How I Got Published (Part II): Nicola Morgan

Last week Nicola Morgan told us a little about the writerly struggles she faced in the days before she was published. This week she reveals how she found herself an excellent agent, moved from not-really-published to very-well-published-indeed, and discovered her heartsong.


Ok, so there I am ridiculously pleased with my boring government documents but horribly desperate to be published “properly”. What happened next?

The school where I’d taught had lots of kids with dyslexia, and I’d learnt quickly about specific learning difficulties. I’d become fascinated. So I did a diploma in teaching pupils with dyslexia. That sparked an interest in the brain (which is a huge strand of my writing and speaking now) and a chance to be a recognised “expert” in dyslexia. As well as this work, I started another entrepreneurial idea: Magic Readers, which in 1999 became a website, The Child Literacy Centre (I actually only closed this down a few weeks ago after deciding that I no longer had enough time). Magic Readers was fabulous fun and very rewarding — groups of 4-year-olds in my house, having brilliant fun with books, games and activities to develop their pre-reading skills, but answering many, many emails from parents needing free advice and support was just too much for me on top of everything else I now do.

Although this had nothing to do with me becoming a novelist, it led to my first book contracts. See, (and here comes another secret, because I always forget that this is how I started) I self-published (badly) the Magic Readers books. I sold the first print run of 1,000, but sent some to the educational wing of Egmont. By chance, they were about to commission a major home-learning series. They asked me to write the whole series, for a glorious fee and my first experience of a nightmare deadline: twelve books in three weeks… (that series is called I Can Learn and there were many spin-offs which I also wrote. They are still market leaders, twelve years later — and I’ve had more dosh each time they reprint [I've shown the covers for two editions of just one book to emphasise this—Jane]. Recently Egmont paid me to allow them to put some material on their website. No royalties but no complaints).

Suddenly, I could call myself an author. I was published. I was earning. I was valued. My books were in shops. I was well.

But I wasn’t A Novelist. My second novel was still coming back. I’d had near-misses: a fabulous letter from Collins; a story being short-listed for the Ian St James Awards; several times when the novel got as far as acquisitions meetings. But nearly being published is still failing.

I started a third novel. I was full of hope. Sent the first part to an agent, got a lovely reply asking for the rest. (More rules broken — don’t send a novel out before it’s finished…). Went back to it, but didn’t finish it because...

… I read a new children’s novel. I’d been writing for adults and had never thought of writing for kids. Why would I? I wanted to break boundaries with language, not be held back by simplicity. Oh how wrong I was! The book I read was Skellig, by David Almond, a beautiful writer with an extraordinary voice. He expresses deep ideas in language which is only simple because it is perfect, not because it’s trying to avoid complexity. He is unselfconscious and his words are crystalline and generous where mine were convoluted and self-indulgent.

This was what I wanted to do. I’d been so tangled in prose that I’d forgotten about story, about plot. And now I could do both.

So I began to write Mondays Are Red. When I’d written about a third of it I became impatient and broke that rule again: I sent it to an agent and two publishers. The agent and one publisher wanted to see the rest. I explained to the agent that I hadn’t finished but would do so NOW, and to the publisher that I had interest from an agent and would be in touch soon. I then wrote furiously and sent it off to the agent. The agent said a) she loved it but b) she was ill and had decided she couldn’t take anyone on. Gah! I told the publisher that and sent them the rest of the book. Meanwhile, the second publisher, Hodder, said no. (Hold that thought.)

The first editor was very excited but wanted changes. She also suggested that I got an agent. I contacted two agents that day, one by letter because she had no email address and one by email. I included in my covering letters some glowing quotes from the editor.

The agent whom I’d contacted by snail mail phoned the next day and said she wanted to take me on. Just like that.

When I opened my emails, I found a reply from the agent I’d emailed, apologising for not contacting me immediately. She was interested. Yikes!

I contacted first agent, explained and said I needed to know if we were definitely going to be working together. Yes, she said. I got to turn an agent down!

To cut a long story short, my new agent and I worked on Mondays are Red, got it to the state we wanted it; but the editor wanted one change too many and my agent advised that we go elsewhere.

Which publisher took Mondays are Red? Hodder, who had turned it down when I’d sent it on my own… Useful things, agents.

Anyway, I did four novels with Hodder but when my editor left and went to Walker Books, I followed. I’ve written four teenage novels for Walker (including Wasted, publishing in 2010), a younger novel (Chicken Friend), and three teenage non-fiction books: The Leaving Home Survival Guide, Know Your Brain, and Blame My Brain. And around 80 home learning books for Egmont, including Thomas the Tank Engine books. Do I earn a living from all that? No. It’s the public speaking that provides the bread and butter. It’s amazingly hard to earn a living as a children’s writer, especially if you write mainly fairly literary stand-alone teenage novels as I do. It’s not how to earn a living but it’s how I feed my soul.

Do I wish I hadn’t had those years of failure? No. They stop me taking anything for granted or thinking too highly of myself. They are crucial to who I am now; they are also why I understand what gets published and why some perfectly wonderful writing does not.

Now, I am wholly well. I put that down to having repaired my bruised soul. In the dark days, a clever medical person told me we need heartsong in our lives and that the key to health was finding my heartsong. When he said that, I knew what he meant and where I needed to find it. That’s why I spend time blogging for talented, hard-working, non-delusional writers: because if you have that same need for heartsong, I understand.

