Writers in the Storm

Susan Spann
“Royalties” is the publishing industry term for money paid to an author (generally, by a publisher) on sales of a published work. Most authors receive the bulk of their writing income from royalties, which makes them a critical feature of publishing contracts.

How are Royalties Calculated?

Royalties vary from contract to contract, and across different publishing formats. However, industry-standard royalties are normally based on a percentage of either: (1) the money the publisher actually receives on sales of the author’s work, or (2) the sale price of the work. (Most commonly, royalties are based on a percentage of the publisher’s receipts.)

Royalty percentages are either calculated on a “gross” or “net” basis—but those terms can be tricky, because publishers and contracts don’t always use them consistently. Good contracts calculate authors’ royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts – the money actually received from buyers or resellers (less refunds and returns). That’s a “gross” method of calculation.

Dangerous contracts allow the publisher to deduct certain costs (sometimes including marketing and advertising costs as well as publishing costs) from receipts before calculating the author’s royalties. This is “net” calculation, because the author’s percentage is calculated on “net profits” – meaning receipts minus some or all of the publishing costs. Traditional publishers don’t expect or ask authors to share the publishing costs, or the publisher’s marketing costs. No exceptions.

How Big is the Author’s Royalty Percentage?

Royalty percentages can vary widely, both from publisher to publisher and across the various publishing formats. Most contracts state a different percentage for hardback royalties (typically 9-15%), trade paperback royalties (typically 7-12%), mass market paperback (typically 4-8%) and ebooks (typically 25-35%). However, each of these “typical” percentages can vary by 2-4% (or more) in the printed formats, and the Author’s Guild wants publishers to increase ebook royalty rates to 50% of receipts across the board (a great idea, but not yet industry standard).

Royalty percentages also vary based on an author’s experience and sales record—those with lots of successful books tend to receive higher royalties than debut or midlist authors.

Royalties on foreign and subsidiary rights can vary widely, too, depending on the rights being licensed, the nature of the license, and whether you license the subsidiary rights directly or through a publishing house.

In other words: your mileage will vary, so always have your contracts reviewed by a specialist (an agent or an attorney) to ensure you’re receiving the best possible royalty percentages from your publisher.

How Often Do Authors Get Paid?

Every publishing contract should state how often the publisher will issue royalty checks and sales statements. Many larger publishers calculate royalties only twice per year, while some independent publishers pay their authors quarterly. Self-published authors often receive payments from Amazon on a monthly basis, and a very, very few small publishing houses also calculate royalties monthly (usually a month in arrears).

Publishers’ sales statements and royalty payments are normally sent 3 months in arrears, meaning the publisher has three months from the last day of the sales period stated in the contract to calculate and send the royalty payment. Again, the specific payment terms and timing should be stated in the publishing contract—and the language should be specific enough that the author knows exactly when the statement and payment is due (and hopefully not overdue).

Reserves Against Returns (And Other Royalty Issues)

Many publishing contracts allow the publisher to withhold a percentage of the author’s royalties as a reserve to cover potential returns and to pay reduced royalty rates (or no royalties at all) on copies sold at deep discount or distributed free of charge for review and promotional purposes. Again, the contract needs to contain specific language explaining when a sale is—and is not—a royalty-bearing sale, and the terms should match current industry standards.

A Word About Advances

“Advances” – technically, advances against royalties, are lump-sum payments some authors receive in advance of publication.

In most cases, advances are paid in 1-3 installments: upon signing the publishing contract, upon the publisher’s approval of the final manuscript, and/or upon publication of the completed work. Whether an advance is paid in one installment or multiple installments, and the timing of those installments, varies from publisher to publisher.

If an author receives an advance, the author normally won’t receive any royalty payments from the publisher until total royalties due to the author on sales of the work exceed the advance amount. When that happens, the work has earned out and the author will start receiving royalty checks on the next payment and statement date referenced in the contract.

Never Sign a Contract Without Professional Review

Always obtain professional review of publishing contracts. Publishing lawyers and agents have experience reviewing not only royalty provisions but other important contract terms, and know the current industry standards for royalty percentages, reserves against returns, and other vital terms that can impact not only the author’s rights but the timing and amount of royalty payments on the finished work.

Do you have any questions about royalty payments or publishing contract terms? Did anything here surprise you?

