Slash the Advance, Double the Royalty, Author Urges

Years ago I found myself sitting at a banquet table with Isaac Asimov and decided to take advantage of his proximity to ask him something I'd wondered about for years. Asimov had authored upwards of 400 books, and was represented by literary agents on many of them. Yet he never settled down with any particular one. I wanted to know why.

"The problem with agents," he explained, "is that they get too much money."

Naturally, as an agent whose clients have never complained to me about getting too much money, I felt his statement merited some amplification. The garrulous Asimov was happy to oblige: "Publishers that lose money on a big unearned advance don't invite the author back. The editor gets into trouble for overspending and sometimes even gets fired. Bookstores order half as many copies for the next book as they did for the first one. Everybody loses...except the agent. So, I just handle my own deals, accept modest advances and get rich on royalties. Everyone looks good and everyone makes out fine. Am I right or wrong?"

To help you judge whether he was right or wrong, read author John Greene's comparison of an author's earnings on a big-advance contract versus a deal for which he gets one-tenth of the advance, but twice the royalty.

I wonder what Asimov would have thought of the double royalty offered by Vanguard Press, Roger Cooper's Perseus Books imprint. Billed as "A Unique Collaboration Between Publisher and Author," Vanguard doesn't just offer half or even one-tenth of the advance paid by traditional publishers; it offers no advance at all. Cooper, whose imprint boasts such authors as David Morrell, Kat Martin, Mary Balogh, Eileen Goudge and Greg Bear (full disclosure: Bear is a Curtis Agency client and E-Reads author), reasons that the savings on front money can be invested in publicity and promotion. That means that each book must pay as it goes, and from its track record, Vanguard's books are doing just that. Another virtue of Vanguard's business model is that it pays royalties on a monthly basis, whereas most publishers issue statements only semi-annually.

Another approach is the one instituted by Robert Miller in his recently launched HarperStudio imprint. Perhaps inspired by the reported deal between Stephen King and Scribner, Miller offers a profit-sharing deal to authors. Publication expenses are defined, then pooled. The author receives nothing from the book's sale unless and until the expenses are recouped. Thereafter author and publisher split the profits. Miller's daring business model includes bookstore sales on a nonreturnable basis, a plan that at least one chain, Borders, has embraced. Had Asimov lived to see the day, he might have joined such illustrious HarperStudio authors as John Lithgow, Michael Eisner, Robert Greene, and Leonard Maltin (full disclosure again; Maltin is a Curtis Agency client)

Cooper's and Miller's business structures are not for every author, agent, or indeed for every publisher. But colleagues are watching their performance with great fascination, seeking not just a new way of doing business but a way to break the blockbuster mentality that has impoverished all but a few behemoth publishers, authors and agents. (Full disclosure: I'm not one of them.)

Richard Curtis