Self-Publishing Sales Statistics Clarified

When I appeared on The Write Lines last week I mentioned that the average self-published book sells between forty and two hundred copies, depending on which set of figures you consult. Compared to mainstream publishing, where sales of three thousand copies for commercial fiction are considered by some to be disappointing, these figures are terribly low and the reaction from the other studio guests (a literary agent and three successful mainstream-published writers) was obvious: if you listen to the recording you can clearly hear them gasp.

After the broadcast I caught up with the reaction on Twitter, and found that a few writers were discussing the figures I quoted and reaching some rather unsound conclusions. While I'm not going to quote anyone here (it’s just not appropriate to single anyone out), I do think it’s important that I respond to their points. But first, a very quick primer on how sales figures are usually gathered in the book trade.

Nielsen Bookscan collects the sales figures of various online and physical retailers, then collates those figures and reports them to the book trade (it’s Nielsen which produces the best-seller charts we're all so envious of). However, as relatively few copies of self-published books are sold through bookshops, and quite a few self-published titles don’t even have the ISBNs which are essential for books to be tracked by Nielsen, the majority of self-published sales aren't included in Nielsen’s sales reports: therefore, if you rely on Nielsen to provide sales information about self-published books, you’re likely to be way out of whack with the real picture.

The Tweeters seemed to assume that I was relying on Nielsen, and that therefore my figures had to be way off.

They would have had a very valid point if I had relied on Nielsen’s reports for my statistics, but I used a far more generous source for the figures I quoted on air: the publishers themselves (there’s an obvious difficulty here: my figures came from companies which style themselves as self-publishing service providers, which many consider to be vanity presses: but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll ignore that issue, which is a little off-topic here. I shall return to it at another time, have no fear).

As most publishing service providers of this type offer only print-on-demand services, copies of the books that they publish are only ever printed in direct response to an order; a copy printed is a copy sold, no matter who buys it. So long as a book is printed and sent out from their premises they consider it a sale—when these companies report sales what they’re really reporting is the number of copies printed. You can see that there is not going to be a hidden stash of sales which fail to get included in the sales statistics: if anything, these companies are likely to over-report, rather than under-report, their sales.

As the sales figures I quoted came directly from POD-based self-publishing service providers, not only do those figures include all copies sold in bookshops or by Amazon, etc.; they also include all copies subsequently returned by bookshops to their authors (because with self-publishing the author is the publisher, and so they have to credit the bookseller’s account for those returned books even if they’re no longer in a sellable condition); they also include as sales every single copy that the authors bought and then sent out, for free, to reviewers, or gave away to family and friends; and every single copy which all those hopeful authors ordered, only to have them left mouldering away in their garages when they found they couldn't sell them—of which there are far too many.

Which means that it’s impossible for the sales figures I mentioned to be under-reported: unlike Nielsen's figures, they are going to be higher than the sales which really count in an author's career: the sales made to interested readers who considered the books potentially good enough to pay their hard-earned money for.

How Writers Can Save Publishing, One Book At A Time

When I visited Aberystwyth a couple of weeks ago, I did my usual thing: I left my husband on the beach to supervise our children, and I went for a walk around the town.

I've known Aberystwyth all my life: I have a lot of family there, and it's familiar to me in an infrequent, surreal way. I know the layout of its streets, but not the names of them; I know the history of the town as it appears in my family's folklore, which often juxtaposes oddly with the more widely-accepted versions; and I know a series of landmarks through the town which help me to knit together my own mental street-map, and which provide a framework for all those inherited memories I have of the place.

This time, though, one of those landmarks had gone. Galloway's, the independent bookshop on Pier Street, has closed. The space it left behind is now filled with racks of tracksuits and boxes of cheap trainers. There are other bookshops, of course (and the list you'll find in this link still includes Galloway's even though it's gone, which pleases me): there is a branch of Waterstone's on the main shopping street and a couple of hundred yards down from it the small but brilliantly-stocked Siop-y-Pethe, both of which are wonderful in their own ways, and there are a few others too: but Galloway's, with its top floor full of fiction, its racks of small-press books, its spooky, echoing basement full of textbooks and odd non-fiction: Galloway's, which I've never once left without a satisfyingly fat bundle of books—Galloway's is gone. Because, as several people told me sadly, it just wasn't making enough money to remain in business.

I stood outside the space-which-once-was-Galloway's and stared in at the bright white trainers and the young men fighting to get themselves the right sizes, the best designers. It was never so busy when it was full of books. I found myself thinking of the wonderful literary magazine Cadenza, which came to an end this year not because of a lack of quality or reputation, but because it didn't sell enough copies to pay for its own printing bill; and of Salt Publishing, which earlier this year asked us to buy just one book in order to keep it in business (which appears to have worked, I'm pleased to say).

So here is my point. It is difficult to get published: this we know. But imagine how much more difficult it would be if the market were halved. Fewer publishers in business translates directly into fewer publishing slots; and as bookshops close, books and literary magazines have fewer opportunities to get into readers hands, which reduces book sales even further.

Over the last year I've read a lot of blog posts which have bemoaned the perilous state of publishing today: the suggested solutions to publishing’s financial crisis have ranged from sacking all editors (and in so doing prevent them rejecting the Brave New Literary Voice Which Could Alone Save Publishing (which is usually, coincidentally, the voice of the person writing the blog post in question) to cutting literary agents out of publishing's food-chain (because in their role of literary gatekeeper—how I hate that phrase—they’ve rejected the Brave New Literary Voice Which Could Alone Save Publishing, and we know who that is, don’t we?). But very few of them have pointed out that writers could do a lot to help keep all these publishers and booksellers in business until business picks up.

