Learning About Fiction Publishing

I’m not alone in harbouring an ambition to publish a book one day, and after a) having had a programming book published, and b) having a short story published in an anthology, I have a reasonable expectation of how much work it is, and low expectations of how much money it makes.

Still, it makes sense to learn about something before doing it, so I’ve been reading and finding out a few things about how fiction publishing works. The highlights so far are from The Publishing Rodeo Podcast and a couple of blog posts by Elle Griffin. The highlights so far:

• Book sales are quite low. Anything above ten thousand is very good. (I don’t think I have quite that many from my programming book, but that’s really quite old now.)
• Few books earn out their advance, and in fact if they don’t it’s a sign that the author has gotten a decent deal as royalties after earn-out are low (and therefore the publisher is making almost pure profit from that point on)
• Marketing spend is key to success
• Marketing spend seems related to how good a hook your book might have, which to me means: how easy it is to market. From my start-up world, that sounds a lot like an elevator pitch.
• Writing quality apparently has little relation to sales (although I would never be the one who could judge that). I haven’t heard any clues as to the effect it might have on sequel success, but I might have missed it.
• If you get a good advance from a publisher they’re more likely to spend more on marketing. If you get a low advance you’ll probably not get much marketing. A good advance is into six figures (probably for a multi-book deal)

The Publishing Rodeo Podcast in particular is a wealth of more subtle information, and next up for me is one of the guests who has their own podcast: Kameron Hurley.