Hope

Thriller Guy’s wife, Mrs. Thriller Guy, (MTG) often complains that the entries in this blog are

too “inside baseball.” For those not familiar with this metaphor, TG always supposed the general meaning was that it means talking about a subject in detail that would appear boring to those not intimately involved in the subject. I.e. going on and on about the minutia and difficulties of The Writing Life until readers want to shout, shut up and just tell us the titles of some good thrillers. TG agrees: Guilty as charged. And before getting to today’s subject, TG can’t help but go just a bit further with the examination of the origins of the term “inside baseball.” Why? Because that's just the kind of guy TG is. It turns out that while TG’s meaning is correct, it refers not to simply talking about the sport of baseball in numbing detail, it refers to a particular style of play, sometimes also called “scientific baseball.” This is a style supposedly developed by the Baltimore Orioles back around 1910 that featured concentration on the small elements of the game: walks, bunts, base hits, and stolen bases, rather than home runs and other big plays. Who knew? Those who are whacky enough to look into this matter at even greater depth can start here with Wikipedia.

Onward to today’s subject: the struggle to make sense of the publishing business from the viewpoint of those who are completely indispensible to it: the writers. Those without whom there would be no business, and yet those who, at least most of them, are at the bottom end of the pay structure. It has always been thus, but with the rise of independent publishing and self-publishing it has seemed for some time that new possibilities are arising for writers to manage their own careers, output and financial rewards. But there has been little solid evidence for these possibilities. Until now. A new report on the important site, Author Earnings, shows that these opportunities are indeed real and that there is a body of statistics to back it up. TG suggests those who want all the details, and this should be anyone who is in the business of publishing on any level, should read the entire report here. The report is long, detailed, and at times the charts are difficult to make sense of, but it’s important to take the time and sift through it and figure it out.

Here are some of the takeaways from the report without the charts to get you interested. These are pulled directly from the report without any input from TG.    

The Tenured vs. Debut Author Report

In our most recent earnings report, one chart jumped out at us and begged for deeper analysis: It was a look at daily author earnings according to publication date, and it revealed the heavy reliance Big 5 publishers have on the sale of their backlist titles. The same chart showed, less surprisingly, that self-published authors are making the vast majority of their earnings on recently published works. In a single chart we were witness to the economic effects of new participants entering an industry in which they were formerly uncompetitive. The same chart made it apparent that the effects self-publishing will have on the trade book industry have only just begun.

Because of this chart, we began looking more deeply at authors from two different camps: those who debuted prior to the explosion of self-publishing and those who debuted after. Authors getting their start today will of course be joining the latter camp. And we believe those authors will want to know the following:

• Big-5 publishers are massively reliant on their most established authors to the tune of 63% of their e-book revenue.

• Roughly 46% of traditional publishing’s fiction dollars are coming from e-books.

• Very few authors who debut with major publishers make enough money to earn a living—and modern advances don’t cover the difference.

• In absolute numbers, more self-published authors are earning a living wage today than Big-5 authors.

• When comparing debut authors who have equal time on the market, the difference between self-published and Big-5 authors is even greater.

In this report, we will also reveal how e-book earnings represent roughly 64% of a traditionally published fiction author’s income, and therefore why authors should focus less on statistics geared toward publisher earnings and trade bookstore sales and consider their own incomes instead. Finally, we will tackle the difficult question of just how many authors are earning a living wage today. The results are sobering. I’ll spoil it for you and say that there aren’t many. But there are reasons to celebrate. Read on to see why.

Roughly 46% of traditional publishing’s fiction dollars are coming from e-books, while the other 54% comes from print sales, audiobooks, and other formats. On the non-fiction side, e-books make up a far smaller fraction of gross dollar revenues: only 20%.

For the average traditionally-published fiction author, this means 59% of unit sales are now e-books.

While only 32% of the publishing industry’s gross revenue currently comes from e-books, nearly 64% of the average traditionally-published fiction author’s earnings is coming from their e-books. Earnings for the average genre-fiction author will skew even further toward their e-book sales.

 There are far more indie debut authors from 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 who are now holding spots on the Amazon bestseller charts than Big-5 debut authors. Even more striking, the number of today’s bestsellers from these “New” indie debut authors increases steeply year-over-year, while the number of today’s bestsellers from “New” Big-5 debut authors stays flat. The number of today’s bestsellers from small to medium publisher debut authors is also growing year over year, although not at the same explosive rate with which indie debuts are grabbing and holding slots on the charts.

After years and years of querying and jumping through gatekeeper hoops, it appears that even the less-than-1% who are lucky enough to land an agent and a Big-5 publishing contract can’t manage to quit their day jobs. (This is an observation in the data that matches what we have seen anecdotally in the publishing and bookselling trenches).