Every time you submit your work anywhere, support your submission by buying a copy of the magazine that you’re submitting to, or a book from the publisher you’d like to publish you. If you’re writing a novel and are nowhere near ready to submit then think about who you would like to publish you once you’re ready to go and buy something from them.

Buy just one more book; subscribe to just one literary magazine; use your local bookshop if you can; and then keep going. Every single copy helps: and there’s no need to stop at just one. If you can afford to, buy an extra book or literary magazine every month or every week; if you can’t afford to then order books at your local library and read them all for free—the library pays for the books it lends out, and every little helps. Because every time a publisher ceases trading or a bookshop closes its doors, it becomes just a little bit harder for us to get published. And if we writers haven’t supported the independent publishers, the small imprints, the many tiny but wonderful literary and genre magazines which put out fabulous work, then we can’t complain when they close, and another opportunity is lost to us forever.



(The two stunning covers I've used to illustrate this piece belong to books translated by John K Bollard with photographs by Anthony Griffiths: The Mabinogi, and Companion Tales to the Mabinogi. They're both published by Gomer, and I bought them from Siop-y-Pethe. If you're interested in the Mabinogion, or in Welsh/Celtic literature, culture or countryside, buy them both: they are the most beautiful books I've seen in a good long while.)

Applying For Arts Council Funding

My thanks to Daniel Blythe for this piece.



I've applied for four Arts Council England grants in my life—three between 2000-2005 for community-based arts projects (two successful, one not) and one in 2008 for my own writing development (successful).

1. Read everything you can about Arts Council grants on their website.

2. You don't have to be a published writer. What you do need to do is to demonstrate that the project you are undertaking is a "literary" contribution and that it represents a turning-point in your career—that completing this work will enhance your artistic career and take it off in an interesting direction. In my case it was my first novel for children after fifteen years of writing for adults. In the case of a friend who was also awarded a grant, it was his first full poetry collection, for which he already had an offer to publish.

3. Give your local Arts Council office a call and talk through your idea for a project with one of the development workers. They want to help you and should be able to tell you if it sounds viable or not.

4. If they sound at all enthusiastic about it, then go to the "funding" page at the Arts Council website and download their application form and notes.

5. Be absolutely sure you know what the budget for your project is going to be. If this is going to be a book or script you are working on at home, this will include things like what proportion of utility bills you will be using, your stationery costs, etc.

6. You need to find 10% of the cost yourself, and be very clear where this is coming from. I funded mine through my private work teaching and critiquing manuscripts.

7. At some stage, talk to someone else who has done an Arts Council grant application. I found it very valuable to speak to another published writer who had just received notification that his application was successful. He let me look at his application and supporting statement so I could see an example of something which had got the nod.

8. If you want a quick response, go for one of the smaller grants (less than £5,000), as they turn those around within three months. A larger one (£5,000 and over) will take six months.

9. One tricky thing on the application is the question of the numbers of artists, participants and audience. This is easy-ish to answer if you are putting on a play or a community writing project. It's not so easy if you are writing a book and don't even have an offer to publish yet, let alone any idea of the print-run. If you've been published before, then I can only suggest working out the audience from what a reasonable print-run would be based on your previous career. If you haven't, then I'd suggest asking a published writer or the Society of Authors for advice.

10. Sometimes, the Arts Council will come back after the application is in and ask you for more information on your project outside the boundaries of the application form—this is usually a good sign. It happened to me and I ended up writing an extra 1000 words on the project. I was grateful for this opportunity—I thought it could only be a good thing, and I was right.

11. You are more likely to get the award if you seem professional, focused and on top of your material. Woolly, vague applications are no good. Also be able to say exactly how long it will take you and how you will evaluate it at the end.

12. If you are successful, you may be asked to do some publicity. I've not been asked to do an awful lot. I was featured in some local newspaper articles and I have been happy to put an Arts Council Funded logo and link on my website. I wasn't asked to do the latter, but it just seemed polite. And of course I will mention the grant in the Author's Note at the start of the book, if and when it is published.

Guest Post: Being A Writer, by Dave Dittell

Few writers make much money from their writing alone, and most depend on other work to provide them with a living wage. Dave Dittell is one of many writers who amazes me: how can he be as productive as he is with so little writing time available? I offer him my thanks for this contribution to my blog, and my admiration for all that he achieves.


Wake up, shut off alarm, don't snooze. Used to be a snoozer, but now you're not. Now you're a teacher. It seemed a perfect fit for a budding writer, a chance to immerse yourself in the English language. Your day job would be related to your dream job; it felt like cheating.

Yesterday: taught all day, wrote all afternoon, prepared and graded papers into late night. Now it's early. Still dark out. Four hours sleep. More papers to grade. You spend five minutes per paper max, but it's still too much. Can you really help someone become a better writer in under five minutes a day?

Coffee. Bathroom smells like coffee-pee. Spit out showerwater yellow with caffeine. Never spend more time showering than it takes to grade a paper.

Teaching is two jobs. The in-class job and the out-of-class job. Your third job is writing. You need at least four hours of sleep, so writing is only part-time, even though you'd do it all day if you could.

You have meetings, you have projects. Projects move forward, projects fall apart. Class goes well, class falls apart. Every day, inside your class room, you stand before them and provide hope and strength and knowledge. You represent opportunity; you represent it so well that your class has a future fireman, a future astronaut, a future Air Force pilot. And eleven future engineers, which you think is funny. There are no future writers, but then again, you're a future writer.

Should they want this?

