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The Multiple Book Deal - It should Only Happen to You! (Or Should It?) - Part 2
The big multiple-book deals that make front-page headlines incorporate all of the factors I described in Part 1 of this article, plus very big front-money. These deals are designed to nail down a bestselling author for as long as possible, and in many cases there is little or no description of the books because nobody including the author knows what they're going to be about. Indeed, the publisher may not even care what they're about as long as it's guaranteed he'll get his mitts on them.
The publicity value of a multiple-book deal may outweigh its actual monetary value. The pages of publishing trade publications and writers' newsletters are filled with references to deals that make author and publisher look good but do not necessarily stand up to intense scrutiny. A "five-figure deal" might be for $99,000 or it might only be for $10,000. Or you may read about deals that "could bring the author $850,000 per book." They could, yes, if they sell like hotcakes, get picked up by major book clubs, go on the best-seller list for two years, and are made into major motion pictures. The actual guaranteed money in such deals might be quite modest, but the built-in escalators, bonuses, and similar features enable the publishers to wring the most publicity out of them.
And of course, deals that may seem relatively small to the public at large can be most impressive in the author's "hometown" - that is, the genre in which he writes. A three-book deal for a $75,000 advance might be sneezed at by the New York Times, but if the books are science fiction, romance, westerns, or some other genre, the writers and editors who read about such exploits in the trade papers will sit up and take notice.
Big deals or little, the underlying accounting principles are the same. Let's examine them. There are several ways in which the accounting may be set up in a multiple-book contract. The first is to fix the advance for each title in the contract and to keep the royalty accounting for each book separate from that for the other books in the package. Thus you might have a three-book, $30,000 advance contract, with the advance per book pegged at $10,000. When book number one is published and earns more than $10,000 in royalties, you will collect the overage in royalties even though the second book, say, has not yet earned back its $10,000 and the third book has not even been published.
The other way to structure a multiple-book deal is to "jointly account" the advances on each book. Joint accounting (also known as "basket accounting" and "cross-collateralization") creates a common royalty pool for the earnings of all books in the contract. This means that royalties earned over and above the advance on one book in the contract will not necessarily be paid to the author but will instead be applied to the unearned advances on other books in the contract. Until the total of advances in that contract has been earned out by royalties from any or all books in that contract, the author will not receive additional royalties. For instance, suppose we have that $30,000 advance deal for three books, but with joint accounting. Book number one is published and earns $15,000. Does the author receive royalties? No, because the three-book combination must earn a total of $30,000. Suppose, further, that the second book earns $14,000 too. Does the author now receive royalties? Again, no, because the two books have earned, together, no more than the $30,000 originally advanced to the author. Now book number three is published and earns $4,500 in royalties. Does the author now get anything? Yes, he gets $4,500, for the total royalties earned by the three books is $33,500, or $3,500 more than was originally advanced. Of course, it can work the other way around too. Suppose the first book in the package was a wild success and earned $35,000. The author would then collect $5,000 royalties on his three-book contract even though the second and third books weren't yet published or even written. And when those books were published, all royalties they earned from the very first dollar would go to the author, because his $30,000 advance was earned out on the first book.
There are pitfalls for both author and publisher in multiple-book deals, for such deals are like long-term commodity investments. If you bet that a commodity will be worth X dollars one year from now, and between now and then the value soars far beyond what you estimated it would be, you will be left holding a considerably undervalued contract. Apply this to the case of an author who grabs a three-book contract for a $30,000 advance. The advance is paid in four equal installments of $7,500 apiece, the first on signing and the next three on delivery of each book. The first book is published and becomes a wild success: book club, reprint, movie, the whole bit. Now he delivers the second book and what does he get? - a mere $7,500. He may be mad at himself (to say nothing of his agent) for tying himself up for so long for so little. Of course, the difference between an author and a pork belly (and perhaps the only difference) is that the author at least has the opportunity to make up in royalties for the inadequate advance he negotiated two or three books ago when he was just another lowly writer in the crowd. Thus he may only collect $7,500 when he delivers book number two, but a few months later he may collect $50,000 in royalties earned on book one.
