The Deals

ExposingCorruption said:

"nice deals" that bring the author $1000 - $49,000;

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That's usually listed as "$1 - $49,000"

I'm assuming that is the advance for the author (correct me if I am wrong) but does anyone know how long it takes to hammer out the agreement after the publisher says that they will publish the book?

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Yes, the amounts refer to the advance given to the author.

And there's no set time for how long it takes the publisher and agent to hammer out the contract. It all depends on the publisher, the agent, the author, and the project.

And do authors ever walk away because they feel that they can get more money from another publisher?

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Yes.

My book went to auction the first week of December 2006, My contract was finalized and signed at the end of February and I didn't get the portion of the advance for signing the contract until April 2007. That's a pretty average length of time. For some of my foreign contracts it's been almost a year and I still haven't received the monies.

When an agent makes a verbal agreement with your say so with a publisher and you walk away and don't sign the contract because you decide you can get more money elsewhere (there was a huge deal about one author doing just that a few years ago) You might as well kiss your publishing career goodbye...

ORION said:

When an agent makes a verbal agreement with your say so with a publisher and you walk away and don't sign the contract because you decide you can get more money elsewhere (there was a huge deal about one author doing just that a few years ago) You might as well kiss your publishing career goodbye...

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Oh absolutely. That's a terrible move.

I had read the OP's question as meaning do authors sometimes walk away from an offer before accepting it, because they think they can do better.

That's why IMO it's important to have an agent to advise you...

Corruption-
Probably yes. I am sure there have been agents who recommended to their clients to pass on a deal or whose clients opted to pass against advice. I am not sure why this would matter to you. Stupid nonsensical decisions are made in business all the time for a variety of reasons.
Getting a book published is not easily done.
And it is not a matter of simply asking the right questions.
Many others have mentioned this so I will too albeit at the risk of alienating you.
Yes it is true this is a forum for questions. And yes many people offer their insights. Most posters engage in a back and forth dialogue and participate in other threads -
They don't just post 18 threads of questions in less than a week...
Many of your questions could easily be answered by reading the stickies and other threads. I suggest you spend one week just reading all the posts and threads here at AW- I venture to say that will answer most of your questions.
I mean this in the best possible way...

ORION said:

My book went to auction the first week of December 2006, My contract was finalized and signed at the end of February and I didn't get the portion of the advance for signing the contract until April 2007. That's a pretty average length of time. For some of my foreign contracts it's been almost a year and I still haven't received the monies.

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Interesting. You mean that in some cases, you were supposed to receive some money from foreign rights buyers after contract signature and they never paid it? I would think that's a blatant breach of contract and you could peddle the rights elsewhere later, hopefully for more money since Lottery would have more of a sales track record than in the case of a pre-pub deal. Or are they already out there in the foreign language so you can't do anything?

I'm curious because I wrapped a German language foreign rights deal with the German publisher Droemer. They've signed and they are about to receive the contract back with my signature. I hope I'm not going to wait a year; their deal was half on contract signature and half on publication, as advance against royalties. Nice to be getting it in Euros too, the way the dollar is these days.

Corruption - You opted to make that interpretation - I never said "no matter how low the offer" I am saying that an agent will give advice on what an author can expect and whether they advise taking a particular offer from a publisher and an author ignores that advice at their peril...

dantem- the big countries are fairly fast (for example the UK was 1/3 of the advance 6 months later on signing) - - some of the smaller countries have 12 to 18 months to publish and it TOTALLY depends on the contract...i.e. some advances are due on signing others are split-
It's not a breech of contract- some small countries take a long time if they have to pay an advance in dollars- I also had to fill out tax papers with each country...

I have made an excel spread sheet to keep track of what is due when and when the expected pub date is...
Don't be surprised if it takes 8 weeks or longer with Germany... if your agent is smaller you might have to wait 10 more days for the check to clear...It's best to ask your foreign rights agent - William Morris has their own foreign rights dept. -- they can tell you when to expect your monies...

ExposingCorruption said:

Are saying that no matter how low the offer, an author should just accept it in order to get his book published, and that any author who turns down an offer from a publisher, no matter how low the offer, is making a "stupid nonsensical decision?"

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This is precisely why you need an agent advising you about offers. They will know way more than you about whether an offer is good or not.

ExposingCorruption said:

Are saying that no matter how low the offer, an author should just accept it in order to get his book published, and that any author who turns down an offer from a publisher, no matter how low the offer, is making a "stupid nonsensical decision?"

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No. I believe she was saying that an author who acts against an experienced agent's advice may well be making a "stupid nonsensical decision."

Remember, too, that advances on royalties are only part of the picture. Once the book "earns out" it's a whole different ballgame.

It's different for every situation...Generally there is a negotiation. If you have more than one publisher interested that is the best possible scenario...Keep in mind that editors move (or die!) so there's also the possibility of the book being "orphaned" and then after they make an offer if marketing nixes it - it can be withdrawn...nothing is for sure until the contract is signed and the check is in the bank LOL...

ORION said:

dantem- the big countries are fairly fast (for example the UK was 1/3 of the advance 6 months later on signing) - - some of the smaller countries have 12 to 18 months to publish and it TOTALLY depends on the contract...i.e. some advances are due on signing others are split-
It's not a breech of contract- some small countries take a long time if they have to pay an advance in dollars- I also had to fill out tax papers with each country...

I have made an excel spread sheet to keep track of what is due when and when the expected pub date is...
Don't be surprised if it takes 8 weeks or longer with Germany... if your agent is smaller you might have to wait 10 more days for the check to clear...It's best to ask your foreign rights agent - William Morris has their own foreign rights dept. -- they can tell you when to expect your monies...

