Why Relatives Should Not Be Beta Readers

I am incapable of turning down anyone who wants to read my novel, but I’ve gotta say, there are reasons to not use relatives as beta readers.

1. You know they don’t really want to read it, would never pick it up in a book store, and are only reading it to be “nice.”

2. Probably because of #1, they make a lot of vague comments, “I liked it”, “Hey, not too bad!” and my favorite, “Wow, so all these pages are part of the book? I can hardly write ten pages, ha ha. It’s so long, you must be a really good writer.”

3. They don’t know your genre. “Well, it’s fantasy, right, so [the characters] can just use magic at the end to fix everything.” “Maybe you should be different from all those other novels and have your heros NOT win in the end.” “How about the hero cheats on the heroine and she dumps him.”

4. Some of them don’t know the English language. Sometimes “had had” is NOT a typo.

5. Some of them are former English teachers. In fiction, sentence fragments ARE okay, if they are deliberate.

6. They don’t grasp historical context or world-building. “This word ‘doublet’ sounds weird, maybe it would be more clear if you just called it, ‘jacket.'” “This king is really mean to his slaves. I don’t think he’d stay in power if he was so mean.”

Writing the Breakout Novel

I’m going light on blogging while I:

A) Catch up on beta reading — which is in itself quite illuminating. So often I’ll catch some problem, say, overwriting, and realize, damn, I do this too.

B) At the same time, I’m using responses from my beta readers and the Donald Maass Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook to edit my Dindi story. (Yes, again. It still has not compelled five agents to scramble over themselves to represent it, so clearly it still needs work.) I’ve read the Maass book by the same name, but never read the workbook before. Has anyone else gone through it?

C) Beyond mere editing, I’m still brainstorming like mad to figure out how to fig-leaf the ginormous plot hole in the middle of my series. This is not even something caught by my beta readers, because they wouldn’t be able to see it until a few more books into the series. But I believe that through the mystical power of the Great Unconscious, they can already sense the Black Plothole sucking all life from the story, even this far away from the event horizon.

New York Times Bestseller Bares All

Lynn Viehl reached covetted New York Bestseller list with her latest book Twilight Fall. And she’s kind enough to give us the down and dirty on what this means to one’s pocketbook.

My advance for Twilight Fall was $50,000.00, a third of which I did not get paid until the book physically hit the shelf — this is now a common practice by publishers, to withhold a portion of the advance until date of publication. Of that $50K, my agent received $7,500.00 as her 15% (which she earns, believe me) the goverment received roughly $15,000.00, and $1594.27 went to cover my expenses (office supplies, blog giveaways, shipping, promotion, etc.) After expenses and everyone else was paid, I netted about $26K of my $50K advance for this book, which is believe it or not very good — most authors are lucky if they can make 10% profit on any book. This should also shut up everyone who says all bestselling authors make millions — most of us don’t.

She also recieved her first royalty statment (links on her blog):

To give you some background info, Twilight Fall had an initial print run of 88.5K, and an initial ship of 69K. Most readers, retailers and buyers that I keep in touch with e-mailed me to let me know that the book shipped late because of the July 4th holiday weekend. Another 4K was shipped out two to four weeks after the lay-down date, for a total of 73K, which means there were 15.5K held in reserve in the warehouse in July 2008.

Here is the first royalty statement for Twilight Fall, on which I’ve only blanked out Penguin Group’s address. Everything else is exactly as I’ve listed it. To give you a condensed version of what all those figures mean, for the sale period of July through November 30, 2008. my publisher reports sales of 64,925 books, for which my royalties were $40,484.00. I didn’t get credit for all those sales, as 21,140 book credits were held back as a reserve against possible future returns, for which they subtracted $13,512.69 (these are not lost sales; I’m simply not given credit for them until the publisher decides to release them, which takes anywhere from one to three years.)

My net earnings on this statement was $27,721.31, which was deducted from my advance. My actual earnings from this statement was $0.

That could change, if her book keeps selling fast and furious. Though she might have netted only 26K or roughly half, of her advance, she won’t see money from royalties until those have caught up with the total amount of the advance.

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UPDATE: An agent breaks it down for us.