Grade papers. Run-on sentence, run-on sentence, fragment, fragment, run-on sentence, past/present inconsistent, run-on sentence. Same mistakes every week, but they're getting it. Some of them could barely write in English when they first walked through the door. Run-on sentence, fragment, fragment, singular/plural inconsistency, run-on sentence. How can you get Jake to try, Sarah to stop thinking about her mom's cancer, Frank to stop disrupting class? Can you really bring yourself to mention ADD to a twelve year-old's parents?

When you write, you think of them.

When you teach, you think about your stories.

Mouth tastes of reheated coffee. You used to drink coffee and not sleep for hours. Now you sip right up until the moment you collapse.

Get to school early and jot a few notes on your lesson plan. Come up with a good line, an important plot point, and tuck it into your back pocket.

Class starts in twenty minutes and it's the only time of the day when you have absolutely nothing to do. No papers to grade, no blank page, no vocabulary words to pretend you didn't look up the night before.

This is the twenty minutes of the day you most look forward to, more than the writing, because, during the writing, all you can think about is how it's still just the part-time job.


Dave Dittell is a 25 year-old screenwriter currently at work adapting a comedic novel for 363 Entertainment. He operates Alphabet Soup Kitchen, a blog dedicated to young and struggling writers, and has volunteered and worked in education throughout the past five years.

Income: Self Publishing vs Mainstream Publication

I always advise writers to exhaust all possible routes into commercial publication before they consider self-publishing their work. Recently, I was told that I was wrong. The reasoning went something like this:

Forget about going to one of the big publishers. Put your work out yourself, pay for your own barcode and ISBN, and hire someone to sell it for a cut of the cover price. You’ll make far more money out of it than you’d earn in royalties.

On a book-by-book basis, that’s probably true. A typical royalty for a commercially-published book is 10%, which equates to a per-unit rate of 90p on a book with a cover price of £9. With self-publishing you can set your own cover price, so it’s possible to earn far more per copy.

There are costs associated with those self-publishing sales, though: it would be difficult to hire anyone competent to sell your books on percentage, as each bookshop visit would barely cover the travelling costs incurred even if every bookshop approached took half a dozen copies each.

Even if you do the legwork yourself you’re still likely to end up losing money because of those travelling costs, and because you will only be able to cover a very small part of the country.

Commercial publishers have their own sales and distribution networks in place. Their sales representatives frequently visit every bookshop in the country, and discuss their new and forthcoming books.

Commercial publishers also have publicity departments which routinely send out stacks of review copies to TV programmes, newspapers and magazines, to ensure that potential readers will get to hear about each book as it is released.

The self-publisher simply cannot match this vast sales machine, and so is unlikely to sell anything like as many books: few self-published titles sell more than one hundred copies, while most commercially-published books sell more than a thousand.

And that’s why I almost always recommend mainstream publishing rather than self-publishing. It is likely that the royalty rate per book will be lower than with self-publishing: but the overall sales, and therefore the total amount earned, and the number of readers reached will be so much better that mainstream publication has to be the obvious first choice.

Guest Post: The Implications Of Second-Hand Book Sales

My thanks to Nicola Morgan for this post.


Second-hand books—what’s not to like? The ultimate in recycling, they raise money for charities and independent second-hand bookshops, and offer cheap reading material for those who can’t afford the full price.

At which point, allow me to draw some deep breaths, because I’m trying to be moderate and not mount my hobby-horse for a full-scale rant. Nor would I like you to think that I would steal the food from the mouths of starving babies who are helped by Oxfam and the like. Thing is, I know that at some point I am going to mention Amazon Marketplace....

Let me start by being incontrovertibly reasonable and stating What I Have No Problem With:

• The genuinely second-hand trade in out-of-print books (even though you’ll often have difficulty in determining whether they are, so let’s rephrase that to “books which you can’t buy or order new”).
  
  
• Ditto out-of-copyright books (because the author has been dead a long time—seventy years in UK law—and they can’t use the money).
  
  
• The argument that one’s book being sold in a second-hand shop may create new readers, who may buy or recommend your other books.
  
  
• The giving of used books to schools, libraries (if only they would accept them, but thereby hangs another gripe), hospitals, prisons or any other such organisation where the books will be read on-site.
  
  
• Any scheme which offers good reading material for people on low incomes or reluctant readers.

Thing is, the second-hand book trade poses a specific problem for authors because of how we earn from our work. The advance + royalty system means that we earn when a new copy of our book is sold, but not if it’s sold second-hand (you may know that in the UK now, visual artists DO earn a second royalty when their work is re-sold in a gallery or at auction).

So, any second-hand purchase which replaces a full-price purchase is lost income. This wasn’t a big deal when second-hand book-selling was small business. But now, it’s HUGE.

Take Oxfam. From figures I could quickly find, each Oxfam bookshop would expect to make around £175,000 per year; and bearing in mind they don’t pay most staff and don’t pay business rates, they have an advantage over “ordinary” second-hand bookshops, many of which are complaining about unfair competition. In 2002, Oxfam sold 12 million books in the UK, and with many new shops opening every year that figure must have grown. Forgive me if I don’t search for that info for you—I’m trying to write a book and earn a living at the moment....

Now, I’d hate to knock Oxfam. But I do argue for an informed choice. And my choice is to give money to my favoured charities (which may include Oxfam), but to buy books from a proper shop and support authors and literature.

But what about people who can’t afford full-price books?

• It’s not only just the economically deprived who use charity shops. People on all incomes use charity shops, for many good reasons.