By contrast, we see over 700 Indie-published authors who debuted in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 who are today earning more than $25,000/year from their Kindle e-books alone. For these authors, e-book sales on other platforms and POD print sales will add another 20%-30% on average to this total. It’s easy to see that, for the past 4 years, and even taking lost print sales into consideration, far more Indie authors than Big-5 authors are earning a living wage from their writing.

Does this mean that earning a living as an author is likely? Absolutely not. Here is where optimism for self-publishing is often mistaken for naïveté. It’s where excitement leads erroneously to a gold rush mentality. Let’s take an example from sports: Aspiring basketball players know precisely how many roster slots exist in the NBA. (30 teams with 15 roster spots each). Aspiring writers are not so lucky. We have no idea how many slots are open for us as we begin to dream of writing for a living. Many of us hopeful writers grew up browsing bookstores with the misguided impression that all of those tens of thousands of authors we see on the shelves were writing for a living. The vast majority are not.

Yes, millions of people dream of writing for a living. Yes, becoming one of those people is difficult. But it’s never been more likely for those willing to put in the effort. You don’t have to be in the top 200 to 300 of fiction writers to earn a living these days. You can be in the top 2,000 to 3,000. That’s an enormous improvement. And yet it goes largely uncommented on and unnoticed. We hope to highlight this trend for all those with manuscripts in-hand and a decision to make.

Final Thoughts

The picture that is emerging from our data collection and our look at bestseller churn is that the number of Big-5 debuts at each earning level is relatively flat, year over year, while the number of living-wage-earning indie author debuts is growing exponentially year over year. Even ignoring the hurdles and roadblocks that are a built-in part of traditional publishing’s drawn-out querying process, it’s easy to see which method of publishing represents the greater and faster-growing opportunity to earn a living wage as a writer. Again, the data matches everything we are seeing in the publishing community trenches. And these observations help to explain many of the restrictions we see in modern publishing contracts.

To combat these trends, we believe that major publishers are going to have to pay higher royalties on e-book sales in the very near future. We have heard from some authors and industry insiders that this is already taking place. Unfortunately, the sweetest deals are going to existing bestsellers, which means the rich get richer while debuting authors are left behind. This must change. Higher royalties will have to become the new standard across the board. Otherwise, the word will keep spreading—both anecdotally and through hard data—that the choice on how to publish keeps tilting toward retaining ownership of one’s art. We’re not saying this decision will ever be simple. But it sure seems to be getting easier and easier.

TG here. See, there is hope. And as readers of this blog know well, hope is often the only thing TG can give writers to keep them at their desks, or at least in front of their computers, staring at that blank page, working and dreaming.

How Many Words Did You Write Today?

Many years ago TG was having a conversation with his pal writer Henry Allen. We were

discussing a mutual writer friend who was working on a novel and had been working on it for some time. TG asked Henry how far along he was on it, how many words he had written. Henry laughed. “He says he has no idea how many words he has written, that he doesn’t think that sort of thing is important. Bullshit. Every writer knows how many words he has done, down to the single digits.” TG agrees. Every professional writer TG knows keeps a careful word count. Words are more precious than gold and watching them mount up is little different than watching Scrooge McDuck bathe in his basement coin vault. (When TG was a lad he used to daydream about Scrooge rolling in these coins. Could it be true? A quick internet search reveals that to replicate the vault would take 32.6 billion dollars in coins.)

A novelist knows that a “regular” novel should be between 80,000 and 120,000 words, though agents and publishers these days discourage more than 100,000 words because of printing costs. That’s the number you aim for, and every day after work you tote up a tally so you can see how far you’ve come. You think “a third of the way, half the way, three-quarters there,” and are solaced by how far along you are, or upset at how far you have to go. It’s kind of like if you’re on a diet: every day you step on the scale and assess the results.

The other day TG was trolling the book blogs and came upon one of Keith Thompson’s entries on the subject. TG is going to lift a big chunk of the blog and add some stats he dug up on his own. Keith Thomson is a thriller writer (among other types of books). Thriller Guy reviewed two of his books, Once a Spy and Twice a Spy and thought they were terrific. Here’s Keith.

I’ve noticed a lot of writers posting their daily word output on social media. The single common denominator of these posts, unfortunately, has been word counts that exceed my own. In hope of feeling better, I compiled some data on the typical daily productivity of writers I admire. What follows is a selection that provides a representative sample. Bear in mind that no heed is given to the relative merits of such numbers, and, as Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Speaking of Twain, every morning he would get up and eat a hearty breakfast, then go to his study to write, staying there until about five, except in case of emergency—if anyone needed him, they had to sound a horn. The result was 1,000 words per day.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King says that he writes 2,000 words a day without fail, even on holidays. And that’s with no adverbs.

Lee Child uses word counts as mile markers. His record is 4000 words in a single day. His low is 600. His average: 1800. It takes him 80-85 working days to complete a book, but not 80-85 consecutive days, because he tends to (not?) write for more than four days in a row.

