Calling all Sports Publishing LLC authors

I may just be overlooking the obvious here, but could you please elaborate?

 

I mean they've just made a "take it or leave it" offer and any reputable place realizes that all contacts are negotiable. No one is EVER going to give you their best deal first.

Example: Last year I was offered a work for hire for four apples, and they told me "our budget only allows four apples." Well, I told them they had contacted me, so they must think I have some value beyond that, and are you going to use my name? They said yes, and I ended up getting six apples. Six months later they offered me another project, same amount of work, for two apples. They refused to negotiate and I walked away. If they don't value you enough as an author to negotiate, they generally don't value the work either, and are just looking to hire "someone" to do it. Unless it's a vanity project for you, and the fact of a byline is more important that the content, or the possibility that anyone will ever see it, in many instances it's simply not worth your time, financially, to deal with these outfits, and often their sub par production work can reflect badly upon you. The more a publisher invests in a book, generally speaking, the better the project.

 

That's a great post by Exile; as in any business negotiation, you want both parties to walk away thinking they got the best deal. As an author, you also want to believe a couple thousand dollars extra isn't going to break the bank, and you want to feel that the publisher understands the time and cost involved in writing a book. You don't ever want to hear, "It shouldn't take very long, it's not a lot of work."

But on the other hand, there are indeed projects that just need a writer, and if you're willing to take what they're offering, you can be the writer. Triumph Books, for example, does a great job rolling out various series of regional sports titles. They know exactly what they want to pay, how many they think they can sell, etc. Nothing wrong with that, they're developing product lines. You just have to go into it understanding that it's more of a product than a piece of literature. Then you see if there's a bigger and more lucrative book you can do for them, or for someone else.

 

Sirs, Madames,

Not always a lie. On their end, they're almost certainly BSing you, I grant you that. But if you've tried to get big publishers interested and failed, but you remain not just convinced but sure it will sell (all vanity projects check out here), get it done and take your chances. The difference between this outfit that has burned DS & friends and the second-tier outfit I signed with my cheaply done book -- mine had at least a decades-long history of doing some things (kids' books, YA, service/how-to), while DS's sorta smacked of famous-artists-school fly-by-night bad karma.

Outcome: I'll eat my hat if DS's advance was less than mine in this single case. Mine earned out its advance in the first week the book was on shelves. The second cheque I received (the first three months it was on the shelves with a fall release) was for 30K+. It has been re-released, repackaged, updated twice since and sold upwards 35,000, a nice steady stream of side income. Remarkable as it sounds, there was a time that you couldn't convince a major Canadian publisher that Sidney Crosby was going to be an important hockey player. I knew it but got laughed off. I had to get inventive to cover my costs (goodbye airmiles, mag work etc to pick up some other expenses). Time constraints: 60 days to produce 80,000 book-ready words. Could have easily talked myself out of it. But I'm glad I didn't bail out just because I couldn't get the advance I wanted. I made sure my 12 and 15 percent clocked in at 5,000 and 10,000 and took my chances.

A year later, of course, there was a bunch of Crosby books, including one from a major publisher. I beat them to the bookstores and have sold far more than they have.

Someone mentioned marketing department. In the couple of books since, both for healthy advances (to a publishing house that has expressed regret in not picking up the Crosby book), both agent represented, I've worked with two publicists, the first brutal, the second incredibly efficient and thorough. But with my first book I seized control of the marketing and got in touch with every radio station in Canada (and Pittsburgh) and every sports department. I even managed espn.com to run an excerpt. I made the rounds of bookstores wherever I travelled that year. I've kept all my contact information (phone #s, emails) on file and updated. You can hope for marketing/publicity, but shouldn't count on anything other than doing it yourself.

There are no absolute truths here. Publishing is unpredictable stuff (or else Life of Pi, which has made Yan Martel and award-winner and a millionaire, would not have commanded only a $20K advance).

YD&OHS, etc

 

Exile made the same point, so I think I need to clarify my statement.

Plenty of books make money on the back end, like Christmas twice a year.

I was referring to optimistic authors who convince themselves to take sub-par advances with the expectation that the book will earn royalties, and then become upset and disappointed when there are none.

Bottom line, to me: Look at the advance, and that's it. Factor in the taxes you'll pay on the money, the length of time between payments, the commission or fee you might be paying an agent. Are you taking unpaid leave time to write the book? Are you paying for photos?

One more thing: As Friend said, forget their marketing dept, you must be the greatest advocate of your own book. They'll move onto others, you may not.

For publishers, it's business. For writers, it's about craft and creativity and a love of writing. Sometimes very hard to blend the two.

 

Ms S,

If my Crosby book didn't sell I was going to have one or two people to blame. Either Crosby or me. Or him and me. I knew I was taking my chances. A judgment call. That the publisher said that they would pay for the photos (a very important point) at least seemed an expression of good faith, likewise the royalty #s.

