How Precious Was That While, page 16
That was pretty much the clincher. If Berkley treated a Xanth adaptation that way, I sure as hell wasn’t going to give it Xanth itself. Berkley had taken Adept off the best-seller list, and failed to make a reasonable effort on Mode, and torpedoed an aspect of Xanth. The handwriting on that wall was plain enough. Berkley was out.
Del Rey had lost my business because of the editing, but half a dozen years had passed and now could offer me what would have kept me there before: an editor other than Lester Del Rey. Owen Lock had visited me at my house in Florida and was a fascinating and erudite man, quite candid about aspects of publishing. I had a meal with him and editor Veronica Chapman, a dark-haired sweet-looking young woman who surely would not say “Boo” to me about anything I might write. Del Rey had put Xanth on the best-seller map, and would love to have it back. It was tempting, very tempting, because I had never wanted to leave Del Rey, and would have felt at home there. It could do what it had before, putting real muscle into marketing—the kind of treatment Avon and Berkley had so singularly (doubly?) failed to do.
But there were two problems. One was licensing: a clause in the contract that limited the publisher’s right to sell copies of the novels to a given period, perhaps twelve years, after which the novels reverted to the author. For a series that never goes out of print, like Xanth, this is important, because it returns control to the author, who can then sell it again elsewhere, or leave it where it is, as he chooses. It really helps keep a publisher honest. That’s why publishers don’t like to do it. In Europe licensing is common, but in America it isn’t, for books; a writer has to fight for it. I had done so, because I had learned what’s-what on contracts. I had licensing on virtually all my other material, but my seventeen novels at Del Rey lacked it. A condition of my returning was that these be put on license. And the publisher had a policy against licensing. Owen hemmed and hawed, and didn’t say no, but never could quite commit to that matter. But I insisted on it, so knew that this publisher was chancy. Publishers have ways of avoiding, “forgetting,” nullifying, or reneging on commitments they don’t like; I’ve had ample experience, to my cost. This wasn’t worthwhile.
The other problem was the Xanth calendar. I had paid $30,000 for the art and assembly of a beautiful all-new calendar, and signed it over to Del Rey on a special deal: if it sold more than about 30,000 copies, I would get repaid for my original costs. There were several stages, but that was the essence. I knew it could do far better than that. The prior Xanth calendar, consisting mainly of recycled cover art, had sold that many, and this was an improved job. I was considering whether to return to that publisher, but after twice leaving it for cause, I was cautious. I wanted to see how they did with a relatively small project before I trusted them with the big one. So what happened? Del Rey printed about 33,000, which means that it would be almost impossible to crack over into paying territory for me. Owen had said that Del Rey was concerned that they could not do well enough with it to satisfy me, but I had figured that Del Rey would at least try to address its market, and would be pleasantly surprised. But once it was published, and we wanted to know how it was doing, Owen was chronically “out of the office” for the entire sales period. Instead came a report from the sales department: why did they have to handle this stuff, instead of the real Xanth? So evidently they resented it and didn’t try very hard to market it. I had reports from stores: one had sold out the morning the calendar was put on sale, and latecomers couldn’t get it because the publisher would not go back to press on it. Another store had never heard of it; a third had sold out. The sampling told the story. So it was a combination of bad marketing, inadequate printing, and determination not to admit obvious error. I received queries about the calendar from interested readers who couldn’t find it on sale, and even one great suggestion from a reader: why didn’t I do a Xanth calendar? He had no idea that it already existed. That showed the lack of promotion; how many readers who would have bought it never learned of its existence? When we set up Hi Piers, to market my books for those who couldn’t find them, we had requests for the calendar, though it was now well out of date. So we queried Owen: we would buy the returned copies, at the regular wholesale rate, because we could sell them even if Del Rey couldn’t. “Oh, we destroyed those,” he replied. Right: thereby making it absolutely impossible to sell enough to pass the threshold for repayment. If there really had been any significant returns. But why should they have tried? They made a good profit, at my expense, by not selling more copies: by this device the publisher neatly hit me with a $30,000 loss and, of course, made that much more itself. I remarked on that to an agent, later. “I trusted them,” I said ruefully. He just looked at me with that “You fool” expression. Of course I had been a fool. That was what really stuck in my craw, as I pondered whether to return to Del Rey. Judy-Lynn del Rey was dead; straight playing was dead; the bean counters were in charge there now. They had stuck me for a five-figure loss. That bit of cleverness bordering on bad faith may have cost them a seven-figure profit that they could have made on the return of Xanth, had they not alienated me on the rapprochement project. Which is why bean-counter companies tend to lose out in the long run to those with a larger view. Short-term profit can indeed mean long-term loss, as the American car companies discovered the hard way. So Del Rey was out—and when I finally made that decision, a weight lifted from me. An incubus was gone.