Susan Spann writes the Hiro Hattori Novels, featuring ninja detective Hiro Hattori and his Portuguese Jesuit sidekick, Father Mateo. The fourth book in the series, THE NINJA’S DAUGHTER, will release from Seventh Street Books in August 2016. Susan is the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ 2015 Writer of the Year, and a transactional attorney whose practice focuses on publishing and business law. When not writing or practicing law, she raises seahorses and rare corals in her marine aquarium. Find her online at http://www.SusanSpann.com, on Twitter (@SusanSpann), and on Facebook (SusanSpannAuthor).

 

We’re going to start this blog post with a duh moment …

Writing is hard. Getting published is hard.

Now if you can all roll your eyeballs back into place, we’ll continue. Ready?

I’ve talked many a writer friend off the “I’m going to quit” roller coaster. I’ve even had my share of “maybe I should consider becoming a barista”, moments. But I was always able to shrug those moments off and buckle down for yet another revision or another batch of queries or another manuscript.

Why?

Because I chose to look at the positive (or sometimes just less negative) steps as milestones.

Before you get the wrong idea, let me me make one thing clear … I’m not Little Miss Sunshine. I’m not that eternal optimist who will spew happy, shiny clichés. I’m not the making lemonade kinda gal (unless you pour some rum into it).

When I first set out to write, it wasn’t the idea of getting an agent or being published that kept me going. It was the challenge of learning.  Finishing that first draft of the first story idea was one of those, “holy shit I did it, I really did it” moments. Didn’t matter that it was crap, I was celebrating just getting to the end. I was holding 300-some pages that came out of my crazy brain. Positive.

My first attempt at querying agents wasn’t a whiz-bang success. Neither was the second attempt. Or the third attempt for that matter. I’m not keeping tally of the number of queries I sent out. The first requests for partials and fulls sent me into chicken dance spasms. After that it was a “cool”, mark the date on the spreadsheet, send, move on.

You guys are going to think I’m a total nut job, but what kept me going were the rejections, not the requests. I don’t mean the form rejections on queries but the manuscript rejections. Those were my gauge on how close I was getting. When I stopped seeing consistency in the feedback, I knew it was just a matter of finding that one person who would connect to my voice and story. Positive.

Now it’s confession time. I never saw the manuscripts I was working on as published books. I was hell bent on pursuing publication and didn’t doubt that it could happen, as long as I stuck to my plan. But the idea that what I’d been working on for so long could be an actual book somehow didn’t fully register. Even after my debut sold to an amazing publisher. Weird, I know.

Then this happened …

And it happened on a day when I was questioning every word coming out of my fingers on a new book project. I bottled the frustration with myself and proceeded to freak out my cats with something vaguely resembling a happy dance.

Tomorrow I’ll sit back down to write on that new project. Today, I’ll flip through one of those lovelies and remind myself that I can do it and it can happen. Hello, positive! :-)

Your turn … do you look at the bright side? What keeps you going when you’re ready to throw the computer into the fire?

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About Orly

Orly Konig is an escapee from the corporate world, where she spent roughly sixteen (cough) years working in the space industry. Now she spends her days chatting up imaginary friends, drinking entirely too much coffee, and negotiating writing space around two over-fed cats. She is a co-founder and past president of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and a member of the Tall Poppy Writers. She is rep’d by Marlene Stringer, Stringer Literary Agency LLC.

Orly’s debut, The Memory of Hoofbeats, will be released by Forge in 2017.

You can find her on Twitter at @OrlyKonig, on Facebook at OrlyKonigAuthor, or on her website, www.orlykonig.com.

Penny Sansevieri

According to a recent New York Times article, users spend an average of fifty minutes on Facebook. Fifty minutes! And though this number includes Instagram and the Facebook Messenger app, you can bet that the lion’s share is still spent  on their main platform.  Now more than ever it’s really important to turn your Facebook Page into something that isn’t just getting you likes, but making you sales as well.

I don’t know about you but I sort of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, when it works it works well but when it doesn’t work, well… crickets. The challenge is that Facebook is always changing and as it does, our strategies need to change as well. Whether you have a strong Facebook page, or want to try and up your engagement on an existing page let’s have a look at some of the new and exciting features Facebook offers.