• But, if you want to save money, use public libraries, where books are free AND the author earns money each time. So, don’t throw the poverty line at me—libraries are the best levellers of all.

And, er... Amazon Marketplace?

Thing about Amazon Marketplace is that the word “second-hand” takes on a blurry hue. Every author I know has found their books listed, sometimes for absurd prices (one of mine is currently available for 1p—apart from the HUGE postage charge) as being second-hand before publication day. Where do these books come from? Back of a lorry? Returns to publishers (which means they’ve already had the royalty payment DEDUCTED from the author, sometimes at a higher rate than the royalty paid to the author in the first place—oh, don’t get me started on that)? I once had a consignment of books go completely missing between warehouse and a school where I was doing a talk. I’d love to know precisely who ended up making money on them—it sure as hell wasn’t me.

Amazon Marketplace is a stunning business model: three parties make a profit—Amazon, the seller, and the postal service. Never mind the author, eh?

Look, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for free trade; I’m all for people getting a bargain; I’m all for charities making money; I’m even all for businesses making a profit. But what I’m most for is every customer making an informed choice. And if you don’t care about the author, fine: that’s your choice.

I call the concept Fair Reading. It’s explained in detail on this Facebook group. I am not telling people not to buy second-hand, or to feel guilty if they do—I want everyone to be aware:

• that most authors earn very little—according to recent Society of Authors figures (for the UK) two thirds of professional authors earn less than half the average wage;
  
  
• that author income is based on a few pence earned on each new book sold;
  
  
• that if authors can’t earn from writing, they won’t be able to write, and then we’ll all be the poorer.

I have been remarkably moderate today, for me. Another day, remind me to tell you what happened when I spoke to people (yes, really, people) at Amazon about it. And I also tried to work out how we could do for authors what was done for artists in the EU—the Authors Licensing and Collecting Authority could manage the collection of second-hand royalties—but we reckoned that it would be too punitive to the charities and we don’t want to knock charities. So, all I’m left with is the power of education and the generosity of people’s natures and sense of fairness: do join me in spreading the word about informed choice and Fair Reading.

The message is simple: Buy your books at the best price you can for the author, or borrow from a public library. If we love books, we need authors.

©2009 Nicola Morgan

YouWriteOn and Arts Council England: What's The Connection?

There’s a lot of confusion over who runs YouWriteOn, and how it’s related to Arts Council England. People seem to think that YouWriteOn is run by Arts Council England, organised by Arts Council England, or part of Arts Council England in some other nebulous way, but this is not the case: YouWriteOn’s only apparent connection with Arts Council England is through the substantial funding it has received from that organisation.

Arts Council England’s funding has forged a link between Arts Council England and YouWriteOn which many people perceive as a stamp of legitimacy. When the YouWriteOn publishing scheme was first launched, there were writers who saw it as a chance to get published by Arts Council England; others felt reassured that the scheme had to be above-board because of Arts Council England’s apparent involvement. However, when Arts Council England was asked for clarification of its involvement in the publishing scheme it replied:

YouWriteOn.com receives funding from Arts Council England to run its website forum and professional critique service for writers.

Arts Council England has not funded, and has not endorsed, the separate Print-on-Demand self-publishing service offered through the site.

As with any self-publishing service, Arts Council England would encourage writers to read the terms and conditions carefully and make an informed judgement about the service on offer. If in doubt, you should contact the Society of Authors http://www.societyofauthors.org/ who have information sheets and guidance about self-publishing and vanity publishing.

We have asked the site moderator to make this absolutely clear, so that there is no confusion about the involvement of Arts Council England.

You’ll find Arts Council England’s letter reproduced in full in comment number 5 to this blog post. Soon after that letter appeared on the blog, a disclaimer was posted on YouWriteOn’s home-page which stated that its vanity publishing arm was separate from the Arts Council England-funded area of the site: that disclaimer has since been edited, but at the time of writing it reads,

The Arts Council fund critiques for new writers from leading publishers each month on YouWriteOn.com.YouWriteOn also offers its own book publishing initiative, funded solely by us.

Despite YouWriteOn apparently being taken to task by Arts Council England and instructed to distinguish between the Arts Council England-funded and vanity-funded areas of the site, the Arts Council England logo still appears at the top of every one of YouWriteOn’s web pages—including the pages which offer the vanity publishing packages.

Some writers have now contacted Arts Council England (and here's a handy list of its chief executives, just in case you were considering doing the same) to ask why it funds a vanity publisher, but have received what they consider to be less-than-satisfactory replies: while I’ll not reproduce them here, I suspect that anyone with a complaint would do better to contact the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Government department to which Arts Council England reports: one of the ministers there is the rather effective Barbara Follett, who also happens to be married to a writer called Ken something-or-other.

It’s widely felt that it’s inappropriate for Arts Council England to be associated with a vanity publisher in this way: vanity publishing doesn’t support writers, it exploits them, and Arts Council England has apparently stated independently that it does not and will not condone such schemes. While I’ve been unable to find written evidence of this stance, it seems likely considering Arts Council England’s remit to support and encourage the arts. My opinion is that YouWriteOn should either accept funding from Arts Council England or continue its vanity publishing operation, but that it shouldn’t run the two projects side by side: there are too many conflicts of interest between them. But YouWriteOn is unlikely to give up its Arts Council England funding just because I think that it should, because there's too much at stake: it's received nearly £85,000 from Arts Council England in the last three and a half years (the following links will download PDFs when you click on them):

June 2005: £29,896
February 2007: £24,000
2007-8: £10,000
February 2008: £10,000
October 2008: £11,000

Total Arts Council funding received by YouWriteOn since June 2005: £84,896

I’m particularly interested by the £11,000 paid last October: the grants information form states that this amount was paid to Edward Smith of YouWriteOn.com to fund “A major new writing competition in partnership with Random House. This will give new writers the opportunity to have their books published by a major publisher”. I’m intrigued to know more about this competition: this funding was approved four months ago, and yet no announcement of any competition has yet been made. I wonder what Random House will have to say about that?

