So I just got my Royalties. Bow down, kowtow, for I am indeed the master and king of 742 dollars and 23 cents. And that’s an improvement on the last one. I can’t tell you how it has done such great things, as I haven’t yet got the statement. I’ll be very interested to see if the book I got a friend to buy from webscriptions – a book whose rights have reverted, are reflected. But I’ll have to wait for the next one… because of the lag.

Royalties – mine at least – have been on a long slide. There was a time when I got a 4K royalty check, and one with less than three zero’s didn’t happen. This – seeing as I was still working my way to more than 10K advances – was lifesaver money.

Now, we live in a society where there are too many of us (well except on Flinders Island – where yes, most people know you for what you do and respect and your place in society has little to do with your income. But in places with more than 700 people…) It’s difficult to impossible to put social value on most people for what they are, when your only indicator is… well… mostly money. Yep, a uniform will get you respect in some quarters, but really our measure of social value has become money. And that money determines not only if you have to sleep under a bridge and go dumpster diving for dinner, but also the value that is put on your labor. When — back in 1960 – a new author got a 5000 dollar advance, they were worth around what someone in charge of 50 workers was. By 1975 (when the advance was still around $5000 and valued an author’s work at a year’s worth of labor a new teacher. By the time I got 5K for The Forlorn in 1998 IIRC… we’d started to drop a lot. Now, when 5K is very good, and 3K is more normal… I think publishing rates us as Indian scrap metal workers, with the same lifespan.

Why is this relevant? Well, publishing has been mining an ‘endless resource’ – which is why it’s cheap. The cheapest part of publishing actually (except agents). The trouble with this is that people write for a reason. Now that reason usually involves being read (although there are those who write to please themselves and those who write because they must), and in turn they want to be read for a reason. That reason – particularly in the literary arena, can be recognition and social kudos, or it could be money (which as I explained above is how our modern society measures status – a method which I’d say accounts for about 98% of our problems right now. No one needs 1000 million to live well, ah, but the status. Which when you work in a profession no one likes or respects makes it tempting to award yourself money you really don’t need for any other reason).

So: if you do it for money to live on, you’d do a lot better panhandling. If you do it for money as a social status tool (and possibly to help to live on) its social value is declining, because, no matter how publishers try and enforce secrecy and how they use authors shame at failing on this measure of success to keep this as ‘our little secret’ it does start to become obvious eventually, with spouses and second jobs only being able to subsidize the publishing industry just so far. (Which is why the talent pool now, is quite badly skewed). And this is the death, by slow degrees, of your deathless resource. Once it was easy to recruit people wanting desperately to work in banking too. Already they’ve stripped out a large number of writers who just can’t afford to do it, and those who can only write a book every two years because they have a day job to hold down… That has to hurt quality.

But wait… you’re wrong Dave. The internet, Independent publishing, more offering than ever… and what’s more, publishers are making a profit this year for the first time in many…

Basically, what you’re looking at is fire-sale of resources — backlists, some of which they do not have the rights to, and the fact that while authors are taking home even less, the considerable savings on e-books have gone straight to publisher’s bottom line.

But they have vast backlists… and if Dean Wesley Smith is to be believed, that long tail can make them a fortune too.

Well. I like much of what Dean says, and I’ve seen their spreadsheet of income calculations. Basically the internet is vast: sooner or later someone will buy your book/short and this will keep happening. And to a point this is true. A very small point. Sales actually follow (as publishers should know) a normal decay curve. There is pent up demand, there are new people discovering your book. If it is good, they’ll tell a few people, and it will go up the also bought lists and rankings. And then… ever so slowly, but at a predicable rate… it will die. Yes, even Shakespeare or Peter Pan will eventually reach a point at which they do not sell more than rare, occasional copies. Their point is just thousands of times further than yours or mine. Until of course, the next book (or play or book about) comes out and reminds people. At which point it bumps up again, and if it’s a real corker, it could make you a lot more. And then it declines again. Until the next book… (If you’re hugely prolific like Dean or Kris Rusch or Sarah this will barely show. If you’re doing a book a year…)

Which is fine IF you write the next book. It’s possible, for instance, that Joe Konrath’s ex-publisher is doing well out of Joe’s productivity. But this is not an eternal mine. After time that too runs down. And at this point you only have what you invested in since digitization to rely on. And then you’re up a creek… because…

The recruitment has been going on. OUTSIDE your ambit. And as money is the measure of success and respect to encourage others in… well, the prolific authors outside traditional publishing will out-earn your recruits. By a LOT. By 4 times, and off their backlist boosted every time they bring a book out.

To illustrate this – I have 13 books supposedly earning me royalties… 742 dollars. I have 14 shorts out on Kindle. My six months worth of royalties (and some have been out for years and some months, and some like the Leprechaun and the Bootlace, days) is just over $647 – remarkably close… for short fiction. Yes, one Pirates of the Suara Sea has outsold everything else – but I couldn’t get any interest in the book I proposed on it. Most of these shorts are stories which have been sold before, so indeed, apples with apples… except shorts should not equal novels.

Interesting times… especially for those of us trying to live by our labor.