Facebook Livestreaming

In the past few months many of you have probably seen the little icon for the new Facebook Live, which gives you the opportunity to do livestreaming video right onto your Facebook page. To start a livestream, open up the status bar as though you were going to write a new post and click the little head with the circles around it. This will push you into a cue to start your livestreaming. You will then be prompted to name your video feed and choose your audience, meaning you can choose to Livestream to everyone, or just selected followers. Once you do that, you’ll click the button to go Live and voila, you are now broadcasting to your Facebook audience.  Also important to note, you can save the video if you decide you want to share it later – so perhaps add it to your YouTube channel, etc.

Tips for using Facebook Livestreaming:

• Ideal video length: 5 to 20 minutes
• Use a short, snappy video title. If you need to add a longer description, do it in the comments.
• After the live event be sure to add a little narrative to the post, a call to action and change up the thumbnail (Facebook let’s you pick 1 of 10 images)
• Tags will help folks discover your video so add any that tie into your topic.
• If you’re interviewing people in the video, you can also tag them under “edit video” (one note, you can’t edit the video yet on mobile, just on your desktop)

Facebook Ads

One of the trickiest things these days seem to be Facebook Ads. Facebook has pulled together an elaborate ads dashboard with seemingly endless choices. But for this piece, let’s have a look at some things you may be doing that could be amplified a bit, as well as some newer features you may not have considered.

Boosted Posts: These types of ads are often too go-to for most of us and while they’re easy to do, they are the single biggest ad-dollar suck of all the ads Facebook offers. Why? Because most people use these wrong. When Facebook invites you to boost a post, it’s generally because the post is already getting a significant amount of engagement but it could do better, at least according to Facebook’s algorithm. The key to successful boosted posts is to limit their exposure.  When you boost a post to everyone, sure you’ll get into the stream of some new folks,  but statistics show that boosted posts do better when they’re shared with fans only. Boosted posts from your timeline are automatically optimized for page post engagement – but specifically to your fans. So if you boost a post to everyone, you’re spending a lot of money on very little engagement. In fact boosted posts are some of the most expensive ads you can run if you’re focused on ‘everyone’ instead of your fan base. Also, when you do fans only, you can also limit your budget. I’ve run hugely successful boosted post campaigns for as little as $15.

Ads to Drive Newsletter Sign Ups : I see a lot of people doing Facebook Ads geared toward driving people to a Leads Page or some other sales page to sell product. This is often a pretty expensive endeavor actually because CPC is much higher when you’re driving people to a sales page. So what’s a budget-minded author to do? Drive folks to a blog post that invites your readers to sign up for something. The key is, you’d better have a fantastic blog post so let’s look at that first.

Blogs

A blog post that’s designed to drive engagement should be kind of epic and by epic I mean: how to, actionable, or a list post. Also, did you know that people love to share stuff that makes them look smart? So if your post does that, bingo!

If the idea of writing an epic blog post makes your head spin (what on earth would I write about?), think about the top three things that people ask you about your work.

Fiction Writers: Maybe for you fiction authors,  it’s about how to get published. I always tell our fiction authors that 83% of Americans want to write a book and, guess what? These folks are probably also your fans or might want to learn more about your books. So while you don’t need to become a go-to publishing guru, sharing your experiences could be helpful.

Non Fiction Writers: For non-fiction authors, this is a no-brainer. You probably even know what your epic blog post might be about, even as you’re reading this article. To save time, if you already have a post that did really well, you can change it up a bit, maybe even update it and relaunch it.

Freebies:  So people love free stuff like checklists, cheat sheets, etc.  Maybe if you’re the author writing a blog post about becoming a writer, you give folks a list of your resources to get them started! Whatever kind of freebie you’re offering, make it irresistible. You may have to test a few to get a sense of what gets the most bounce.  Think of something you would want, something you wouldn’t be able to say no to. But don’t overthink it and spend a lot of time on this type of blog. You don’t need to write an entire book to make it valuable. We have a simple Amazon Optimization checklist that’s literally just a one page list and our readers love it.

