ESSAY: Which Would You Buy: A Mercedes or a Book?
by Stephen Morrill, Director, WritersCollege.com
As a full-time generalist freelance writer I have done all manner of things, including a few books. But one thing that I run up against from time to time—and you will too, once word gets around that you are "some kind of writer"—is the person wanting me to write up this idea or that book.
You may have heard this from a friend or relative or a total stranger at a cocktail party: "Oh. I have this idea. I bet you could write it up...." This is sometimes accompanied by a suggestion that you can keep some share of the royalties that will pour in. This amounts to arguing over how much of zero you will get to keep. Your helpful friend may even think the idea is worth much more than the actual writing. After all, anyone can write a book; that's why they sell pencils. It's the idea that is worth money, n'est pas?
Funny how the idea-guys never seem to want to do the actual work.
While you may betempted to strangle the speaker, I suggest restraint. That person has absolutely no idea of how much work is involved in writing for publication. As I'm in this for the CashBucksMoney and not for fun, I also find that they have no clue as to what writing costs. If you can afford the time to do favors, good on you, but bear with my rant here.
Maybe twice a year I get requests to write books. In most instances I turn those down flat, period, end of discussion. The odds of the average civilian having a clue about what he or she is even asking me to do, let alone about what he or she should pay me to do it, are so small it's not worth pursuing.
Occasionally, I will follow up. And one standard line I use in the initial interview is, "A book will cost you as much as a Mercedes. But the car will get old and need replacing, while the book is forever." This brings us very swiftly to the important fork in the road: Does the potential client have the CashBucksMoney and the desire to spend it on me? Or was this just a lot of wishful thinking?
I had one such encounter a few weeks ago. I only took the meeting because (a) a magazine publisher I knew asked me to talk to her friend and (b) because that friend was a medical doctor and thus, possibly in the Mercedes car class. Also, the doctor lived about 40 minutes north of me in the hilly part of Florida and it was a nice day for a drive, and I take Wednesdays off anyway, and I had not seen a hill in a long time.
The doctor was a Jeep driver. Humm... Her own family practice clinic was clean and nice but her children's clinic across the parking lot looked like I could throw a rat through the walls. Maybe a family practice MD in a small town in Florida was not automatically wealthy, especially if she also had a reputation of being kind to a lot of poor patients and supportive of the community.
She described what she wanted: A story about her life from small town to school to living in a small town again. I asked some questions:
Background information: She had zip. I'd have to interview her, a lot, to get the information I needed. This almost doubles the time and money spent on the book.
Platform: A 'platform' is publisher-speak for "just how famous are you? Are you on Oprah often? Have your own radio show? Have a column in newspapers? Make a ton of speeches to large audiences who know of you and why you are famous?" Needless to say, publishers almost never want autobiographies from less than the rich and famous. And famous is better.
The response: No platform and, furthermore, she didn't like my calling her book an autobiography. What else I was supposed to call a story about her life, I was not clear on.
Publishers and Distribution: I explained briefly the various forms of book publication and distribution. And I'll summarize those below so skip it here.
She adamentally refused to get into marketing her book. A royalty-paying publisher would have hurled her out the window at that point. I tried again and her response to my comment about needing to get out and actively market her book, as she was not well-known outside of her own town left me stunned: "Well, we read Shakespeare, and we don't know him." I guess that's true. I just never before had someone who wrote nothing other than prescriptions compare herself to The Bard.
Here is what I wrote to her after the meeting.
It was fascinating to talk with you yesterday about your proposed book. And, to recap our conversation:
- What you are proposing to write is a ghosted autobiography. I realize that you seem not to like the term “biography” but that’s what any publisher would categorize it as.
- Any royalty-paying publisher would need to know your intended audience and what organizations you belong to where you may be able to get the word out about your book. Even royalty-paying publishers expect the authors to aggressively sell the book wherever they can.
- You have little in the way of previously-written material about yourself, though you do have some photographs. The book would require extensive interviews with you in order to collect the raw material to use.
- At this time we have no idea of the outline or length of the book. That might solidify as we get more into it. This is one reason that I am unable to give you a flat rate for working on your book.
- What I would do, instead of a flat rate, is to charge $60/hour, billed to you in 40-hour increments and upon delivery of that portion of the manuscript or raw material worked on during that 40 hours. That would include the travel time for me, about 45 minutes each way per trip. I would work no more than half-time on your project.
- I would need half in advance and half upon completion of each 40-hour increment. For example, $600 would start me off. When I have completed 40 hours of work I show you what I have done and you then pay me $1200, half for the work just done, half for the advance against work upcoming. We continue in this way and neither of us is at much risk.
- Either of us would be free to break off this arrangement at any time, for any reason. You would retain all work done to date and I would retain all payment made to date. - You would own the copyright, as this would be a "work made for hire" under the standard copyright provisions.
I discussed publishing options, and to recap, there are several:
1) The traditional royalty-paying publisher. For this, we would need a book proposal, and the publisher would hire you (or, through you, me) to write the book.
Advantages are that the publisher has access to the big distribution networks and can get your books into bookstores nationwide. Also, it costs you only the money needed to hire me to write the book proposal and supervise the marketing to the publishers/agents.
Disadvantages include: the process takes several years at the shortest. Biographies are not very popular with publishers and they only want those from people who are in the news. You would probably need an agent who takes out 15% of any royalties.
2) Have the book printed by a small-press publisher. The advantage is that this can happen relatively quickly and you have more control over the process. Disadvantages are that there may be limited distribution by the publisher and you have to pay the costs of publication, transport and storage of a lot of books. You would most likely have to distribute the book yourself. You would still need to pay me to write the book.
3) Use POD or Print-on-Demand. This new technique can produce books, one at a time, to order. POD publishers have web sites where they list the books and, when someone clicks on the BUY button, the POD publisher prints a copy and mails it to the buyer.
Advantages are: very cheap to set this up, though you would still need to pay me to write the book. No warehousing costs. Publisher can be ready within weeks or a month of delivery of the manuscript.
Disadvantages are that there is no sales help, so you have to do it all. Because of the one-at-a-time printing process, that sacrifices economy of scale in order to eliminate the distribution and storage requirement, the books are more expensive to print and the cover price will be higher.
I realize that all this is confusing. It confuses me and I deal with it almost daily.
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