I had not done much business with Baen, but what there was was interesting. Jim Baen offered a copublishing deal, splitting the profits with me. So I tried it on two novels: the paperback edition of my collaboration with Robert Kornwise, Through the Ice, and an arranged collaboration with Mercedes Lackey, If I Pay Thee Not in Gold. They told me I would get a blizzard of paper from day one—all the documents relating to the process of printing, promoting, and so on. But there was none. Baen never tried to honor that. The actual money, when it came, late, was good, but I saw that this was another promise-them-anything, give-them-nothing-much publisher. That abrogation of the verbal understanding, and the actual violation of contracts by late payments, satisfied me that this was not the place to put my major series. Later I did agree to place a series of collaborations there, because there wasn’t much market for them the moment Xanth came off the best-seller lists; we agreed on terms and expected the contracts. Baen did not deliver them. After more than six months with no explanation, and five ignored queries from my agent, I had had enough; I dumped the deal. Then came the explanation: Baen had wanted to take foreign rights, for which I have my own foreign agent. Apparently the publisher had figured that if it waited long enough, we’d grow so desperate that we’d agree to anything. For that I have a maxim publishers should heed: they may push around poor writers, but they can’t do it to rich writers. And some of the poor writers later get rich, and they do remember. I’m one. Baen was out.
TOR had published a number of my less-commercial novels, and done well with them. I liked TOR’s boss, Tom Doherty, personally; he was my age and a genial man. His competence had advanced TOR from a fledging publisher to arguably the major one in the genre, in the course of a decade or so. Was it time to give it my major commercial work? Well, TOR wasn’t perfect. It wouldn’t pay the size advances other publishers offered, and it had very few actual best-sellers. All my TOR advances had readily earned out, but I actually made more money elsewhere. When I had sold it a group of novels, the contract specified publication within eighteen months; TOR had actually taken several years. One book, But What of Earth, TOR had seemed to want to write off; only when it became apparent that I would give it no new novels until that one was scheduled did Earth finally see print. At one point its accounts had been so disastrously wrong that I sent a stiff letter detailing the errors. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” chief editor Beth Meacham wrote—and got the errors fixed. Now that was interesting. I make it a point to read and understand contracts and statements of account, after getting shafted by Ballantine in the early days, and always challenged incorrect reports. Ballantine had blacklisted me rather than correct the errors; Del Rey I regarded as a different publisher, and its accounts were squeaky-clean; the only error I caught, about the royalty rate of an early novel, turned out to be my misunderstanding. (The matter of the Xanth Calendar wasn’t incorrect accounting, but incorrect marketing.) Avon took its time but did fix theirs; Berkley had some spectacular errors, but fixed them, and when I audited them, they were clean. But TOR had actually thanked me. I was pleasantly surprised.
TOR had done well with the novels, probably better than would have been the case with on-time publication, so I hadn’t made an issue. The fact that I don’t challenge a given violation doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t notice it; I choose my ground carefully. Some fights aren’t worth it. Indeed, few publishers seem to have understood my underlying reasons for doing or not doing business with them. Money counts, and editing, and promotion, and so on, but so do the hidden things. I’m paying attention in ways that they are not, judging where my best interests lie. I confess that sometimes I get the impression that I am dealing with relative idiots, but that’s their problem, had they the wit to realize it, not mine. I have not been phenomenally stupid since childhood.
