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Daily Archives: April 11, 2009
Daily Archives: April 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Meyer-t.html
In the preface to “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Dave Eggers broke form by telling the reader he received $100,000 for the manuscript, which — after his detailed expenses — netted him $39,567.68.
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As a payment to be deducted from future royalties, an advance is a publisher’s estimate of risk. Figures fluctuate based on market trends, along with an author’s sales record and foreign rights potential, though most publishers I talked to cited $30,000 as a rough average. In standard contracts, the author receives half up front, a quarter on acceptance of the manuscript and a quarter on publication, though that model is changing, said the literary agent Eric Simonoff, whose clients include James Frey and Jhumpa Lahiri. “Now we see advance amounts being paid in thirds, fourths and even fifths,” Simonoff said in an interview. “For a writer dependent on those funds, that’s not an advance, it’s a retreat.”
The numbers can sound much bigger than they are. Take a reported six-figure advance, Roy Blount Jr., the president of the Authors Guild, said in an e-mail message. “That may mean $100,000, minus 15 percent agent’s commission and self-employment tax, and if we’re comparing it to a salary let us recall (a) that it does not include any fringes like a desk, let alone health insurance, and (b) that the book might take two years to write and three years to get published. . . . So a six-figure advance, while in my experience gratefully received, is not necessarily enough, in itself, for most adults to live on.”
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In 1971, for example, Viking sold paperback rights to “The Day of the Jackal” to Bantam for 36 times the $10,000 hardcover advance it had paid its author, Frederick Forsyth. “Agents realized that they should be the ones holding auctions for their authors and get advances more in line with the anticipated total value of their books,” Georges Borchardt, who brokered the hardcover rights, said in an interview. (Full disclosure: Borchardt, who is my agent, got me $50,000 for my first, nonfiction book.)
…The notion of the ‘first book with flaws’ is gone; now we see a novelist selling 9,000 hardcovers and 15,000 paperbacks, and they see themselves as a failure.”
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At PublicAffairs, an independent house specializing in current events, advances are as good as capped, said its founder, Peter Osnos. Osnos paid an average advance of $40,000 for PublicAffairs’ four New York Times best sellers in 2008, including Scott McClellan’s “What Happened,” sums greatly augmented by royalty payments when the books hit it big. “If the market says you need to pay $10 million to acquire a title, no one requires a publisher to pay it,” he said in an interview. “You’re not going out of business if you don’t pay that money.”
Today, some publishers are experimenting with low or no advances. In exchange for low-five-figure advances, the boutique press McSweeney’s, founded by Eggers, shares profits with its authors 50-50, as does the new imprint Harper Studio, which offers sub-six-figure advances.
Another typical screed bemoaning the loss of literary refinement in human civilization.
The odd thing about this decline in general literacy is that people are probably reading more than ever. Beyond the obvious ramifications of a much more highly educated populace, the rise of the Internet has upped the amount of time a person spends reading every day. But they’re not reading Sophocles, to be sure: it’s likely that blog posts and Wikipedia, despite the fact that they put more text before more eyes, have actually hurt our cultural sensibilities. Readers accustomed to short Perez Hilton paragraphs have difficulty turning to, say, the long-winded eloquence of Faulkner, and so the good stuff gets pushed aside.
It’s not even that books have been abandoned altogether. In fact, there have been some astonishing literary phenomena in recent years that probably represent the largest shared experiences of reading in history. The obvious example is the Harry Potter series, which has sold over 400 million copies in 67 languages. More recently, the Twilight books have gotten a boost from the related movie and are now seen in every teenage girl’s hands. And the seemingly unending hubbub over faux-memoirs and the accountability of authors would seem to suggest that people still care deeply about literature.
But the literature under consideration is of a deeply impoverished sort. Harry Potter and Twilight are good for a quick thrill and an occasional, broad-stroked lesson, but there’s no comparison to true art. At the risk of sounding too high-brow (and my hesitation indicates the extent to which cultural elitism has been discredited), the majority of what people read today is schlock. There’s something to be said for the pleasure of reading Tom Clancy or Dan Brown, I suppose, but their prevalence pushes aside the great authors.
This always amuses me. More people are reading than ever. How can we make this look bad? Oh, yeah, maybe they’re reading but it’s all puppy-poop! So there!
So let me get this straight.
Year 1309
Number of Literate People Reading Enobling Philosophical and Religious Stuff: 50
Number of Literate People: 50
Number of People communicating prmirily through the written word: 1 (primarily a nun walled into some little room with quill and parchment)
Year 2009
Number of Literate People Reading Enobling Philosophical and Religious Stuff: 50
Number of Literate People Reading Trashy Genre Books Like Harry Potter: 400 million
Number of Literate People: Apparently more than 400 million
Number of People communicating prmirily through the written word: millions (primarily geeks walled inside little rooms with a computer)
Yeah, reading has really declined in the past 700 years. Cry me an ocean.
There’s been no decline, in real numbers, of those who like to read the erudite and uplifting and obscure. Those of us who are interested in flogging our souls with ink and paper are outnumbered by those who like to watch Punch-and-Judy shows, but that’s nothing new.
The main complaint here, it seems to me, is that some dofus went and taught the tasteless masses how to read.
I think the entire nature of our society is changing. Consider even the lamest, stupidest trolls on the internet, the kind who post profoundly stupid comments which defy the laws of both logic and grammar.
Twenty years ago, these kind of people would have not dreamed of sitting at a keyboard to read or write something.
A century ago, these people would not even have been literate.
A millennium ago, the majority of the human population vastly superior in intelligence to internet trolls would not even have been literate.
Just consider. Even the idiots in our society now have to be better versed in the written language, just to express their stupidity, than the geniuses of ages past.