Maybe someday when I’m famous for writing something other than guidebooks, the few copies of the book still floating around with Melissa Crow on the cover will be valuable. Imagine if John Grisham’s second novel had had James Grisham on the cover. Not really worth whining about it as long as I get paid, right? You’d be surprised how hard it can be to get paid correctly I eventually forgave them and we recently released the fourth edition of that book. Traditional publishing contracts pay authors a percentage of each book sold, often with that percentage rising in increments as more copies are sold. It seems like simple math, but over the last three decades that Melissa and I have had titles with this particular publishing house, I have had numerous math-related conversations with the book counters. In their defense, the imprint (what a publishing trade name is called) has been sold from one publishing house to another. That means that my original contracts (which were actual paper) are probably buried in a tomb with the Arc of the Covenant, so the new people might have been unaware of the terms. I’m really not out to dump all over my own publisher. That would be kinda STOOPID, don’t you think? We have a good relationship that has lasted considerably longer than many writer/publisher arrangements. and the last chair on the right of the front row of chairs. My goal is simply to share a few of the pitfalls of publishing books through the traditional route. had published a short novel myself a few months before and my publisher wanted to increase. Publishing contracts are not what they used to be You shouldn’t go into it with blinders on. Not every traditional publisher is scrupulous Where there used to be clauses that ensured that writers were paid for any use of their materials, publishers now often sneak in broad rights allowing them to use and sell your work without further compensation, including words like “any and all future technologies, either now known, or unknown.” Entering into a publishing contract now without a lawyer familiar with them on your side is probably a mistake. I found this out the hard way a few years ago when it came to my attention that a large educational workbook publisher (here in America) had been using an article of mine in multiple editions of workbooks for several years. I only discovered it because a Japanese workbook publisher I had sold the piece to alerted me to it. It took more than a year and many discussions with lawyers to get paid and I still haven’t a clue how many copies they actually printed and sold. Not every editor you deal with will love your workĪnd that’s okay. If prying the best (re: most sellable) book from you means they bash you around a little, good for them. If all you want is someone who adores your words, hire your mom as your editor and self publish. I honestly don’t think my primary editor has an opinion one way or another about my work, but he supervises some ruthless people who regularly send me hate mail filled with massive markups. I’m gonna get some haters here among the self-publishers. Until then you can find us taking pictures.I get that you’ve got to wear all the hats when you self publish. And if you’ve got another system – or an alternate photo storage trick – we’d love to hear about it. You can read our original post from 2010 with a little more about why we became photobook converts in the first place along what we put in that album. And it usually costs around 15 cents per picture on sites like Target or Shutterfly (that’s their best “bulk” price), so for 700 prints it would be $105! But you’d still need to buy albums if you were doing it the old school way (at Target they’re around $15 for each album, and they typically hold 200 photos, so to store 700 you’d need four albums! So to get a nice custom made book for $45.99 versus spending $165 for traditional prints & albums – well, we’re down. Which is a TON of photos for each year, but we’re snap-happy like that. If you do the math, 100 pages of photos with an average of 7 photos per page = 700 photos. But we imagine that even after a decade of yearbook-making we’ll be able to easily store (or display) ten or more of them in a nice little stack, as opposed to a decade’s worth of photo albums, which could easily take up an entire shelf.Īnd when it comes to cost, hello money in my pocket. Three photo albums wouldn’t be nearly as thin and easily storable or displayable (their pages are thicker and their bindings are huge).
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