In short, TOR’s assets were okay, and debits were mild. I was mindful of the statement Tom Doherty had made to me, that Avon’s printing of 375,000 paperback copies was exactly half what it should have been for the big best-seller lists. I’d love to have a printing of 750,000 copies! But TOR wasn’t much for big advances, which indicated a publisher’s real commitment, and because of the importance of Xanth to my career, there had to be a competitive advance. However, in this case TOR was ready to play with the big boys. But other publishers with whom I had not done much, if any, business were interested, and they did have considerable clout on the marketplace, so my agent let them put in their bids. All the offers were for $250,000 per novel, but only one publisher came through with the subtle but vitally important term: licensing. That made the decision easy: TOR. And so Xanth came at last to TOR. Who made a fine effort on the hardcover, multiplying its sales tenfold, but printed only 400,000 paperback copies, 40,000 of which were used for the “Companions of Xanth” computer game, and took Xanth off the national best-seller lists. Sigh. That 360,000 net printing was, you guessed it, less than half the figure Tom Doherty had implied his publisher would print. The editor, Beth Meacham, asked amazed how I had ever gotten the notion that more would be printed. She really didn’t know? That was hard to believe. Well, I had been taken. Again. That meant the next time that publisher pulled a fast one, I responded with greater force, as will be seen in Chapter 8. I learn slowly, but well.
Seven
DYNAMICS
So are publishers really as rapacious and idiotic as they seem? Yes and no. Just as the intelligence and conscience of a lynch mob may be less than that of any individual person within it, so may the net savvy of a publisher be below that of any of its components. But the publisher also has its own perspective, which differs from that of human beings in much the manner of predator from prey. It’s like politics: what makes sense to a liberal may be nonsense to a conservative. Much depends on the viewpoint. Mine is that of the writer, so this will not be a friendly analysis, but it should clarify some matters. Those who aren’t interested in technical matters should skip this chapter. Here’s how it works:
First, it must be recognized that power will tell. There is a thought experiment that is instructive. Take a ten-dollar bill and offer it to a person, on condition that he/she find one other person with whom to share it. Of course Person A will make the deal, and will soon find a Person B to cooperate with. So they each get $5. Or do they? Soon A will realize that there is nothing in the deal that specifies the shares; he can change the terms. So he offers B $4, and B will take it, because that’s still better than nothing. Or $3, or $2. Whatever the market will bear. If B turns it down, he loses easy money, and A will make the deal with someone else. So chances are that A will wind up with most of the benefit, because he has a superior bargaining position: he controls the money. Okay—now translate this to publishing. The publisher is Person A, and the writer is Person B. Guess who gets the better deal. It’s not discrimination, it’s not cheating, it’s the nature of the game. So the publisher makes most of the rules, and the writer agrees to them or gets left out of the game. Thus the dynamics are those of the publisher rather than those of the writer. Perhaps if writers ran the show, they would be making similarly sharp deals and foolish errors. But they aren’t.
