The Boss of You

As Emira alluded to a cou­ple of posts back, we’ve had some excit­ing for­ward move­ment on the book — namely, an offer. Our agent is in dis­cus­sions with the pub­lisher now, and we don’t want to mess things up by talk­ing too much about it yet, but I feel like I want to record some of the things we are going through now, for pos­ter­ity as well as for the sake of any of you who may have thoughts of pub­lish­ing a book some­time in the future.

dream the impos­si­ble dream,
orig­i­nally uploaded by gliff.

One of the things that’s been inter­est­ing is that in some ways, the road to pub­lish­ing this book has been sim­i­lar to start­ing our busi­ness. It has involved being a novice again (i.e. lots of help from friends, and new learn­ings at every turn), being ready to take finan­cial risks in the hope of long-term pay­off, and of course an enor­mous amount of hard work.

The other day, in prepa­ra­tion for our SXSW panel (woo!), I lis­tened to the pod­cast of a great panel dis­cus­sion held at the BlogHer Con­fer­ence 2006: “Is the Next Martha Stew­art a Blog­ger?” The panel was mod­er­ated by Mag­gie Mason, and at one point she guided the dis­cus­sion to the topic of book pub­lish­ing. She men­tioned that before ink­ing a deal for her book, she had been told that a typ­i­cal advance for a non-fiction book by a first-time author would run between $15,000 and — oh, I for­get the upper limit, but let’s say it was $30,000. She also men­tioned that because she signed with a smaller pub­lisher, her advance was sub­stan­tially lower than that, but that her roy­al­ties were higher.

I was happy to hear her talk about this, because our expe­ri­ences so far par­al­lel hers; we are inter­ested in work­ing with a smaller pub­lisher for a vari­ety of rea­sons, and the sim­ple fact is that money is awfully tight in the pub­lish­ing world. Unless you’re pub­lish­ing national or inter­na­tional best­sellers, you’re unlikely to make a liv­ing wage writ­ing books, let alone earn your fortune.

(I know I sound like some old codger try­ing to dis­suade you from fol­low­ing your dreams… bear with me, please. It gets more opti­mistic soon.)

Let’s do the math. Let’s say, for the sake of argu­ment, we held out for a major pub­lisher and a $15,000 advance. First, the agent takes between 15 and 25 per­cent off the top; let’s call it 20%, so $3,000. Then, because we’re co-authoring the book, we split it 50/50. We now have $6,000 apiece. Then we pay our taxes, which come to around 25%. Now we’re at $4,500. If we were to divide that by the hun­dreds of hours that we have and will put into writ­ing, com­bined with the time we will spend later mar­ket­ing and pro­mot­ing the book, we’ll be lucky if our hourly earn­ings are above min­i­mum wage.

Now, there is always the chance we could earn out our advance quickly*, and if so, we will obvi­ously make more money, so that’s the upside.

All of this to say that we now find our­selves in the posi­tion of need­ing to plan our sched­ules for the next few months with an eye to strik­ing the right bal­ance between run­ning Raised Eye­brow and work­ing on the book — and one fac­tor among many will be finances. We need to keep the money flow­ing to the busi­ness in order to keep afloat, but we are also on a short time­line with the book man­u­script — cur­rently it’s due mid-July — and as the per­fec­tion­ists we are, there will be a ton of work to be done between now and then.

How­ever, it’s all such excit­ing and reward­ing work that we’re eager to jump in. And of course, there are some things in life (many, in fact) that one does for love, not money. This is one of those. It’s just inter­est­ing to ana­lyze it from a busi­ness per­spec­tive, since it’s a business-themed book.

(*For those who don’t know, a book advance is essen­tially a kind of loan against the pro­jected earn­ings of your book. If you get a $10,000 advance and your roy­al­ties are $1 a book — which is fairly typ­i­cal — you will start col­lect­ing roy­al­ties on your 10,001st book sale.)