This Arts Council England funding, plus the £11,000 or so which YouWriteOn has received as a result of its vanity publishing operation, works out to a rather nice turnover of around £27,400 each year—impressive for a start-up business which seems to be run by just one man. It’s worth noting that there are a few layers of potential income that I’ve not included here:

• Its original vanity-publishing package, which it runs in association with Legend Press, costs £399, £699, £899 or £1,499, depending on which package you choose.


• YouWriteOn runs a paid-for critiquing service: prices start at £75 for a short story of up to 3,000 words, and then increase with your page count: a report on a 400-page novel would set you back £550. Writers are asked to state which three advisors they'd prefer to comment on their work: while the people who provide these reports do seem reputable and experienced (although I haven't checked out any of the names), I could find no guarantee that anyone would get the advisor(s) they requested.


• It’s not yet clear how many books YouWriteOn/Legend has vanity-published at £39.99 each and it seems that not all books have yet been published, so the initial income from this will almost certainly reach a figure higher than the £10,906.35 I quoted yesterday.


• YouWriteOn will continue to earn money from every one of the sales of those vanity-published books as their writers work to sell them.

Meanwhile, I’ve found this quote about YouWriteOn and the man who runs it, Edward Smith, buried in the depths of this PDF from Arts Council England:

Edward Smith, YouWriteOn’s director, provided the design spec for the site, and manages it from day to day, with some support from web company ZARR. In terms of user experience, the site is clunky, full of broken links and difficult to navigate, with forums that mysteriously open at particular hours only. Nonetheless, YouWriteOn.com has 6,000 members, and receives millions of page views a month. There is clearly a hunger for these services. (Edward used to work in a Citizens Advice Bureau and sees his work as being about information and empowerment.)

(Bolding mine: I added the link to YouWriteOn's "web company", too: perhaps it knows what's happened to the forum.)

Just yesterday, Tom Chalmers of Legend Press told The Bookseller that the project has "largely been a success". Meanwhile, there are many writers who Smith promised to publish in time for Christmas who, despite making numerous attempts to contact Smith, have still heard nothing from him, several weeks later. Many don’t know whether or not their books will even be published; and while several have now cancelled their contracts, few have received any confirmation of their cancellations, leaving them worried about the future of their books.

I wonder just how empowered they feel right now.

What Writers Earn (Part II)

In 2005, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society commissioned a study of authors’ earnings. Its findings* make depressing reading, as did those from a similar study carried out by the Society of Authors in 2000. The ALCS study established the following statistics for UK writers.

The top 10% of UK authors earned more than 50% of total reported income, while the bottom 50% earned less than 10% of total reported income. Which means that for every £100 earned through writing in the UK, the top-earning 10% shared out £50 between them, while the lowest-earning half of all writers had to make do with sharing out just £10 between them all. The remaining £40 was shared between the 40% of writers who occupied that relatively middle-to-high-end income bracket.

60% of people who considered themselves “professional authors” cannot support themselves from writing alone.

If you want to earn a living wage you’d be better off working as an electrician: their average earnings (mean/median) were £23,985/£23,251 compared to writers average earnings of £16,531/£4,000 for the same period.

In the five years from 2000 to 2005, the average reported income for writers dropped from £16,600/£6,333 to £16,531/£4,000.

Only 20.3% of UK writers earn all their living from writing—which is just as well when you consider the annual average income levels.

I think I’m going to retrain to be an electrician.


*The link takes you to a page where you can download a PDF of the study's findings.

Paying Back Your Advance

Very occasionally, a publisher will ask a writer it has under contract to pay back the advance that was paid.

This might happen if, for example, the deadline passed months ago but the writer still shows no sign of submitting a finished manuscript; or if the writer submits a vampire novel about World War I instead of the non-fiction book about the history of cockle fishing off the Welsh coast that he was contracted to write.

If a book is published but fails to sell in any significant numbers, though, the advance is the author's to keep. Even if the book doesn't earn out. Despite what many vanity presses insist.

Competitions And Anthologies

There's a failsafe way to make money out of writers.

Run a short story or poetry competition, and attract as many entries as you can: the internet makes it easy to find writers' groups and message boards where you can advertise your competitions for free. You don't even have to charge an entry fee (although you can if you think they'll pay): just get those entries in, as quickly as you can.

You don't need to read the entries: it's quantity you want here, not quality. Just bundle all of them altogether into a single anthology, stick an ISBN onto the cover, and download it to a POD provider. And that's all your editing and production work done.

The marketing on this project is very easy too: all you have to do is tell all the entrants that they've won a place in the competition, and that their work will appear in your prizewinners’ anthology.

Add the anthology to Amazon, and you're away. Make sure you price it qute high, to maximise your return; then wait for the orders to come in. Chances are that most of the people who are included in the anthology will buy themselves at least one copy; probably more. And each copy that's bought brings in more cash for you, for very little effort.

As I said, it's a failsafe way to make money out of writers. It's just not a very nice one.

Cover Price, Gross or Net?

