The Truth About Modest Advances [CC]

you clicked on this video so you know what's up today I'm gonna be talking all about modest advances so to start off what do I mean by a modest advance a modest advance that I am talking about because a lot of people will say modest advance and I think they mean very different echelons and it's always so kind of vague and I'm really gonna stick it straight forward to you when I'm talking about modest advances I'm talking about people that get $0 to $15,000 per book so if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it, minus a 30% you put away for taxes minus a 15% agent fee because I am talking about traditional publishing this kind of means at the uppermost echelon of the modest advance I'm talking about you're doing about $8,000 per book net that you come away with at the end of the day so this is a topic that I actually wanted to talk about for a long time but then also kind of felt a little bit weird about it because I like if maybe this is just like North American Society but you were made to feel very awkward about talking about money in any capacity especially when it comes to what you are earning for the work that you're doing but I think this is a very important conversation to have 1) because I hadn't seen a lot of people explicitly talking about this range of advances the range of advances I had heard people talking about when they talked about modest advances was actually higher than this quite a bit I would say and 2) I myself have a modest advance and when I was talking about it with people you know being transparent sharing that information I got a very negative response across the board and it really affected my self-esteem as an author it really made a time that should have been the happiest moment of my life have this negative tinge to it and then I finally got into conversations with other people who also had modest advances and they had had a very similar experience and so really the reason why I'm doing this video and why I'm pushing through that feeling of awkwardness is so that 1) so that people know how to act quite honestly for one and also for two so that anyone that is in that situation that's feeling really alone that is really coming to attach their self-worth as a writer to the amount of their advance doesn't feel alone anymore and that this is kind of all de-stimagtized in a way and so that's really the purpose of this video so I'm gonna start with a little story time I'm going to talk about how, me getting my own book deal, I do have a very thorough video about it over here that you can watch later I'll link that but I didn't really talk about advance amounts and that sort of thing so because of I have a group of writer friends we share advance amounts so I kind of had an inkling of maybe what my advance might be going into this I'm gonna say upfront I'm not gonna say what my advance is I'm gonna stick with the Alexa Donne rule of that's a little bit "ehhh" I'm not gonna go with that but this is the range like I've given you a range you know it's within that range um so essentially I had an idea in my head going through of what I thought my advance might be and then you know offers, my offer came in and we had gotten an offer and I was like okay I was like that's good cause my goals really I just wanted to pay off my student loans I didn't have a ton left but I really wanted to be debt-free and that was an amount that could get me to debt-free and I was like okay cool of course it would always be great to get more money, who doesn't want more money? though I will say in some cases you actually do want less money but that's a whole other kettle of fish but most of the time who doesn't want more money? and then of course we went through the process I didn't get any other offers I had the one offer so that it was very obvious to me that I wasn't going to have this sort of leverage to say let's ask for more money because that's the sort of thing you do if you have competing offers you know you need leverage it's a negotiation and in that case that was fine very happy with my publisher very happy with my editor, ecstatic with my deal so happy just like over the moon happy and I was really good like I was doing really great and then of course after I got my deal and I started talking to other authors and author friends it kind of came up in the conversation of what is your advance? and to me, because of like the way the writer community is I think it's important to have transparency with advances so that people kind of have an idea of what's out there so that people can create a realistic idea of what they can expect so that they're not going in it you know with a blindfold on and so I was like oh yeah so this is my advance and universally almost entirely universally the reaction I got from people from other authors, not my family everyone my family was like woo exciting, but universally almost universally the reaction I got from other authors was "oh" and so you can imagine that this didn't make me feel rosy and sunshine inside which I had felt up in to that point and it kept happening and then some interesting things started to happen within myself for one I started to not feel as rosy sunshine about my deal as I should have I started to really feel attached to people's reactions to people feeling that it was an inadequate advance which made me feel inadequate myself which I shouldn't have because I had a deal it was a good deal and I was very happy but I, that started to really get to me that reaction it really started to dig in and the imposter syndrome like popped out like a spring daisy just so happy to be there and let me know that I was an impostor and I started to disclaimer and I started to tell people when they would ask me what my advance was I would say oh well it's like a smaller advance and or I'd say oh it's a small advance or it wasn't very much or like I would start disclaimering and telling people upfront that it wasn't gonna be a lot to try and circumvent that reaction and it didn't make me feel good to do that, I didn't feel great doing that because I've now attached this kind of like value of smaller and larger to my own success in a way that didn't make me feel great and I kept doing that and then eventually I got to a point where even after doing that I would still get the reaction and I got to a point where I didn't want to tell anyone at all I didn't care about transparency anymore because I really truly felt that what was the point of me being transparent when nobody wanted to hear it? I felt like people were tossing me aside as a weird outlier um and I just kind of generally I had a crappy experience every time I told someone that with, who was a writer or an author and so I stopped altogether and in fact when people started talking about advances I would leave so I would literally say "oh I can't handle this" and I would run away somewhere else so that I didn't have to hear anybody else talk about their advance because I knew in my head that it was likely gonna be larger than mine and I was gonna feel bad about it and I was gonna feel bad about my book when I shouldn't have and so that was my experience