Bear in mind that by the same token the publisher stands to lose if the commodity - the author, his books, and the market - go short, that is, drop below what the publisher projected when he tied the author up for all those books. If a publisher signs you up for that four-novel peanut-plantation saga, and just around the time you're delivering the first one the market for plantation sagas collapses and your publisher can't give them away - well, there's going to be much rending of garments (and maybe of jobs) at that publisher's office.
So, it's a bit of a crapshoot both ways, and if you feel your books are going to be worth far more than the per-book advance you've been offered in a multiple-book deal, then turn that deal down. If your publisher doesn't agree with your appraisal of your future value, then they'll turn the deal down. Sometimes you can forge a compromise. If your publisher feels that the individual value of the books in a three-book deal is $10,000, and you feel it's $15,000, you can split the difference by structuring advances of $10,000 on the first book, $12,500 on the second, and $15,000 on the third. If the deal is jointly accounted, you'd simply add these advances up for a total advance of $37,500, but when you negotiate the next contract your price per book starts at $15,000, the value of the third book in your previous contract.
Once a publisher has a good writer in his stable, it may be willing to pay high, even to overpay, to keep him or her there for a long, long time. I remember negotiating with a publisher for an author he coveted, and I fixed a price of $225,000 for a three book contract. He winced. "That's awfully high."
"What can I tell you?" I said with a shrug. "That's what I think he's worth, or will be by the time he writes his third book."
"Who knows how much he'll be worth two years from now?" the publisher sighed philosophically. "We could all be dead two years from now."
"That's true," I replied. "So why don't we just make a deal for one book and see how that one goes?"
The man sat bolt upright in his chair, a stricken look on his face. "Don't do me any favors." Alarmed at the prospect of having this rising young author for only one more book, the publisher quickly met my terms.
The Multiple Book Deal - It Should Only Happen To You! (Or Should it?) Part 1
For many writers the term "multiple-book deal" conjures images of byzantine negotiations conducted in a crowded conference room by a battery of literary agents, lawyers, accountants, and publishing executives, of telephone-number advances and thick contracts replete with state-of-the-art jargon about best-seller escalators, book club passthroughs, and topping privileges. The tyro author who would be overjoyed to get even a one-book contract must view such deals as relevant only to the gods in some literary Valhalla. What pertinence do these John Grishamian, Dan Brownian, Nora Robertsian transactions have to the humble and brutish lives of nickel-a-word galley slaves?
The truth is that many more multiple-book contracts are proffered to writers than most people imagine, and most of them are no more complicated than one-book contracts. And their terms are substantially lower than those generally associated with Olympic-sized swimming pools on the grounds of Beverly Hills estates. In fact, if you write in any of the traditional genres the chances are that sooner or later you'll be offered a multiple-book contract. Whether your specialty is science fiction, mysteries, westerns, romances, male adventure, or even popular nonfiction, it is likely that a publisher will be interested in signing you up for more than one book at a time. You may have created a character in a novel whose exploits you or your publisher would like to extend to further books. Or your publisher may like your work well enough to ask you to write books in a series created "in the house," as it were. You would do well to understand the features of such deals, if for no other reason than that, after longing to have one offered to you, you might ultimately decide that they're not that hot after all and you'd be better off selling one book at a time.
When you think about it, a multiple-book deal is simply an elaborate extension of your option clause. In a traditional contract, the publisher usually gets an option on your next book at terms to be negotiated. In a multiple-book contract, the publisher makes a commitment to more than one book and specifies the terms and conditions for the acquisition of those books.
The nature of those books is usually described in detail: "Books number 4, 5, and 6 in the adult western series featuring the hero Buckyball Jones," or "Four saga-length works of fiction set on and around a Savannah, Georgia, peanut farm during the American Civil War." The general terms - "boilerplate" - that characterize a contract for one book now cover two or three or more at a time. The warranties you agree to on book number one are identical to those on numbers two and three, for instance. A few boilerplate items may be altered to adjust for the multiplicity of books in the contract. The termination clause will have the phrase "on each work" in it or something along those lines in order to account for the probability that each book in the contract will go out of print at a different time.