The bean counters have a formula for printings. Indeed, Parnassus is formula driven. Formulas are the salvation of those who lack real intelligence or judgment. They look at the sell-through for the first year—that is, how many copies of a book are actually reported back from booksellers as sold—and limit the print order for the author’s next book to that. This might seem reasonable, except for the actual way of sales. There are always returns, because some stores don’t put all their books on the shelves, and may even return whole boxes of books unopened. I once worked for a distributor, and saw the way of it: the store manager gets one look at the cover, and says “No, we don’t carry that kind here.” So it goes back unseen by anyone else. Maybe some readers would be interested, but they don’t even know that the book exists. Because the store manager objected to the partially clad young woman on the cover, or thought the book would be dull, or had space only for the existing best-seller list, or had some other private agenda. Sure, other stores may carry it, but if it is a one-bookstore town, many who might have bought it will not have the chance. So that book is returned. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: what the manager doesn’t think will sell (or doesn’t want to sell) doesn’t sell, because it isn’t given the chance. The publisher doesn’t want to pay the shipping charges for returned books, so they make it easy: just tear the cover off and return that instead. What happens to the rest of the book? It’s against the law to sell it, but many do get sold; I’ve had fan letters from readers who liked the books, but wondered why they weren’t sold with covers on. It’s a dandy way for an unscrupulous person to make more money: why accept only part of the cover price, when he can tear the cover off, sell the book for half price, and keep all of that? So the cover is returned, and the author’s next print order is reduced accordingly, even though his actual sales (including coverless copies) were good. Other books are honestly put out for sale, but don’t sell all at once; some folk visit a bookstore every week, or every month, or less often. They may buy a lot when they do visit, stocking up for the interval—but by that time many books have been removed from the shelves and returned. The booksellers just can’t keep all the books on sale forever; their space is limited, so they focus on the fastest sellers and send the slower ones back. You guessed it: after the first week or so, a fantasy novel is apt to become a slow seller.
So in a general way, the more copies are printed and distributed, the more sales there are—but also more returns. Obviously a publisher doesn’t want too many returns, because they represent losses for the costs of printing and shipping. Suppose 100,000 paperbacks are shipped, and 50,000 are returned: that’s a 50 percent sell-through. Is that a disaster? No, it’s about average for paperbacks. If it costs, say, a dollar a copy to print, and the sale price is five dollars, you might think a 50 percent sell-through would still make a profit. That is, $250,000 in sales, minus the $100,000 printing costs. But of course it’s not that simple, because the publisher doesn’t get all that money, it gets only maybe 30 percent of it, and it has editing and overhead and such to pay for. So the dynamics can get complicated. For now, let’s assume that a 50 percent sell-through is the break-even point. The author gets royalties on 50,000 copies. So if the publisher doubles the print order to 200,000, and more sales are made, that’s good for the author, but if the sell-through drops to 40 percent it may be bad for the publisher. That is, 80,000 copies are sold, so the author gets royalties on an additional 30,000 copies, but the publisher has losses on 70,000 more returns. While if it lowers the print order to 50,000, and the sell-through rises to 75 percent, that’s bad for the author but may be good for the publisher. The author gets royalties on 37,500 copies, and the publisher has only 12,500 returns. So the publisher tends to underprint. And that tends to drive the author crazy, as my own reactions of the prior chapter demonstrate. And yes, when Berkley cut the print order in my best-selling series, the sell-through was in the neighborhood of 73 percent.
But it isn’t necessarily feasible for a publisher to cut down too far, because there are certain initial costs, such as the advance paid to the author, the wage paid the editor, the rental on the building, the art for the cover, and so on. Let’s say that the publisher’s initial costs for a paperback original, including everything, are $100,000. If it sells 50,000 copies, at $5 per, and receives 40 percent of the money, it will make $100,000. Right: it breaks even. If it made those sales by a 50 percent sell-through of a 100,000 printing, what happens if it cuts the printing on the next? Its sell-through may rise to 75 percent, and so its losses on the printing are cut. But the other expenses, such as the $25,000 advance paid the author, don’t shrink. The author may have a good contract with 8 percent royalties, so he earns 40¢ a copy, or $20,000. That advance has not earned out, so the publisher is $5,000 in the hole. If the printing is cut, the publisher will be further in the hole. But if the publisher doubles the print order, and the sell-through drops to 40 percent, it sells 80,000 copies, receives $160,000, and is ahead despite grudgingly paying the author another $7,000 when his advance earns out and royalties are owing. And the editorial, art, rental, promotion, and similar fixed costs don’t rise at all. So it may be better for the publisher to absorb the cost of the extra returns, for the sake of the larger picture. Up to a point. Too high a return ratio could wipe out everything despite increased sales.