and then when I finally ended up talking to someone, the reason, how I found like my kindred soul person was a conversation about advances came up and they did the same disclaimer thing they said "oh mine is small so..." and that was when I was like okay we're having this same experience and we had talked about it and this person said the exact same thing they said I told someone and they went "oh" and it just like, and they said I did that I told two people, that reaction happened twice, and I stopped telling people and I was like yeah hundred percent feeling that. What was so hard about that is that I was going through a lot of emotions for 1) I now had attached this monetary value to how good I felt my book was to how good of an author I felt that I was, to projected future success I now felt like maybe my book was gonna bomb because I hadn't been given any acceptable-to-other- people amount of money and I just generally felt really down about my accomplishment that I really should have felt up about and then I also got into this thing where I felt really ungrateful because I was having these thoughts and I reached a level of success that a lot of people want and that a lot of people don't necessarily get to get to and I was feeling crappy and impostor syndrome and depressed about it and so then I felt like I was a shitty person because how dare I feel that way and be so ungrateful and such a horrible person and for a long time until I had spoke with that person that was having the same experience I felt completely alone in this I felt I really couldn't say anything to anyone about it because it would be complaining and how could I complain when I had achieved this? that would be like I would be such a shitty person so I just had to kind of keep it inside and walk around with it and say nothing and that is why I've created this video. What is this truth about modest advances that I have titled this video of? so there are really a lot of things about this but the hard core upfront truth that I really want to get at is an advance is not a reflection of the quality of your book, it is not a reflection of the quality of you as an author, it is not a reflection of the future success of your book, believe it or not publishers are not psychic they do not know the future, it is purely a reflection of how much they think the book will sell in addition to other factors such as if you have competing offers for example if you have foreign offers things like that but please please don't attach your self-worth to your advance you shouldn't do this in any capacity but I really explicitly say this in terms of modest advances because it can be really easy to get caught in that trap especially if you are getting those sorts of reactions from people and this is for people in general an advance is an advance is an advance not everyone gets advances this is also a truth that doesn't seem to resonate as much, not everybody gets advances and that's really more of a truth of smaller publishers but it is a truth nonetheless and when someone has decided to be transparent to share with you the amount of money that they have been paid which is a very like private thing especially like in North American culture you've very much been told not to share that with people if somebody goes to that likes with you your only reaction should be like "cool" that's it just wow okay cool thanks for telling me that should be it and I think that's kind of like consideration and thinking about how you react to people not everyone can control reactions I'm sure none of those people that had those reactions were trying to be malicious but I think part of it is that it comes from this feeling this sort of inflated idea of how much an advance is because the truth is that people that get big advances usually talk about it and people that get modest advances usually don't talk about it and so it's very easy to get this inflated idea of what a typical advance actually is or what most people are getting and that's really kind of the truth that I'm getting out with that. Another truth is that a modest advance will not save you probably it won't it may not dig you out of financial hardship, it may not pay off all of your debt, you may not have enough to go on this wild amazing vacation, you may not even have enough once you get your deductions to really set aside money for things like marketing and pre-order campaigns because sometimes you need to put debt first and depending on the size of your debt and the size of your advance you may not have the ability to set aside money in that way that was really something that I discovered and I really had no problem with but I really knew that I have money now that I can put towards debt and that's really the limit I don't have put aside for XYZ money which was fine but it's also being realistic about knowing that in the back of your head so that you don't get caught up in this idea that you are going to be lifted out of financial hardship by an advance which may not do that and that is another truth and the absolute final truth is that you wrote a book, you sold a book, you got in advance that is amazing universally that is amazing, does an-- doesn't matter how much your advance was it's an amazing accomplishment and please please do not go down my road and don't let anyone else, don't let any ideas in your head take away that joy from you because you have worked really hard for that and you deserve to enjoy that and feel good about that without having all these negative things kind of trying to attach itself to that achievement you know shove down impostor syndrome and really feel joy about your accomplishment because you always should and I really uh feel I honestly like feel bad for my past self and kind of achieving something that I was really proud of and ending up getting caught up in those sorts of feelings and those sorts of experiences that took away something from that now I am doing great don't worry about me I'm really I really moved past that I feel really great I've gotten back to like that past self right when we had gotten the offer where I just feel so happy and privileged and that is the only way you should feel about your book offer as a whole and yeah that's it for this if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you have any comments on this whole thing I don't even have a specific comment to direct you to, but always feel free to comment if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe to my channel I post twice a week a longer form video on Tuesday in a short-form video on Friday and yeah that's it thank you so much for watching bye

Channel: Liselle Sambury

Views: 1,791

Rating: 4.969697 out of 5

Keywords: Authortube, amwritingya, ya writer, amwritingfiction, amwritingscifi, writing motivation, writing community, amwritingfantasy, writing life, writing inspiration, writing, write, writers, amwriting, writers life, black writers, black women writers, writer youtube, author tube, book advances, publishing, publishing money, novel advances, modest advances, publishing advice, publishing tips

Id: 9v82p5R9reg

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019