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Luckily my agent is with Harold Ober Associates, which has one of the strongest foreign rights departments worldwide. In fact they've been really aggressive about marketing the rights, or as an unpublished "genre" author I would have never seen the light of day with a major player like Droemer. Actually the excitement on the German side is if anything more than on the U.S. publisher's side, because the novel is full of that macabre sort of coal-black humor that strikes a certain chord among the Teutons. We're talking the people who brought you children's lit like Grimm's Fairy Tales.

ExposingCorruption said:

It's sounds like an author would be shooting himself in the foot by turning down an offer based on a too small advance from the publisher. If the book has a decent amount of sales, the author will eventually get his money in royalties, although I have heard that it is not unusual for book sales to be less than what the publisher had expected. In that case, if the publisher pays out a hefty advance, they lose money while the author makes more than he was supposed to make.

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It goes both ways. Publishers are notoriously bad about predicting sales of an unpublished author's work, and often get surprised by something that becomes a monster cult hit through word of mouth. That is after all what happened with Harry Potter. Horror author John Saul sold more than a million copies of his first novel when publishers had figured on less than a tenth of that. One agent tells the story of a woman who wrote a book on how to make cutesy little knicknacks out of your dog's hair. It ended up selling half a million copies. Go figger.

By the way, if you don't earn out on your first novel, it often means that you're going to have a long, hard haul to get your second one published. Some authors I know have said it's even tougher than being unpublished, because you're not wearing the mark of Cain yet.

But for the most part, as an unpublished author, you're not going to get a huge advance to start with; most are well under $10,000. While there are exceptions, most huge advances go to established authors whose sales are much more predictable.

ORION said:

I have made an excel spread sheet to keep track of what is due when and when the expected pub date is...

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Wow you are so efficient! I just kind of let them cone when they come. I have NO business skills and it never occurred to me to keep track in this way. But I am learning...

Don't be surprised if it takes 8 weeks or longer with Germany... if your agent is smaller you might have to wait 10 more days for the check to clear...It's best to ask your foreign rights agent - William Morris has their own foreign rights dept. -- they can tell you when to expect your monies..

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.

Droemer is a prestigious publisher and the Germans are generally terribly efficient about everything. You should get your money soon.
I found the French annoying. They are allowed to pay royalties up until the end of March and of course they wait until th every last moment. This is for royalties up to last June, so they had lots of time to work it out. As I had good sales in France that meant that they were earning interest on quite a large sum of money for three months... whereas I had to pay interest on debt! I will certainly try to amend that on any future contracts. However, royalties and advances are two very different subjects.

Also, they won't pay by cheque. Cheques are not used in Germany...

OT: published authors, do your royalty statements tell you how many books have been sold? I find it terrible that my statements from HarperCollins don't say a word about this, only how much of the advance has been paid. Just sums of money.
My Germany royalty statements on the other hand do give numbers of books sold. (The first one, almost 47000 copies). I do think that ought to be a given.

ExposingCorruption said:

A point that I alluded to in an earlier post: Would it be correct to say that the smaller advance doesn't mean much if a nonfiction book does well in the two years after its published, in which case the author ends up making his money in the long run, whereas a larger advance would simply mean getting the money up front?

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If you're talking about purely monetary value and you are willing to wait for royalties to come in rather than receive a larger advance upfront, then yes, a smaller advance won't mean much in that regard. But bigger advances have other benefits than just the hard cash.

Big advances usually mean the publisher has faith in your book and will push harder to recoup the advance. Just receiving a big advance as a debut author in the first place can create publicity and anticipation for your book, because it's such a rare (but nevertheless achievable) event. Smaller advances can sometimes result in a lukewarm reception at a publishing house - because they have so little at stake, they don't have to try as hard to help make your book a success, and you might get overlooked for the hotshot new author with a six-figure advance for a predicted best-seller.

Of course, I'm playing devil's advocate here. These are hypothetical situations, and things don't always pan out the way I've said. I'm not talking in absolutes. Certain books with small/modest advances do get a lot of in-house support. Some books with bigger advances have a huge amount of support when the contract is first signed, and then by the time the book is actually published a year later their house has moved on to the next best thing. Books with small advances can end-up selling a million or more copies, and big-advance books with lots of publicity and publisher support do sometimes under-perform. You can never really tell what will happen.

There are so many variables in this business and so few things are concrete. That's why it's great to have an agent who has been through the mill and has some hard experience to draw from when you need guidance. An advance (and a contract in general) has many more implications than just the cha-ching in your bank account, and it's so easy to overlook that when you have the temptation of real money on the table.

RLSMiller said:

Big advances usually mean the publisher has faith in your book and will push harder to recoup the advance. Just receiving a big advance as a debut author in the first place can create publicity and anticipation for your book, because it's such a rare (but nevertheless achievable) event. Smaller advances can sometimes result in a lukewarm reception at a publishing house - because they have so little at stake, they don't have to try as hard to help make your book a success, and you might get overlooked for the hotshot new author with a six-figure advance for a predicted best-seller.

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This is the usual situation and it is true in most cases. However, there are exceptions, as in my case.
I got "very nice deals" from both my British and German publishers, and from three other European publishers about 5000 Euros each.
The Briths publisher had other, bigger authors to promote and thought they all said they loves my book it got only second rate attention and was allowed to sink or swim.

My French publisher, who had only paid 5000 euros advance, put their entire muscle behind the book. They gave it a promotional budget of 100000 Euros, and my French editor said that that budget had come from the marketing people; usually he would have to fight them tooth and nail for such a budget! They made it their first priority and it paid out in huge sales, Top Ten listings on the French bestseller lists, and up to today I am earning royalties, whereas the British and German advances have not earned out and I am not favourably seen by them.

So you see it can work otherwise, though my story is really the exception.