Blog Traffic and Delivery: AME uses a system called LeadsPages,  which you can get for free or purchase the paid subscription. They have pre-set up templates and it’s easy to get started. The reason you want to use a system like LeadsPages is because if you get a flood of traffic to your blog (and that’s the goal!) you don’t want to be emailing each of these folks the giveaway and then manually adding them to whatever newsletter system you use. And, as I said, it’s a very simple system to use. In fact some pages integrate with MailChimp and other newsletter providers.

Once the page is set up, go back to your blog post and add the link to the bonus content in the middle of the post and again at the end.

Now you’re ready to do your Facebook ad!

Facebook Ad Tips

In general, Facebook ads work better when you don’t work so hard to create them.  Using  casual language on a Facebook ad tends to pull better than a formal, structured ad. So when you’re running ads, especially if you’re driving them to a blog post, keep it casual, as though you were doing a status update to your page.

Imagery:  I don’t recommend using Facebook’s stock images. I would highly encourage you to use something that will really catch the eye. A lot of authors like to use their own image.  This is perfectly fine if you’re doing an ad just to your fans, but if you’re doing an ad to drive more newsletter sign ups, you’re pulling in a lot of people who don’t know you.  Having your image on there may not have as much pull for folks who don’t know you.

You can also just do text with a color background, I’ve tried that and in some cases it worked brilliantly. As a matter of fact, Yellow seems to be the power color if you’re doing just a color ad with text overlay.

I recommend Canva for ad design. The site lets you choose the exact size of the ad so you won’t wind up having to redesign your ad because of Facebook ad size limitations.

Optimizing Your Facebook Posts

Posts that aren’t related to ads don’t tend to do as well as they once did. But since I don’t like to be forced into the ad funnel, I wanted to do some research and find out if there was a better way to do posts that could drive engagement, without spending money. Here’s what I found:

Pictures: We all know that posts with pictures drive more engagement, but did you know that with the right picture you could boost your engagement by as much as 179%? But the key is finding quality images. So images with stunning views, lovely scenery, smiling faces, you get the idea. If you want some ideas, head on over to Trip Advisor’s page because they’ve really made an art out of using a simple, stunning image and creating a discussion around this. For example a beautiful picture of a waterfall with the simple phrase: “Caption this,” got over 251 likes and 30 shares.

Memes: A lot of folks think that funny memes are great for sharing and they are, but they don’t really help with your engagement. For example I shared a meme that got in excess of 300 shares (yeah, it was pretty darned funny) but it didn’t really boost my engagement overall. So stick with stuff that’s relevant to your market, or tied to your book. Also, make sure that you brand all your images so when that one post goes viral, your website address is on there so people know how to find you.

Posting Time:  While this is often subject to your audience demographics, I  find that that highest engagement is on a Sunday which tends to increase by 52.9%. The best posting time window seems to be  10-11am EST. I know that’s really for you West Coast and Hawaii people, but if you’re really trying to push engagement, it could be worth getting up early on a Sunday.

Talking points:  I mentioned Trip Advisor’s simple “Caption this” on their image but did you also know that questions drive 162% more engagement. And I’ve tested this on both my personal profile and our Fan Page. Even asking something as simple as: “Do you agree?”  can help to give engagement a significant boost.

Post length: Three years ago, shorter was better on Facebook, but  that’s actually no longer true. Posts with 150-200 characters get on average 238 shares. Wow, right? After Prince died I posted this: “5 Things I Learned This Week,” which was really just about this odd new world we live in where rockers from our youth are dying off. I wrote it, figuring no one would see it or care but it got a lot of likes (I think in excess of 100) and a ton of shares as well.

Facebook is sometimes a monster that you feel you just can’t tame, but I promise you if you spend some time with these tools, you’ll turn your Facebook page from “blah” to “wow!”  in no time. Wouldn’t  it be nice to grab some of that fifty minute window for your page? Good luck!

What do you think, WITS readers? Any other tips for us?

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About Penny

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert and an Adjunct Professor with NYU. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. She is the author of fourteen books, including How to Sell Books by the Truckload. AME is the first marketing and publicity firm to use Internet promotion to its full impact through online promotion and their signature program called: The Virtual Author Tour™

To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, you can visit her web site at http://www.amarketingexpert.com. To subscribe to her free newsletter, send a blank email to: mailto:subscribe@amarketingexpert.com

Copyright @2016 Penny C. Sansevieri

Top photo credit: MariaGodfrida - Pixabay