YD&OHS, etc

 

Makes perfect sense. I thought I knew where you were going with the original post but wanted to make sure I had your point exactly. Thank you for the response.

 

Folks,
Sorry for the silence, but it's been a busy couple of days.
Swenk and Friend o' posted wisely and I thank them for it.
I went into this project with my eyes wide open with one notable exception: since I heard of the company I did not check out its record for prompt payment, much to my chagrin.
Otherwise, I knew enough about the book biz to know the advance was all I should count on. As any of my fellow stiffees can tell you, a Sports Publishing advance is modest, indeed. But at the time, the Canuck buck was $1.40 versus the Yankee dollar. I also said I would gather the tales myself (of the Toronto Maple Leafs) and thereby cut out the retired athlete and his 50-per-cent cut. Since this kind of book was easy and I had no agent (yeah, kick me again but the money wasn't worth it), I thought the advance would be okay for the labour involved.
I still think I was right on that count, but the NHL lockout resulted in a long delay because the company did not want to sell hockey books during that period. In the meantime, the dollar went to par and all I had in hand by then was one-third at $1.40 Canadian.
As for promotion, it is to laugh. This is my second book, and the experience was the same both times. The first time was with a major Canadian publisher, albeit the last-place outfit of that group, and I marvelled at their ineptness. I had to tell their poor, befuddled PR person what to do. If it weren't for government handouts, the Canadian publishing industry would be one-tenth the size it is now.
What angers me about the Leaf book is there is a huge market for it but these guys did not lift a finger to sell it. The book did not get a lot of reviews but the few it did were positive. Sports Publishing did send me extra books as a sop for their late payments. I sold those plus the ones called for in my contract very easily by word of mouth.
I have no idea how many retail copies were sold and am not holding my breath for an honest accounting. At one point, it was No. 2 in hockey books on amazon.ca, even ahead of Friend 'O's marvelous tome on Sid The Kid. But it quickly fell, I think, because amazon ran out and wasn't getting any more copies to sell.
I have received some legal advice and, as swenk advised, will not be signing the waiver as is.

 

Let me jump back in with a few random thoughts:

1. Get what you can with an advance, because 50-50 it's all you will ever see. Once the book is published, publisher will use any legal means at their disposal to pay you as little as possible when royalty period comes around. For example, there's a thing called "holdback," which is a hold against returns. If you are unfamiliar to book publishing, would take to long to fully explain it here. Suffice it to say, publishers will usually hold back something like 25-30% of amount due as a hedge against those "sold" books being returned later by the retailer for full credit. Retail book sales = consignment sales.

2. Make sure when you negotiate terms of a contract, reference the advance, that there is writing in there that says once they pay you any portion of an advance, you are underr no obligation to pay any of it back, such as when publisher decides to cabncel the book. There's notning worse than getting our first $2,500, working a month or two on the book, then being told book is canceled because sales/marketing has finally determined they can't sell it. Remember, the "advance" is actually an ADVANCE ON ROYALTIES, and if no royalties will be earned for a book that will go unpublished, some cold-hearted publishers will come back to you to pay them back. All I'm saying is to just make sure your contract wording has you covered.

3. Be real careful when doing multiple titles for the same publisher---I've experienced this to my detriment. If you do, say, five titles for a publisher and three of them are earning out down the road and the other two or not, many publishers will have in the fine print that the profits from the three books can be applied against the unearned advances on the other two, thus rerouting what should have been your royalty checks back to their own bank accounts to pay for those books. Thus, say those two poor performing books are still short $3,000 advances you were paid, and the other three books that are selling have a combined $3,500 in royalties owed you, you can expect a check for $500---NOT $3,500. This one got by me and I've probably left $4-5,000 on the table because of it. What a stupid I am.

4. It's easy here to badmouth Peter Bannon, and there are financial goings-on there that haven't been broached in this thread (printers not getting paid in terms of six figures), but despite all the short-pays, the non-pays, the biting off more they can chew in terms of book production, at least they gave it a go for many years and helped many writers who otherwise might not have gotten published. Book publishing, even in this day and age of e-books, incentive and premium sales, etc. is a dinosaur business model in a dotcom world. It burns cash right and left and the only way someone can make money of any significance is to get their company sold at the right time it has its highest value. Because the cash flow and P&L ain't going a long ways.

 

<i>mean they've just made a "take it or leave it" offer and any reputable place realizes that all contacts are negotiable. No one is EVER going to give you their best deal first.</i>


And you can also badly overplay this. It could be that they've budgeted $5,000 for the book, and it doesn't matter if you write it, if Red Smith comes back to write it or if some guy comes in off the street looking for work.

They may have determined numbers that work for them, and the project will be ruled by those numbers rather than the name and reputation of the author.

 

this is undoubtedly true. But we already spend our days and nights working for assholes that figure if we don't want to work for pennies, they'll find 1,000 others who will. If you're going to try to create something of lasting value--as opposed, as you said, to something that will line the subway by lunch--isn't it worth more than their rock-bottom price?