One of the reasons publishers like multiple-book contracts, then, is simply that they are convenient. They enable publishers to prepare one contract for several books whose terms are pretty much identical. This may seem like insufficient reason to offer such deals to authors, and in truth it is. But when you realize how much time and labor goes into the preparation of even a routine book contract, you might feel less inclined to criticize publishers for wanting to speed up the flow of paperwork, which after all benefits authors too.
The principal object of multiple-book deals is security. Ideally, they should make publishers and authors feel equally secure (agents don't mind a little security either, by the way), but things don't always turn out that way, as we shall see.
The security comes in because all parties know where they stand with each other for the duration of the contract. The publisher knows that his author is not going to leave him after the next book or the book after that. The publisher also knows he won't be hit for a high price one or two books from now if the author gets hot tomorrow, because the prices for those future books will have been fixed at the outset, when the multiple-book contract was signed. The author, by the same token, knows there will be a home waiting for his next two or three books, and can count on a specific sum of money to be paid him when he delivers them. Even if the market for his kind of books collapses, his publisher is still contractually obligated to pay him for each delivered book, whereas if the author made contracts with his publisher on a book-by-book basis, the publisher could drop him as soon it became apparent that there was no more market for his stuff.
Another important factor is scheduling dependability. Where series or other related books are involved, success rests heavily on the timing of release of the books, and that timing can be set with certainty only if the publisher can absolutely count on reliable delivery of three or four or six books. By tying the author up for that many, the publisher knows (or at least hopes) that the author won't accept contracts with other publishers that will interfere with the delivery and publication rhythm of the series.
In the second part of this article we'll take up structuring and negotiating multi-book deals.
If one were to compose a Bill of Rights for authors, ownership of copyright to their works would certainly be close to the top of the list. We hold self-evident the truth that if a person produces an original book-length work, he or she is entitled to proprietorship under the law, and to full benefit of its commercial exploitation.
Yet, it has not always been so. The piracy of literature by printers, publishers, and booksellers has been common practice throughout the world from the dawn of the printed word, and was prevalent in this country until well into the present century. Until the establishment of the first International Copyright Convention in 1891 and its refinement after World War II, respect for the sanctity of copyright was largely a matter of gentleman's agreements based strictly on self-interest—don't steal from me and I won't steal from you. There are still vast areas of our globe where publishers think nothing of stealing and distributing works of literature from authors and publishers of law-abiding countries, and the emergence of electronic and online media have made it a big business. Piracy of books, videotapes, music, and other intellectual property in some foreign countries is tolerated, condoned or even sponsored and supported by their governments.
Lest you become too smug that such barbarities cannot happen here, I am compelled to report my observation that the appropriation of authors' copyrights by publishers and book packagers seems to be on the upswing. Nothing so gross as piracy, mind you. More, I would say, like extortion. But the effect is the same: the deprivation of authors' rights to enjoy the fruits of their labors. The fruits of an author's labors include such bounties as royalties on copies of books sold, participation in reprint income, and revenue deriving from the exploitation of serial, translation, dramatization, electronic, and other subsidiary rights. Not everyone shares the conviction that the enjoyment of these monies is a natural and God-given right, however. Indeed, not everybody behaves as if the enjoyment of these monies is protected by statutory law.
The engagement of writers for flat fees falls into a category of employment known as "work-for-hire." Work-for-hire is a doctrine defining the relationship between a copyright owner and a writer. Note that the owner may or may not be an author; he, she, they, or it may be a corporation (like a movie studio or television production company), a syndicate of investors, or an individual who is not a writer. These entities hire writers to perform a service in pretty much the same way a homeowner hires a cabinetmaker, a painter, or a gardener, except that in this case the task is writing a text for the "boss"—the creator or owner of the idea. The owner is then free to exploit the text in any way he desires with no further obligation to the author.
Some provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act attempt to define the work-for-hire concept, but they do not do so very clearly and have left the door open to unfair exploitation of authors.
I hasten to make clear that all work-for-hire is by no means exploitive. Authors sometimes voluntarily sell all rights to their copyrighted work. And there are numerous situations in which work-for-hire may be considered reasonable and acceptable by normal ethical standards; for instance, the engagement of writers to do articles for an encyclopedia. The copyright holder of the total work is the publisher, and because it would be impractical and uneconomical to pay a royalty to each contributor, the normal arrangement is a one-time fee. As long as the fee pays for the time and effort, the author is usually content, particularly if he or she gets byline credit, for a contribution to an encyclopedia bears great prestige that helps the author endure the low wages.
