Don't quit your day job

[rynling]

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America guild is considering allowing membership to people who create comics. They did a survey on how much comic creators get paid, and it's depressing:

https://www.sfwa.org/2021/08/17/surveys-comics-graphic-novelists-pay/

I'm looking really hard at that $9,400 median advance for a graphic novel. So basically, to earn full-time minimum wage (which is comically low), you'd have to sell two graphic novels every year. Neat.

Meanwhile, I was looking at the publisher's webpage for my book, and it apparently has more than 3.5k downloads. Directly from the publisher's page. At $45 for the ebook. I'm not sure if that's a lot for an academic monograph, but... I mean, I don't get royalties. I don't get anything. I got an $800 direct deposit, but only after delivery of the final manuscript. To put this in perspective, in order to deliver the final manuscript, I was responsible for paying $1200 for the cover image rights, $750 for copy editing, and $100 for indexing. Palgrave isn't a vanity publisher by any means, as the peer review to get this book published was a nightmare, but it is predatory.

In most Humanities disciplines at most R1 universities in America, you have to publish a monograph through an academic press in order to get tenure. I didn't get tenure on the technicality that my monograph publication date was "suspiciously" pushed back by supply chain issues resulting from the pandemic. Which is shit, and I think it's acceptable for me to be bitter about it.

Still, even if I had known that this book wouldn't get me tenure, I'm not sure how else I would have gotten it published, or whether it would be possible for me to have earned money from its publication.

I just don't think people make money from writing (or drawing) books. I guess it's cool that unions like the SFWA exist to fight the good fight, but I suspect that won't really change anything for the vast majority of writers and artists.

Comments

[lassarina]

A long time ago I took a hard look at teh economics of tradpub and realized that my anxiety is of the specific type that will not allow me to have tradpub as my sole source of income. Even if I hit the solid midlist career status (my actual plans, as opposed to daydreams, never included "Nora Roberts/Stephen King/John Grisham levels of sales) I would be stressing over whether I could pay the mortgage.

I don't know exactly what the solution is if we assume that capitalism continues to be the ruling model, but damn, the present status sucks.

[rynling]

Tradpub is not great! Indiepub is not great either!

I resent that so much of the conversation surrounding the success of the publishing industry as a whole seems to put stress on individual writers not to expect to be compensated for their work.

I also get the feeling there's also a lot of survivor bias in conversations surrounding the success of individual writers, which doesn't help.

And also I resent that nobody cared about fandom zines being big glossy anthologies until they started included writers. But what can you do.

[lassarina]

The whole "don't expect to be paid" thing is why I have immense respect for Jim C. Hines for publishing, every year, the exact granular detail of what he makes and from where. Like. Obviously he has several things going for him, but the fact that he's willing to pull back the curtain and say "here is what I make and here is what people have self-reported to me as making when I asked for this" is really useful both to see how little many writers get paid (the assumption that you have a breadwinning spouse, which--I mean, nice gig if you can get it; my husband and I could certainly get by on only one salary, but we'd be a lot more stressed than we are, and personally I have a big vendetta against the idea of being dependent on him for my housing/food/etc. just because it's not that I think he'd be a jerk about it, but if God forbid something happened to him and now I've got to support myself with a resume that has a gap of ?? years on it - nah. No. No thank you. ANYWAY.)

(It also really bothers me that so much of publishing is propped up monetarily by the work of people whom they denigrate - hi, romance authors! - and then you get people making unholy advances that will never earn out because they're white men famous or something, which just fucks over the people writing actually good books because lol we spent what could have been your advance on Memoir From Washed Up Actor #86. I say this, and yet I am absolutely going to buy a copy of Robert Griffin III's book next year for my father, both because he'll love it and because I want to read that damn thing and get ALL the gossip.)