho falls because my family's from there down back to utah whatever number of cities that is that's what we did is our little loop and we did it for a thousand bucks back in 2006 or seven um for the publicists are willing to listen to ideas that you will present to them you can pitch them on things if you've got a good plan and whatnot all right and even if um even if they didn't like that thousand dollars would have been an investment that would have been great for me to do one thing that i asked them to do is give me a box of books this was the second year i did it after i figured out what i was doing grabbed the handy gps which were brand new back then eric james stone loaned it to me he's like a technophile and he has the new technology this was really cool um and i typed in the gps the coordinates of all the bookstores which there were like 20 of them in san diego back then there's like six now but there were 20 of them back then and i went to every bookstore the day before my signing i asked them to meet their science fiction reader on staff if they have one i talked to this person said hey if i give you a free book would you read it they always said yes i handed them a free book i signed the one copy of elantris that was on the shelf got an autographed copy stick it sticker on it from the the front that they have left it there and left a book in the hands of a reader that i hope would start hand selling my books that's what really made the book tour work for me was i did that in every city and it was exhausting to go to 20 stores in every city and hand them a book but the publisher gave me the paperbacks for free because they knew i was doing this so there are ways to kind of get outside the box now dan says that in teen his big thing this day are blog tours blog tours don't cost you money for gas and things they cost you time the blog tours you says are really effective because there's a lot of really good ya bloggers that a lot of people follow and are interested in reading and things like this it's a it's a cheaper way to do publicity hey you write up a good sort of essay that would be interesting to that blog's audience you should read the blog not do just do a piece on how cool your book is but a piece on something that is cool that might be related to your book that they would enjoy reading and then at the bottom you get to give a little advertisement for your book uh sometimes it is about your book but it's about some interesting aspect of it so there are ways to do this that don't involve driving all around um the e-book revolution has changed things a lot and allowed you to do this but theoretically you know the pie in the sky is you'll start getting this sort of stuff the way that you get it as a new author is by something we call a bidding war bitingor sounds fancy um and it is bidding war is when an agent and we'll talk about agents when we do another one because we won't have time today um bidding war is when your agent submits your book to 10 or 15 publishers and several of them get back and say we love this we want to buy it that's when the agent says and says well how much will you offer for it and then they all make their offers and the agent says well we have better offers from someone else so we're going to start bidding on this and then it becomes an auction a book auction and every almost every book okay every book you hear of that is not written by a celebrity where the um where the money goes sky high every new book i should say every first book happens because of a bidding war once in a while there's something we call a preempt where someone off says we know there's going to be a bidding war for this we just can feel it everyone's going to love this book and they come in with something awesome and say we want to preempt we'll give you 400 grand for this and most agents will be like okay because even for a popular book a bidding war is kind of hard we we got a bidding war on steelheart um but it wasn't a true bidding war it was what kind of we call a more like a silent auction where we didn't tell them what the other ones were bidding and we just said we need your final offer by this date by the way you are behind um that sort of thing um and then they all came in with their offers and they all offered about the same amount which told us we got a good price for the book right joshua doesn't like to bid people sky high he's kind of in this very conservative we don't want to get more we want to get as much as is reasonable for the book but we don't want to get more for the book and have this kind of flop thing but they all kind of offered within the same range of one another um but a true bidding war is this sort of thing where one says we'll give you 400 and they say well someone else already offered us five will you give us six um and then can go up and then you hear about this brand new author gets you know 2.3 million dollars or whatever that's what happens from bidding war and agents are trained to do this it's virtually impossible to do on your own you kind of need an agent to do it then they say they've paid that much money which that sky high is probably not going to happen but it's it's not um that rare that a new author gets like a hundred grand for a book after a bidding war right so say you got a hundred grand um advance for your book now the publisher is looking at their p l and saying wow a hundred thousand that's we we paid a hundred thousand this author we need to sell this many copies to make that worth it marketing you now have you know a hundred and fifty thousand probably not from but you have fifty thousand dollars to spend publicity you have you know 20 grand do a 10 city book tour um everybody make sure you go out big with this and get the