Another application of the work-for-hire concept that most of us accept unquestioningly is ghostwriting. Authorities or celebrities who cannot write well or are too busy to write their own books engage writers to draft books for them. Although the principal author may agree to share some of the proceeds of the book with his ghost, the principal is the sole signatory of the contract with the publisher, thus making him the copyright owner. He then signs a separate agreement with the ghost, removing that person from claim to copyright and direct participation in revenue generated by publication of the book. Occasionally, what may have seemed a fair fee at the time it was negotiated with the ghostwriter may not seem so if the work demanded of him turns out to be excessive, or if the book becomes a runaway best-seller. Under ordinary circumstances, however, the ghostwriter accepts his lot as a worker-for-hire, and may at least secure more work for himself by telling publishers, "That book was actually written by me."
If all this seems a bit remote to you, let me point out that many garden variety authors employ other writers on a work-for-hire basis. Take the creator of a popular fictional series who, growing bored with his characters or too busy with other projects to turn out new books in his series, farms them out to other authors. He signs contracts with his publisher, then negotiates separate agreements with ghostwriters to produce first drafts or even final ones for him, which he passes off as his own. In some instances the publisher is aware of the existence of these subcontractors, in others it is not. But seldom is the subcontractor a signatory to the publication contract, and though he may receive a piece of the action as part of his deal with the principal author, it is not strictly a royalty in the sense we usually understand it, and of course the ghost forfeits any claim to copyright ownership.
Although I'm not at liberty to detail the many instances I know of authors who farm their work out, fans of those authors might be shocked to learn that their favorite books are produced, as it were, in a shop. There is in particular one best-selling male action-adventure series whose creator, to my knowledge, no longer writes his own books at all. In conjunction with his publisher, he puts the production of his books on an assembly line basis. A series "bible" describing the characters and general story line of the series is issued to writers, who submit plots for the approval of the creator and/or the publisher. Upon approval, a contract is issued to the writers. At first glance it looks like a typical publishing contract, but closer scrutiny reveals that the copyright is owned by a corporate entity; the advance is not called an advance (it's simply called a "sum"); and the royalty is not called a royalty (it's called a "bonus payment") and is expressed in cents rather than as a percentage of the list price of the book, presumably to further remove the writer-for-hire's labor from any association with creation of the work. I estimate the payments to the writer-for-hire to be approximately one-fourth to one-third of the traditional royalty that might normally accrue to him if he were the original creator of the book. I assume that the balance of the royalty is shared between the originator and the publisher.
In the above example, the originator of the series is in effect a packager. Packagers, as I have stated elsewhere, are sui generis. They are not exactly authors even though they frequently create the ideas and story lines for books; they are not exactly agents even though they take a kind of commission for their roles as go-betweens among authors and publishers; and they are not exactly publishers even though they buy the services of authors.
I've never been comfortable with packagers either in theory or in practice. Packagers are both buyers and sellers at the same time (so that "broker" might be the most apposite synonym), and there is inherent in their function the potential for mischief, abuse, and downright dishonesty. Some book packagers are as honest, open in their business dealings, and caring about authors as is possible under the circumstances. But a number are little short of rapacious, hiring authors for the smallest fees they can get away with and paying them no royalty or participation in subsidiary rights revenue whatsoever, while selling their books to publishers for very large multiples of what they pay the writers for them.
Furthermore, while these packagers manage to sell publishers on the concepts of books or series, they often contribute little or nothing by way of editorial input or guidance. An author is given the most general ideas ("How about a Dirty Dozen set in Bosnia!"), then is required to create characters, situations, and plots—create, in short, the entire series. The packager's argument is that were it not for his initiative in creating an idea and selling it to a publisher, writers would have no work and no pay. As the level of pay is all too frequently subsistence, the cause for heartfelt gratitude frequently escapes the writer-for-hire.
