What do you think a publisher pays for when producing your book? Besides your advance, of course. Well, some of the costs are in the printing, cover image & design, someone to do the interior design, paying the people to work on the book—the editors, production team, pr & marketing team, etc.
For anthologies, there is also something called Permissions. In a nutshell, it is the cost of obtaining the rights to reprint someone’s story. For example, at Travelers’ Tales, you’ll notice that many of our stories come from previously published books. Some are taken from magazines, and even some from newspapers…in addition to the original submissions we get through soliciting our guidelines on our web site.
This morning Susan and I were talking about how to keep the costs down for the women’s humor book I’m editing for Travelers’ Tales, Hold My Purse While I…: Funny Women Write From the Road.
She was telling me that the cartoons we used in our other humor anthologies, There’s No Toilet Paper…on the Road Less Traveled, and Not So Funny When it Happened ended up being quite costly because of how much the rights costs to use them.
Here’s the thing… the more money you spend on permissions, the longer it will take for the editor/author to start seeing any royalties. You still need to take into account the advance and the cost of permissions before you get to take your itty bitty percentage of however much money a book brings in, on lets say 20,000 copies. And if the permissions plus the advance equals more than what your % is of the gross sales, then you don’t get to collect your royalties. Not till the book makes its money back on what it spent.
Confusing?
For saving money on Hold My Purse, Susan came up with the great idea to hire out an up and coming, but talented, freelance illustrator to do all the pics. This could potentially bring the cartoon costs to 1/3 of what we’d pay for the permission to use cartoons from The New Yorker. And we could custom order are cartoons directly to the stories in the book.
Something for us to think about. Are you an illustrator who’s good at drawing people? If you are, or know of any, I’d be willing to take a look at your portfolio. Just send me an email.
Thanks for mentioning me! And giving me credit for the idea – now let’s hope it works and that all the pieces of the puzzle come together to make a smashing success! Keep plugging away…..