Over on the GenReality blog this week, multipublished author Lynn Viehl breaks down her first royalty statement for her book TWILIGHT FALL, which hit NYT’s mass-market best-seller list last July. It’s quite the eye-opener, starting with the fact that one doesn’t see the first royalty check until more than 9 months after the book is published (after it takes up to 2 years from sale to see the book published in the first place). This book, which debuted at No. 19 on the list, did not make enough in royalties the first six months to pay back a $50,000 advance (which after agent’s cut and taxes and a few office expenses came to $26,000 net), so Viehl got a check for $0.
Wow. I’ve been targeting genre because I think these books get more readers than does literary fiction (it looks like TWILIGHT FALL sold more than 60,000 books July-Dec 2008 while many lit-novels rack up less than 3,000), but I also thought that would mean I would make more money. But if no one but the rock-star writers is making that much money, maybe I need to rethink this.
Idea No. 1: I have to shoehorn some of the topics and themes I like to write about into the rigid format of genre romance; maybe I should just write what I want. Idea No. 2: Maybe the way to get the most readers isn’t to publish through, say, Harlequin (which has tens of thousand of readers who automatically buy all the books in their favorite line every month), but through the Web. Samhain, for example, offers no advances, but pays more-generous royalties and pays them in months, not twice a year. I’ve found it difficult to picture my stories coming out as e-books, since I do not read e-books, but maybe it’s time to buy that Sony Reader and grow the e-crowd. If I had to choose more readers or more money, I’d pick more readers, but I do want to make some money. And someday I’d like to go part-time at my day job; I like working too much to quit altogether but I’d love a bit more time for writing.
Of course, I’ll keep doing what it’s most important for now—writing books that are getting better and better. But how readers will see them is an open question.
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