Because many publishers don't particularly care where their product comes from as long as it is good, is delivered on time, and is not too expensive, they provide fertile ground in which packagers can flourish. That is one key reason for my concern that the packaging phenomenon, with all the implications of author exploitation that it represents, is on the rise. The other reason is that some publishers are taking their cues from packagers and doing the same thing. They cook up series ideas in their offices, produce a series bible, then hire writers to write books in the series under a house pseudonym. Because such publishers maintain that they created the series, they have been scaling back advances, royalties, and author participation in subsidiary rights for those books, and their contracts are, in fact if not in actual language, work-for-hire agreements. In many instances, the publishers offer flat fees to authors interested in writing books for publisher-originated series, take it or leave it.
Of more recent vintage, but a phenomenon that will grow to major proportions as time goes by, is the use of writers-for-hire for electronic and multimedia works, where text is but one element along with still and moving pictures, music, animation, etc. And the exploitation without compensation of electronic versions of stories and articles for magazines has become a source of bitter warfare between writers groups and newspaper and magazine publishers.
You might infer that I refuse to do business with the more exploitative of packagers and publishers, but that is not the case. Some of my clients are hungry, and occasionally some are desperate for any kind of work, and though I may judge certain packagers and publisher-packagers harshly, practically speaking I don't feel it is fair for me to turn down, out of hand, work for clients who might be grateful for a few thousand dollars and a job that gets them through a financial squeeze or crisis. It's easy for an agent to tell an author, "I'd rather see you starve than accept that deal"; it's not so easy for an author to agree with him. If, after a writer has weighed all aspects of a work-for-hire deal, he or she still wants the job, then the only thing an agent can do is negotiate what few safeguards he can, such as making sure the writer is not legally liable for changes or additions to his text rendered by the packager or publisher. The quality of help an agent can render in these cases is the equivalent of telling the tenant of an avaricious landlord, "You have two choices: sign the lease or don't sign the lease."
Because packagers prosper from a supply-and-demand dynamic that is clearly—at this time, anyway—in their favor, there is little that individual authors or agents can do to roll conditions back. It must be done through collective action. Sad to say, authors and literary agents are scarcely closer to effective collective activism than they were when I started advocating it years ago. So if you've been holding your breath, let it out.
Novelizations of movies, television shows and video games are among the most intriguing subspecies of commercial fiction. I say subspecies because they obviously cannot be spoken of in the same breath as Lolita or Portrait of a Lady; indeed, even commercial novelists look down their noses at novelizations as possessing not a shred of redeeming social value, as the literary equivalent of painting by numbers. On the spectrum of the written word, tie-ins are as close to merchandise as they are to literature.
There's some truth in this. Tie-ins are kin to souvenirs, and in some ways are not vastly different from the dolls, toys, games, calendars, clothes, and other paraphernalia generated by successful motion pictures and television shows. Those who write them usually dismiss them with embarrassment or contempt, or brag about how much money they made for so little work. Yet, when pressed they will speak with pride about the skill and craftsmanship that went into the books and assure you that the work is deceptively easy. And if you press them yet further, many will puff out their chests and boast that tie-in writers constitute a select inner circle of artisans capable of getting an extremely demanding job done promptly, reliably, and effectively, a kind of typewriter-armed S.W.A.T. team whose motto is, "My book is better than the movie."
How are tie-ins created? Their birthplace of course is the original screenplay or video game bible. The Writers Guild of America Basic Agreement entitles screenwriters to ownership of literary rights to their screenplays. When they sell a screenplay they may retain the novelization rights or include them, at terms to be negotiated, in the screenplay deal. In the case of movies or television, most of the time the screenwriter sells novelization rights to the buyer—the film's producer, studio or network. The new owner of these rights now tries to line up a publication deal for the tie-in by contacting paperback publishers and pitching the forthcoming theatrical or television movie or series.
If the film has a big budget, terrific story, bankable actors, unique special effects, or other highly promotable features that promise a hit, publishers will bid for the publication rights. (In the case of television tie-ins, the producers almost always wait until a series is a hit before arranging for a tie-in. And one-shot movies of the week seldom trigger novelizations because of the brief period—one evening—in which they are exposed to the public.) A deal is then struck, the publisher paying an advance against royalties to the producer, studio or network.
