4 ms·

"But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it." Oh come on, so if you don't somehow

"But Jane Austen Doe was handed an opportunity with her first novel that most professionals will never see -- and blew it." Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"? It took Twain 8 years to write Huck Finn and it was finally published when he was 49. He wrote 100s of small stories under pseudonyms to make ends meet until then. Today, he wouldn't have ever finished it, and we'd be without one of the best books ever written.

robotrout 17y ago
I'm delighted that you like "Huck Finn". In my opinion, it's not his best work, nor was it his "big break", by any means. Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for. Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished prior to the book that you enjoyed. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html
- adamhowell 17y ago
  Fair enough, I got the timeline pretty wrong. The point I was trying to make was it's unfair to place a higher standard of success on an industry just b/c it has a finished product it has to ship. Twain wrote many novels b/f his breakout success, whichever book it was. Why? Because when he started he wasn't as good as he was in his 40s/50s... just like when you launch a webapp it's not as good as it will be after you've iterated on it for 2 years. Anyway, I'll try and stick to a subject matter I know a little better next time ;)
  - robotrout 17y ago
    That lesson may be the correct one to draw here. However, I could just as easily say that the lesson here is to abandon your web app, and write 10 more, until you "make it". No amount of lipstick will make a book with a boring plot shine, or a web app that doesn't fill a need, popular. I've abandoned three of them (web apps), and am working on a fourth, while you've been presumably, iterating and making yours more beautiful. Hopefully, we'll both win. As an aside, I was reminded, when I read the chronology, of all the money he lost as a wanna-be venture capitalist. He lost his fortune, dumping it into printing press designs that the engineers could never get the bugs out of. Too bad he didn't abandon that at some point...
cstross 17y ago
Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"? Yes. In the eyes of your editor's boss, the VP (Marketing), you have blown it if your first book doesn't break even on P&E. Break-even comes some time before you earn out the advance, but even so: if you don't break even on your first contract they'll drop you like a hot potato. Especially if someone gambled $1.5M of the corporate turnover on you and lost! Assuming an average royalty rate of 10% -- it varies from 6% up to 15% in commercial fiction, depending on print run, format, phase of the moon, elevator clauses, and so on, but 10% is about right for a big hardcover run followed by a metric buttload of paperbacks -- then you can multiply the author's advance by ten to get a handle on the amount of turnover the publisher was betting on her. Which in her case was on the order of a million dollars. Her final tally: 10K hardcovers and paperbacks sold. Even if those 10K sales were 100% hardcover at undiscounted list, they didn't turn over $0.24M (and more likely they broke down into something like 2500 hc and 7500 mmpb, in which case total turnover for the book was more like $100K). Actual profits for the publisher are typically about the same as the author's advance (a lot of money goes into the pockets of the distributors and retailers). So they were looking to make about $150K in profit, and instead made $10K and lost $150K on the advance (not to mention another $100K on the unsold copies they pulped). If they'd given her a $10K advance they might have patted her on the head and said "there there, dear, let's try again, shall we?" But you don't get a second chance if you lose big right off the block. The usual response is to bury it deep (before someone higher up notices the oopsie and fires the responsible party). In today's publishing industry, you're only ever as good as your last book. And if Mark Twain was alive and writing today he'd be an embittered blogger.

robotrout 17y ago

I'm delighted that you like "Huck Finn". In my opinion, it's not his best work, nor was it his "big break", by any means. Mr Twain had a wonderfully interesting life, filled with triumph and more tragedy than he deserved. I've read many of his letters, published in book form, which were a very interesting window into who he really was. I believe I own everything he's written. By the way, he was a bit of an atheist at a time when being such was serious. His best work, in my opinion, is religious satire, not the stuff that he's famous for. Anyway, this chronology will tell you a bit of all the things he accomplished prior to the book that you enjoyed. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/chronology.html

adamhowell 17y ago
Fair enough, I got the timeline pretty wrong. The point I was trying to make was it's unfair to place a higher standard of success on an industry just b/c it has a finished product it has to ship. Twain wrote many novels b/f his breakout success, whichever book it was. Why? Because when he started he wasn't as good as he was in his 40s/50s... just like when you launch a webapp it's not as good as it will be after you've iterated on it for 2 years. Anyway, I'll try and stick to a subject matter I know a little better next time ;)
- robotrout 17y ago
  That lesson may be the correct one to draw here. However, I could just as easily say that the lesson here is to abandon your web app, and write 10 more, until you "make it". No amount of lipstick will make a book with a boring plot shine, or a web app that doesn't fill a need, popular. I've abandoned three of them (web apps), and am working on a fourth, while you've been presumably, iterating and making yours more beautiful. Hopefully, we'll both win. As an aside, I was reminded, when I read the chronology, of all the money he lost as a wanna-be venture capitalist. He lost his fortune, dumping it into printing press designs that the engineers could never get the bugs out of. Too bad he didn't abandon that at some point...

cstross 17y ago

Oh come on, so if you don't somehow make your first book a success you've "blown it"? Yes. In the eyes of your editor's boss, the VP (Marketing), you have blown it if your first book doesn't break even on P&E. Break-even comes some time before you earn out the advance, but even so: if you don't break even on your first contract they'll drop you like a hot potato. Especially if someone gambled $1.5M of the corporate turnover on you and lost! Assuming an average royalty rate of 10% -- it varies from 6% up to 15% in commercial fiction, depending on print run, format, phase of the moon, elevator clauses, and so on, but 10% is about right for a big hardcover run followed by a metric buttload of paperbacks -- then you can multiply the author's advance by ten to get a handle on the amount of turnover the publisher was betting on her. Which in her case was on the order of a million dollars. Her final tally: 10K hardcovers and paperbacks sold. Even if those 10K sales were 100% hardcover at undiscounted list, they didn't turn over $0.24M (and more likely they broke down into something like 2500 hc and 7500 mmpb, in which case total turnover for the book was more like $100K). Actual profits for the publisher are typically about the same as the author's advance (a lot of money goes into the pockets of the distributors and retailers). So they were looking to make about $150K in profit, and instead made $10K and lost $150K on the advance (not to mention another $100K on the unsold copies they pulped). If they'd given her a $10K advance they might have patted her on the head and said "there there, dear, let's try again, shall we?" But you don't get a second chance if you lose big right off the block. The usual response is to bury it deep (before someone higher up notices the oopsie and fires the responsible party). In today's publishing industry, you're only ever as good as your last book. And if Mark Twain was alive and writing today he'd be an embittered blogger.