best cover quotes that you can from the biggest authors let's do everything we can because we have our we we've paid this much money we have this much faith in the book let's push it and when traditional publishing wants to push a book that is when uh magical cloud cuckoo land starts to happen and everyone sings you know sings everything is awesome and you know boom big book okay that's the possibility you can have with traditional publishing it's probably not going to happen if you have a very successful career it'll probably happen something like mine you will sell your first book for a little bit more than average because you get a good agent let's hope this happens you get a good agent they argue well for you um the publisher is convinced and has faith in the book launchers they printed ten thousand copies they sold eight thousand five 500 um of those copies 85 percent sell through um the only time they tried to kill my career was the mistborn paperback the original if you ever have the one with the grim reaper otherwise they didn't try very hard to kill my career i'm joking they never wanted to kill my career but that one was a dark moment but um you know the books steadily sold better um each one other than mistborn one which had a little decrease from um from elantris not uncommon by the way that you will have a boost from being a first-time author a little more publicity a few more magazines want to cover hey this new author with their story they'll cover you a little less for your second book hopefully then you get a fan base and since then every book is sold a little bit better or a lot better than the one before to the point that you know a bidding war for a sanderson book is wow sanderson books sell really well let's offer a lot of money on this we really like the book as opposed to first time author getting this sky a high thing hopefully one of the two will happen to you but i would rather be in my position um because i know a lot of people who have had that big first book and then not gone anywhere your job is to convince them that you can sell a lot of different books over and over again so we have three minutes left i think um what else do you guys want to know about this right um i've heard dave carlin talk about how um this was back in 2013 so i don't know how to change an opinion but he was like retain the rights to your ebooks sell them yourselves and yeah uh dave was saying if you didn't hear a retainer write syria books tell them yourself good luck if you can do it great i can't i haven't been able to do it so um i did it with my small press books the emperor's soul i retained all ebook rights um and then they printed the uh tachyon really good small press out of san francisco um treated that book really well won us a hugo award through their kind of push of it with the the award um people and things like that got nominated for world fantasy and has sold a bunch of copies in print that i could never have sold but i retained the ebook rights and it sold like 10 times as many an ebook because finding a little novella like that can be hard do you ever have a baby more halfway through a series like halfway through miss quarters yes if you as long as your initial contract runs out this happens all the time for instance i signed for four um stormlight books the book this series is 10 books long i like tour it's unlikely that when book five rolls around i will say see you guys we're going on a bidding war for this but if they were not giving me what i felt they should be doing then you can take it for a bidding war all right other question i have a question about um reversion of rights yeah so revision of rights is a big deal and we'll end on this one um and then you can save other questions write them down uh save them and i'll try to address them the next time we talk about publishing reversion of rights so standard in publishing in america and the uk which is not good and the writers guild thinks it should change is for life of copyright meaning when you sign a contract they have life of copyright of that book the right to print books and sell it there will usually be what's called a reversion clause where if they sell fewer than this number of copies in a pay period you can request the rights back and sell them to somebody else every book should have a good reversion of rights clause in them the problem is these have all gotten thrown off by ebooks where it's in the past selling 100 copies of book you know usually you have to sell 100 or 200 means they have to keep it in print which means printing 100 copies of a book they would lose money selling that right so it's e they will revert it if they're only selling 100 or 200 copies because if you have to print 100 new copies every year they're costing you like 10 bucks to print or something like that it's not worth it they reverted ebooks don't cost them anything they can sell 100 copies of an e-book without having to go warehouse books and things and so reversion of rights is a big sticking point right now and it's something you should research if you get a contract and talk about however we're out of time i'll try to talk about that more next time thank you guys very much go to ltue and turn in your slips to donald mustard camerapanda.com allows you to find cameras and lenses like no other site find the nikon coolpix cameras with a high space iso or canon cameras with full frame sensors find sony e-mount zoom lenses ordered 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Channel: Camera Panda

Views: 121,711

Keywords: Brandon Sanderson, Earl Cahill, 318r, creative writing, fantasy, science fiction, camerapanda.com

Id: C59eOLX2K-A

Length: 65min 24sec (3924 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2016