The publisher then engages a writer to adapt the screenplay. It should be readily apparent that if the movie is indeed shaping up to be a hit, or the television show is already a hit, the publisher will be forced to pay such a high advance and royalty to the producer or studio that little will be left for the writer. That's why novelizations are generally low-paying affairs, with modest advances and nominal royalties of 1 or 2 percent. Flat fees are by no means unheard of. And, because the competition among writers for novelizations is intense, few writers are in any position to bargain.
But if the pay scale is so miserable, why do authors seek novelization assignments so ardently? Because they think it's easy money. Sometimes it is. But it's not like falling off a log, as we shall soon see.
Publishers are nowhere near as enamored of movie tie-ins as authors are, and they weigh the profit potential of such books as critically as they do that of the thousands of other manuscripts submitted to them annually. They know that most movies do not translate well into books. There are also technical and timing problems with tie-ins that are daunting to publishers. For instance, the screenplay may undergo alterations, some of them radical, right up to or even during the shooting of the film. By the time filming is complete there is insufficient time before the release of the movie for a writer to write the novel and the publisher to publish it.
Another problem for publishers is the greed that has set in at the studios. Originally, tie-ins were regarded as free publicity for movies, and publishers regarded them as little more than list-fillers. For a modest payment to the studio a publisher would get the screenplay, stills, cover photo, and promotional material, and everybody was happy. Then the studios began to smell profit, and arranging tie-ins became a little less complex than building a space shuttle.
Anyone who thinks that tie-in writing is a mere matter of adding he-saids and she-saids to the screenplay dialogue has certainly never attempted such an adaptation. For one thing, most screenplays are too short to convert page for page into book manuscripts. Therefore, even if you are following the script scene by scene, you are required to amplify on character, action, and location descriptions. Any good novelist can translate a terse screenplay direction ("EXTERIOR, OLD MACDONALD'S FARM, A STORMY NIGHT") into a few pages of descriptive prose ("A bitter, shrieking north wind lashed the trees and hurled sheet after sheet of icy rain against the clapboard siding of Old MacDonald's farmhouse . . ." etc.). The problem is that when you analyze screenplays you realize that most of them don't lend themselves comfortably to scene-for-scene conversion. In fact, many of them present nightmarish challenges. The same is true of video games.
The reason is that movies and games are watched with one lobe of the brain, and books read with another. If you'll take the trouble to compare a novel with its film adaptation, you'll immediately realize that whole chapters have been cut or reduced to takes that last a few seconds on the screen; or that, conversely, a sentence or paragraph has been dramatized into a full-dress scene that consumes five or ten minutes of movie time. This is because some material in books is distinctly more cinematic than other material. (It also explains why few novelists make good screenwriters, and most screenwriters are dreadful novelists.)
By the same token, owing to the demands of the book reader's imagination, elaborate scenes in a movie may seem far too long to merit the same expansive treatment in a novelization; fast transitional scenes, flashbacks, establishing shots, short takes, and the like may require a novelist/novelizer to build them into whole chapters.
Every tie-in writer talking shop will tell you how he or she overcame such challenges, challenges complicated by the insistence of the producer on approval of the novel or a run-in with some middle-management studio exec who demanded that whatever was in the movie must go into the book, and whatever wasn't in the movie must not go into the book. The fact that novelizations may take only a few weeks does not mean that many, many hours of thought and years of writing experience did not go into them. Novelizers earn every penny, and for all but the biggest books, pennies are what they make. One author I know, one of the genre's top authors, earned a total of some $45,000 in royalties for a labor of less than a week on the film tie-in of a blockbuster Broadway show, but that is exceptional.
The best advice I can give prospective tie-in writers is, if possible never write one for a flat fee, no matter how dumb the movie, no matter how quick and simple the job. Years ago, Ace hired me to write a tie-in for a perfectly dreadful and quite disgusting horror movie called Squirm, which portrayed in all its graphic revoltingness what happened when a small town was invaded by millions of bloodsucking earthworms. Ace offered me a flat fee of $2,500, and, seeing the prospect of earning $250 a day, I grabbed the deal. The movie came and, blessedly, went. But my book went through numerous editions for Ace, and was sold to English and other foreign publishers where it endured for years.
My book was better than the movie. Big deal! That and a good agent would have earned me a nice profit. Unfortunately, I don't have an agent. I don't trust them.