Two Minds

A quote from a book I’m beta reading struck me with particular force.

“Of all the conflicts of the world, nothing can surpass the conflict between two minds wanting sole possession of the same body.”

Lady Glamis, struggling with some of the same issues I am in rewrites, said, “I have a feeling that the fabric full of holes might be heavier than I think.”

“Write what you know,” we are told, as writers. “I’m sick of that phrase,” she said. Me too. As if we need only to know a thing, and then expressing it will be easy. Ha.

We don’t write to express ourselves. We write to know ourselves.

(Art by thadeoradicarlous.)

Are You Dancing Or Just Swaying Back and Forth?

Some of you may have already seen one of these links on Janet Reid’s blog. More inspiration from Britain’s Got Talent.

It made wonder. How can you tell if you should keep holding onto a creative dream? Here are two people who are well into their lives — one 49 one 60 — who haven’t given up.

But how do you know if the world is crazy for overlooking you or if you are crazy to keep trying?

How do you know if you’re dancing or just swaying back and forth?

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Here’s what Paul Potts, another Britain’s Got Talent discovery had to say:

“I feel like I’m living on gifted time as an artist. You don’t own the time, it is given to you by your fans and public who buy your music and support you. For that I will never stop being grateful and I appreciate the journey I am on even more. In life you sometimes take a turn you weren’t expecting, you don’t know where it leads but you have to take that path. This is what happened with me and Britain’s Got Talent. I still don’t know where this wonderful journey is headed but I certainly appreciate every moment of it.

And if you think suceeding once stills the questions and self-doubt, think again. “The second album is always a challenge, when your first is such a success you cannot be complacent and believe the second will do the same. There is more pressure, you have to work harder, be bigger, better, this is the same for every artist.”

Show Me the Money

I always find it interesting to see how much money authors actually make. We all know that J.K. Rowlings is the exception, not the rule; but real dollars-and-cents figures are guarded more closely than goblin’s gold.

I found this breakdown from one helpful e-publisher, New Concepts Publishing, about the average payout over three years for various Romance sub-genres:

Average payout over three years (contract period) $450.00

Science Fiction/Futuristic range: $127.89–$8455.46

Paranormal range: $78.00–$5673.50

Contemporary range: $55.18–$7913.78

Historical range: $75.16–$3863.12

Romantic Suspense range: $124.24–$1977.20

Fantasy range: $44.00–$4774.80

Remember, all of these are actually in the Romance genre, so you sf freaks, contain your jubliation unless your aliens have their sexy on. I suspect mainstream fantasy and sf sell in much lower numbers. If anyone has any real figures, ballpark or specific, I’d be interested.

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Small e-presses are probably the first step above vanity presses in terms of renumeration. (Some snobs would also say in quality, and this is sometimes true, but not always; some small presses are even more particular about their books than large presses, since they have limited budgets and time.) The figures above also refer solely to royalties. (These small presses are usually royalty-only.) What about advances?

What about the big, mainstream presses? Here’s what the NY Times had to say about advances (emphasis mine):

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.

…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.

…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.”

To break that down, start with $100,000. Pay your agent 15,000, and you’re left with $85,000, divided by 5 years (2 yrs to write, 3 to be published) and you have an income of $17,000 a year, which doesn’t include medical insurence or work-related expences — publicist, anyone? Travel expences for your book tour? Maybe some publishers cover that, but I wouldn’t count on it. This breakdown is even more fun if you start with the “industry average” (?) advance mentioned above, $30,000. Pay your agent, and you have $25,500. Divide by 5 years and your income is $5,100 per month.

A minimum wage of $7.75 per hour (the rate in Illinois) translates to $16,120 annually. Now consider the amount of education needed to hold a minimum wage job and the minimum level of education needed to write novels.

I’m just telling you what you already knew, right? The person who seems to have a hard time grasping it is my educational loan officer.

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The cartoon is by this totally cool dude who doodles cartoons on the back of business cards. That is so gimicky. Don’t you wish you’d thought of it first? Me too.

You might wonder if you can make more money selling business-card cartoons than blogging or selling novels, and the answer is apparently, no.