Trollope, too, wrote by volume. He put his pocket watch on his desk next and produced 500 words every thirty minutes for three hours—a daily total of 3,000 words.

In contrast, Hemingway clocked in at just 500.

Tolkein wrote The Lord of the Rings trilogy—670,000 words—in eleven years. That’s about 250 words per working day.

Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is 370,000 words long. Writing it took him eleven years, of which he says, “My children grew up thinking that was all I did: write, and never finish, a book called A Man in Full.”  The average: 135 words per day.

Jack London: 1500 words per day, every day. Before breakfast. Norman Mailer and Arthur Conan Doyle were both 3,000-words-per-day guys. Anne Rice hits 5,000. The Babe Ruth of this category is Michael Crichton, who routinely hit the daily ten grand mark.

Thankfully we also have Graham Greene, who counted each word, and would stop for the day at 500, even if he were in the middle of a sentence. Maya Angelou, who each day writes about nine pages, but saves just three. James Joyce, who proudly considered the completion of two perfect sentences a full day of work. And Dorothy Parker, who frequently wrote as few as five words—of which, she said, she changed seven.

TG here. TG would like to add that Twain, on arising in the morning, would have a shot of whiskey before brushing his teeth. His wife had strict instructions to have the shot in his bathroom when he climbed out of bed. (TG would like to remind readers that Twain is a major character in the Pastmaster series of novels by Allen Appel. Find him in Twice Upon a Time, now available as a Kindle, as are all five of the series.)

  

Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason novels, wrote a million words a year, which is about thirteen pages each working day. Victor Hugo wrote twenty pages each day.  John Grisham wrote The Pelican Brief in one hundred days, and The Client in six months.  Samuel Johnson often produced forty printed pages in a day.

And some writers are markedly slow.  More on Greene. According to the legendary Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, Graham Greene “without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked like an attempt to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, wrote over the next hour or so exactly five hundred words.”

Rudyard Kipling worked in the middle of the day, from ten until four.  John O’Hara would write all night, then would rise in the late afternoon.  Anne Perry says, “I work probably eight or nine hours a day, six days a week.”  After much procrastination, Harold Robbins would lock himself in a hotel room, hide the clocks, and work round-the-clock to exhaustion.

And King has now recanted this oft quoted fact, the 2,000 words a day, saying that 1,000 words is more like it and that he doesn’t really write every single day. But the guy has a roomful of excellent books to prove his massive output. See below for another King description of his output.

King works on his new novel in the mornings. “Afternoons are for naps and letters.  Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait.  Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.” 

From an interview with Neil Gamin, King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes. It's that simple. “I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about 1200 to 1500 words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hardcopy.”

So how many words do you write or try to write each day? And how do you feel if you make your goal, or don’t make your goal? TG would like to point out that this blog entry comes in at 1300 words. Just about exactly what Stephen King shoots for. Unfortunately, they’re not words that will be in the current novel that TG is working on. But that’s another blog entry.

The Five Mistakes Thriller Writers Make: Number Five -- Weak Endings

Oh how Thriller Guy envies the lucky writer who has his book’s ending in mind before he even starts writing. TG has been in this position a number of times, and it feels like having money in the bank. But he’s also been in the position where he just starts writing and prays that by the end he will have figured it all out. Both methods can work, and writers must always be open to the idea that ending you originally envision can change, even radically along the way. TG assures nervous writers that you will always come up with an ending; it really can be magical when you come up with something you never thought about but once thought proves to be exactly right.

Mickey Spillane said, “The first page sells the book, the last page sells the next book.” Wise words. TG wishes he had a formula for writing endings that would guarantee success every time, but he doesn’t. Some major points to remember, though…

Make sure that all loose ends are tied up, unless the book is going to be a series, in which case leave a few untied. Have the ending be satisfying: Good does not always have to triumph completely over Evil, but it must be weighted heavily on the good side. There can be sadness in an ending as long as it is of the elegiac kind and hope is triumphant. Good cannot win through bogus deeds or lucky breaks: Victory must be earned. In the end, characters must be wiser, even if they are sadder, than when the book began.

Here are fifteen great endings from fifteen excellent books.

...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. –Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Samuel Beckett)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. –James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. –Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. –Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. –Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. –Toni Morrison, Sula (1973

I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them. –Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

He heard the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut. –Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. –Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

That’s it. The sun in the evening. The moon at dawn. The still voice. –John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

So that, in the end, there was no end. –Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955

And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here. –Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (1995)

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine. –Malcolm Lowry,

Under the Volcano (1947)

“GOOD GRIEF—IT’S DADDY!” –Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (1958)

TG will leave you with perhaps his greatest writing tip, certainly his greatest ending-writing tip: Always tie the end to the beginning. Go back and read the opening of your book, and then make your ending come full circle. You will leave your readers satisfied, which is the greatest gift you can give them. They will appreciate it, and they will read your next book.

And so endeth the series, Five (or so) Mistakes Thriller Writers Make.