Royalties can be calculated in all sorts of ways. They’re usually calculated as a percentage of the selling price, which seems pretty straightforward: but there are all sorts of ways that things can get complicated, and it’s essential that writers check their contracts carefully and ensure that they understand all that it implies.

A percentage of cover price is nice and simple, so long as the cover price is set: a royalty of 10% of £10.00 will always end up with the payment of £1.00 per book sold.

A percentage of profits is not nearly so desirable: it might seem better initially, as the percentages given based on this calculation are often higher than those calculated on cover price. But so much depends on how the publisher calculates those profits: do they refer only to the profits made by your book, or to profits made by the whole company? If the latter, your book could end up subsidising the publication of other less successful books; and you’re always at risk of subsidising a feckless publisher’s fondness for new computers or business lunches.

Things are bad enough if royalties are calculated on gross profits: but if they’re calculated on nett profits, then your receipts are going to be even lower.

The problems are compounded by the non-standard contracts common with some of the less standard presses: YouWriteOn’s publishing arm promises a 60% royalty “after printing costs”, but defines neither the printing costs nor the retail price leaving their authors with no accurate idea of how much money they’ll earn from each copy sold.

Special Christmas Offer!

Dear Author,

As Christmas approaches, we want to say thank you to our authors for all the wonderful support you’ve given us over this last year. So here's our latest special offer for you all.

For a limited time only, all our authors will be given AN INCREDIBLE FORTY-FIVE PERCENT DISCOUNT on all orders.

There’ll be FREE SHIPPING for all orders of twenty copies or more.

And if you order fifty copies or more, you'll get AN EXTRA FIVE PERCENT DISCOUNT across your whole order!

This one-off holiday offer has to expire at close of business on Friday. Don’t get left without books for Christmas: place your orders now, so that we can ensure your books are delivered in good time for the holiday season.

Thank you!

Your Author Support Team

You don't see Random House sending letters like this to the writers they publish. That's because Random House is a commercial, mainstream publisher which sells its books to readers, and not to the people who wrote them.

Special author promotions like this are a sure sign that you're dealing with a vanity publisher, and not with a mainstream publisher.

If you get a letter like this from your publisher, take a moment to consider that few self-published or vanity-published books ever sell as many as 100 copies before you take advantage of their offer. Because if you don't, you're likely to end up with some very expensive boxes stacked up in your hallway for the next couple of years.

YouWriteOn Publishing: What’s In It For The Writer?

Following yesterday’s post about the cost of publishing with YouWriteOn, I’ve been asked how writers can work out for themselves whether or not this is a good deal.

Because we don't know how YouWriteOn will define the "printing costs" it mentions in its contract we don’t yet know what share of the revenue will be used as a basis for royalty calculations; and we don't know where YouWriteOn will set its retail prices. This makes it impossible to provide an exact breakdown: but I can make some rough comparisons.

Last year, I put a small book together using Lulu. The book was text-only and 28,000 words long, which came to about 110 pages: Lulu’s printing costs came to £3.92 per copy. I’ll set a cover price of £5.99, and will assume that YouWriteOn isn’t going to ramp up its printing costs over the actual figures.

I shall now play around a little with the numbers with the help of my lovely assistant (who is aged 13 and is top of his year in maths, clever boy). As you read along, though, do remember that longer books will have higher printing costs; and if YouWriteOn sets its printing costs higher, or its retail prices lower, the returns on its scheme will be lowered significantly.

Let’s start with the cost of the ISBN, because this seems to have tempted quite a lot of you. An ISBN costs £39.95 if you publish through YouWriteOn compared to £105.75 if you buy your own block of ten ISBNs direct from the UK ISBN agency (you can’t buy ISBNs singly). YouWriteOn does offer an immediate saving of £65.80 over self-publishing if you are only interested in publishing one book: but in return, you’re paying 40% of all future profits on the book to YouWriteOn.

A printing cost of £3.92 and a cover price of £5.99 leaves £2.07 potential profit, of which I would receive 60% (£1.24), with 40% (83p) going to YouWriteOn. If I published the book myself, I would receive 100% of that £2.07.

Using YouWriteOn, I’d have to sell 33 copies of the book to bring in £40.92, which would recoup the cost of the ISBN and get me into profit by a whole 97p; by publishing the book myself, I’d have to sell 52 copies to earn back the cost of the ISBN and bring me a very slightly larger £1.89 profit.

If I published more than one book, though, things get a little more interesting. By going through YouWriteOn I’d still have to sell 33 copies of each and every book in order to recoup that initial cost, because YouWriteOn offers a per-book price only, whereas by buying that block of ten ISBNs my break-even point is reduced. By publishing two books myself, the break-even point comes at 26 copies each; by publishing three books myself, that break-even point comes after I’ve sold 18 copies of each of the books.

After that break-even point is passed, each book published by YouWriteOn will still only earn me a royalty of 60% of income after they’ve deducted their printing costs, whereas I’d keep 100% of it from each book I self-published. In the projections that follow, I’ve deducted the cost of the ISBNs for the sake of simplicity.

If I sold 75 copies of a single title through YouWriteOn I’d earn £53.05, but by publishing it myself I’d bring in £49.50: in this instance, YouWriteOn is a better option by a narrow margin of £3.55.

If I sold 75 copies each of two books through YouWriteOn I’d earn £106.10, but by selling 75 copies each of two self-published books I’d earn £204.75. In this instance, self-publishing is a better option by a rather nice margin of £98.65.

