PrintChange in Book Biz Recipe May Lead to More Interesting Food Reading
Those of you interested in the book biz may have read about a new venture that aims to rejigger how authors are paid, creating a system that may ultimately benefit both authors and publishers.
Authors typically get advances, or money up front from the publisher. Often times, that's all the money an author sees from a book. That's because a book has to "earn out" the advance before an author can start sharing in the royalties. So if a writer gets, say, a $60,000 advance and the sale of each book counts toward, oh, $3 of that $60,000, the book has to sell 20,000 copies before the publisher recoups the advance and starts paying out royalties. Sadly, a lot of good books don't ever hit that mark.
What's this have to do with food? Well, Michael Ruhlman connects some dots on his blog, citing a similar approach that Chicago restaurateur Nick Kokonas is taking. Kokonas, along with chef Grant Achatz, created famed restaurant Alinea, and they're crafting a book along these lines. As Ruhlman says: "The new model created by Kokonas and perhaps soon a similar one by HarperCollins is exciting because it stands to enable chefs who can finance their own projects to do exactly the kind of books they want to do—which means we’re likely to see more risk taking and more innovative books."
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8 Comments:
About g'damned time!
Book publishers in general, and cookbook publishers in particular, are among the last static elements in the fast changing information business.
In second thought, it's probably too late to save them.
srhcb at 4:58PM on 04/05/08
Well with Alinea cookbook and site they began selling early thereby actually the reader is financing the book and then as has happened to me, the deadline keeps getting pushed further away from the first deadline date....who is going to kick them in the ass to keep deadline?
blondee47 at 5:09PM on 04/05/08
the only place where we have sold the book is through our site alineabook.com. On the site and in the "trailer" for the book it has always set the release as Autumn, 2008. The actual date is October15, 2008. We did not put the site up until we had a firm release date and that date has not changed.
The mosaic preview will launch in may and all book purchasers will receive access to this beta site, which will at first be limited in scope and expand as we get closer to October.
While we do receive income from these early sales, the fact is that we have been working on the photography and layout for the book for over a year. The cost side is not being funded by the readers.
Please feel free to kick my ass on many things, but this publication date should not be one of them.
nick kokonas at 6:28PM on 04/05/08
Who cares about book business.
Authors are rich snobs. They don't care about their fans. As long as they make the $$$$, they're happy.
paris221966 at 11:53PM on 04/05/08
thanks, adam. your math is correct and i'd like to reiterate what you allude to--how hard it is to sell 20,000 copies of a book. it's a sad but true irony of our culture: the more original the book, often the harder it is to sell.
ruhlman at 10:44AM on 04/06/08
@paris221966: Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx were authors. And all they cared about was making money. You are so right.
Susquehanna at 10:57AM on 04/06/08
I don't care about Gandhi or Marx either.
paris221966 at 1:58PM on 04/06/08
@nick: Thanks for the clarification. Can't wait to see how the book turns out.
@ruhlman: Yeah. I didn't assert as aggressively the fact that even 20,000 copies would be a hard target to hit, since most of my back-up on that is anecdotal, from authors and from folks I know who deal with books and from links I can't seem to find. There was an item online from Publisher's Weekly where they talk about Bourdain's book being a hit for selling more than 250,000. That number really shocked me, because I seemed to see that book in everyone's hands after it came out. It seemed low, and then it's even more disheartening when you think that that's about 0.0008% of the U.S. population (roughly 303,000,000).
@paris221966: Seems like this might not be the thread for you.
Adam Kuban at 7:12PM on 04/06/08