stormkeeper_lovedoris

It is a bummer. If I could write something other than fanfic, I wouldn't have minded trying to make a go of it myself.

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megan-moonlight.livejournal.com

You can always try! Just, you know, have also a back-up plan is aything happens XD I have the same thoughts about my drawings. In the future, why not...

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furousha.livejournal.com

Well durn. I still think It would be a great way to make a living!

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Me too!

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realpestilence.livejournal.com

I don't see why she couldn't. Even if a paper-or-hardback publisher didn't take her work, there's plenty of e-publishers. I know people who've started out this way.

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Hey, I'm all for it myself!

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That is sad. It's cool that her parents respect her work as a writer enough to talk it up that much, though.

RE: royalties: usually when you write a short story, you do not receive royalties. You get a flat fee and comp copies in exchange for licensing your work to the magazine/website/newspaper.

When you write a book, you SHOULD get royalties...however, if the publisher offers an advance that might be the only money you see. You don't start getting royalties until you've made back the money the publisher paid out on the advance.

For instance, if Author X receives an advance of $5,000, she isn't going to receive royalties until sales have pulled $5000 worth of royalties. A lot of books don't make a lot of money, so for a lot of authors, the advance is all the profit they end up seeing. So it's possible to write a book and have it in Barnes & Noble and still only earn $3000 or $5000 on it in total.

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That is helpful. Thank you for the explanation.

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If she's working with an erotic epublisher, though, she's not even likely to get $5000 - she'd be lucky to get a couple of hundred bucks as an advance. Which says a lot about their expected sales.

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That is so true. I have heard that some of the big mainstream adult pubs, like Playboy and Harlequin books, and a few of the good emags, like Ruthie's Club, do pay well, but they are the exceptions. Most of them are stingy to say the least.

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I thikn that to make a living, you have to be really, really prolific. Which is hard if you aren't earning enough to give up full-time work in the first place.

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Absolutely true--most writers can't give up their day jobs. Most of the time when you read bios in the back of literary magazines, et al, they mention that the author is a professor of English at some Uni or has some other employment.

I've been writing professionally for a while now and even I haven't been able to make it full time. The income is erratic and unpredictable, to say the least. The only people I know who freelance full time are those who really crank out the work and have a lot of different steady gigs.

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What kind of writing do you do, if you don't mind nosy questions?

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All sorts of stuff. The published work has basically been creative nonfiction, essays, op-ed and straight journalism, with dashes of poetry and prose thrown in. It's been all sorts of topics...for two years I worked for a news syndicate that did grim stories on Chernobyl and child abuse, and then I did two more years working for a magazine about Beanie Babies (which paid very well, LOL!), so it's been all over the place. I have a couple of novels that are finished and making the rounds, as well.

Right now I'm doing reviews for Shameless, which is a very cool feminist magazine for teenage girls. If you want I can message you a link to my writing website. :) I'd link it here but it has my real name.

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rhoda-rants.livejournal.com

Not making any royalties? Like, at all? Damn. That's either the result of a really, really bad contract, or a self-publishing gig without any promotion or marketing whatsoever.

A living can be,made that way, but she's clearly doing it wrong.

Or maybe she just hasn't published anything yet, like me.

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Not really? As

denisia mentioned above, many authors never see royalties, just an advance. It's not a sign of a bad contract, just a standard one. Erotic publishers in particular, especially epublishers, are not known for the generosity of advances of the amount of royalties they bring in - they just don't have the bulk in sales and the high price point to justify it.

She might actually be better off self-pubbing online, where you get no advances but a much bigger slice of the royalties, but it's stigmatised, and trade publishing, even online, with a legitimate company will at least mean you don't have to fork out upfront for editing and a nice cover. It's a tradeoff.

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I really wish there were less of a stigma against self publishing. It so bugs me that if I publiwsh my own zine it is edgy but if do my own novel it is automatically seen with suspicion. I have read plenty of godawful books with major publishers and plenth of cool ones from the indies...

I knew an editor at Viking a few years back. He mentioned that the advance = what the publisher was willing to gamble, since they would not necessarily recoup. One would think e pubs could afford to wager more since the production costs are so low.

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I so agree with you! I have enormous respect for people who have enough faith in their vision and their work to put it out there, in any form.

Looking at writer comms, the ones who are nastiest and most derogatory of self-pubbed stuff seem to be the ones e-publishing bad erotica or disposable romance for tiny advances - but they are very very keen on making sure everyone knows they are a "real author" and not a dreadful self-published author. I wonder if it's similar to the way the not-cool kids at school used to look for people even further down the social chain to bully, to prove that they were at least better than them.

I think the e-pubs just don't sell enough copies to offer decent advances, and they are already wagering the bill for editing, marketing (if they do any, which most don't seem to), formatting and covers.

I actually read a fair amount of self-published stuff. Some is terrible, some is better than 90% of the trade published stuff out there, some would benefit from editing but is otherwise sound - and most, like trade published stuff, is somewhere in between. And a lot, I think, is stuff that few publishers would gamble on - YA lesbian fantasy, for example. :)

I hate that when I read something really stunning, I know someone, somewhere, is dismissing it unread as "self-published crap, not by a real author".

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