Novel Advances 3: Marketability
To continue: Mr. Wolven’s most salient argument appears to be that paying an advance up front to first-time novelists unnecessarily impacts the publisher’s ability to acquire more books by first-time novelists. If only publishing houses would stop this foolish business of blowing thousands of dollars on products that have no proven demand, they could afford to give more books the chance they deserve.
(Extra points for you if that last sentence reminds you of infamous “advance and royalty paying”–yeah, right–PublishAmerica. It’s not accidental.)
The problem with Mr. Wolven’s argument is that the advance doesn’t exactly break most publishers’ banks. Marketing, publishing, and distribution expenses stand more of a chance of doing that.
We’ve already said that an advance represents the amount of royalties the book is expected to earn–how many copies the publisher expects to sell. But it’s more to the point that an advance quantifies how marketable the publisher thinks the book is.
“Marketable” is a nice, active adjective. It implies action on the part of the publisher. The publisher doesn’t just sit back and wait for bookstore orders to come rolling in. They go out and market that sucker.
Yes, they even spend money marketing the books of first-time novelists. Why wouldn’t they? Surely you don’t think they bought rights to the book only to let it sit, unknown and unnoticed, in distributers’ warehouses? Obviously they’re not going to give every author the J. K. Rowling treatment with end-caps and cardboard stand-ups in every bookstore, but between that and doing nothing yawns a vast gulf of difference.
And this marketing expenditure would happen regardless of whether the publisher paid an advance against royalties. And the money spent on marketing and publicity dwarfs that advance every time. And the advance doesn’t even have to earn out in order for the book to show a profit. Which is to say, blaming the advance for publishers’ monetary limitations is a clear case of making dog-like noises at the wrong specimen of upright flora.
And yet it would be silly for the publisher not to try to recoup the expenditure. The advance isn’t just a measure of the publisher’s confidence in the book’s future sales; it’s also a measure of how much the publisher intends to sell. It’s an incentive for the publisher to put their money where their mouth is–rather than sitting on their hands and then blaming the author for lack of sales, as above-mentioned “we’re really not a vanity press, honest” PublishAmerica does.
(Yes, there will be a blog post on PublishAmerica. You can smell it coming, can’t you?)
Mr. Wolven is arguing that publishers should pay no advance to first-time authors. But the case he argues for has publishers feeling no obligation towards the book’s success, and having no confidence in the book’s marketability. And that’s absurd. If a publisher has no confidence in their ability to sell a title, why did they accept that title for publication in the first place?
Chew on that. I’ll be back with Part 4 tomorrow morning.