If I sold 100 copies of a single title through YouWriteOn I’d earn £84.05, but by publishing it myself I’d bring in £101.25. In this instance, self-publishing is a better option by a margin of £17.20.

If I sold 100 copies of two books through YouWriteOn I’d earn £168.10, but by selling 100 copies each of two self-published books I’d earn £308.25. In this instance, self-publishing is a better option by a very nice margin of £140.15.

Remember that this model is based on a smallish book with low comparable printing costs, and I’ve assumed that YouWriteOn is going to price the books fairly, and not ramp up those undefined “printing costs”. A legitimately self-published book has a much better chance of getting into the bookshops than those which go through the YouWriteOn scheme, because of the problems with discounts that I outlined in my post yesterday. And very few self-published books sell as many as 75 copies, without these obstacles in their way.

Who Makes The Money When A Book Is Sold?

Yesterday I read a blog comment in which a writer insisted that she preferred to self-publish her work, as commercial presses paid such low royalties; this morning I overheard someone complaining that it was no wonder that writers are so rich, as books were so expensive. Leaving aside the value of books and the wisdom of self-publishing for a moment, let's consider exactly where the money goes from the sale of a commercially-published book.

According to Tim Hely Hutchinson, writing in The Author in September 1998, the money is split like this. Figures in brackets give real amounts due on a book with a cover price of £10.00.

Manufacturing Costs: 15% (£1.50)
Royalties: 8% (£0.80)
Distribution/Marketing: 8% (£0.80)
Publisher’s Overheads: 9% (£0.90)
Trade Discount: 55% (£5.50)
Publisher’s Net Profit: 5% (£0.50)

Wholesalers buy the books from the publishers at around 55% discount, and then sell the books on to bookshops for around 35% discount. Remember though that not all of that is profit: wholesalers and bookshops have high overheads to cover, like rent, heat, staff, cleaning and advertising. Then there are the discounts that bookshops offer: all of those three-for-two offers also have to be paid for here. It's estimated that once the bookshop has covered all of these various costs, their profit per book sold drops to below 5% of the cover price.

It's not quite clear from this analysis quite who makes the most money out of every deal. But what is clear is that if you do it right, publishing is a very expensive business indeed.

Remaindered Books

While sales of some long-published books are sometimes resurrected by a chance remark or a turn in world events, and a few continue to sell well for years, most books enjoy their highest sales during the few weeks immediately after publication.

Once that first flush of sales has passed, what happens to a book?

It becomes part of the publishers backlist: it will probably have turned a profit for the publisher already and so any further sales will provide a welcome income. If it continues to sell consistently, even in smaller numbers, chances are that it's publisher will keep it in print.

There is a cost to the publisher associated with the book: it isn't free to warehouse the remaining copies, and as numbers dwindle they become harder to locate and store, and more difficult to maintain in a clean, new condition. When the income generated by a title is exceeded by the cost of continuing to sell it, the book is declared out of print and all remaining stocks are disposed of.

Where possible, those remaining stocks are sold as "remaindered books" to the chains which specialise in this trade, like "The Works", in the UK: but if the titles don't have much popular appeal, then the last step for them is the pulping machine.

Perpetuating The Myths

While browsing recently, I found an article called How Amazon Could Change Publishing, written by Sramana Mitra. According to her biography she has no direct experience within publishing, and it shows.

Mitra’s article is full of the sort of errors that just ten minutes of basic research could have avoided. Most of her errors have already been addressed in the comments which follow the article, and as Nora Roberts has already made her feelings about the piece clear, I’m not going to rehash them here. Just read it, and be amazed.

The Street-Smart Writer, by Jenna Glatzer

Jenna Glatzer is a skilled, knowledgeable writer, and is the founder of AbsoluteWrite, which supports the best writers’ message board on the internet.

In 2006, the Nomad Press published The Street-Smart Writer, which Jenna co-wrote with Daniel Steven, a noted publishing attorney. I’ve bought several copies of this book since, and dished it out to my writing friends. It’s informative, accessible and endlessly useful, and I refer to it almost daily.

If you live in America, you can now download The Street-Smart Writer for free. If you live anywhere else you’re going to have to buy it for yourself.

If you’re a writer, get hold of a copy even if, like me, you have to hand over some hard cash to get it. It’s invaluable (although I wish they'd had the vision to put a shark-bite on the cover).

The Society of Authors

I’d advise anyone with the offer of a contract but no agent to negotiate it for them to head straight for the Society of Authors. Once you have that offer in your hand you can join for a relatively low fee (£90 at the time of writing) and once you’ve joined you can send your contract in for a completely free review. The last time I used this service I got four or five closely-typed pages back from them which advised on several revisions I should request, and gave the reasons for those revisions. If I had paid a solicitor for this service it would have cost me several hundred pounds, which made the cost of joining the Society well worth it.

They run lectures on many aspects of publishing, publish a fantastic magazine which is only available to members, always seem to have on hand appropriate statistics and information about the industry, and are very valuable in all sorts of other subtle ways.

How Huge Advances Go Wrong

Some time ago, I read a piece online in which an anonymous writer revealed how her writing career had failed despite her receiving advances that most people would be thrilled with. You can read that piece here.

I've just stumbled upon another piece* that was written by SF writer Charlie Stross in response to it, which explains very nicely where things probably went wrong for her. He does a good job, that Mr Stross.

* Here's a direct link to it, as for some reason the embedded link won't work:

www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-old/2004/03/22/

You'll have to copy it across to your browser manually, I'm afraid: I'll fix it properly as soon as I can work out how.