Although book publishing directly employs about seventy-four thousand people, tens of thousands of others are employed in book- related fields, thus offering job opportunities beyond the publishing organizations themselves.
The book publisher is at the center of the accompanying chart. Every position leads to or emanates from that spot, ultimately extending to the users of books at the bottom. We'll start from the top and work our way around the circle.
Authors
If the publisher is the hub of the publishing wheel, the author is clearly its principal spoke. This holds true whether the author is a bankable commodity such as John Grisham or Jeffrey Archer, a mystery or used with permission from the author, science fiction writer, a "publish-or-perish" academic writing her first book, or a sports hero writing his memoirs with a ghostwriter.
Publishers advance mega money to a small coterie of established authors, and expect these books to be best-sellers; otherwise they would not advance such staggering sums. The best-selling record to date, set in 1993 by Robert James Waller, is The Bridges of Madison County, which sold more than four million copies in one year.
What is the author's role in the acquisition process? To explain, let's trace the path from solicitation to publication. As a hypothetical example, let's use a well-crafted historical novel by an author with one published book.
First, the author writes an outline of the novel and fifty to one hundred pages and sends it to her agent. The agent reads the material, decides that it's commercial, and submits it to a few dozen trade publishers of hardbound fiction. The multiple submission assumes that the author's first publisher does not have an option that requires the next book to be submitted there first.
But even if the author's first publisher does not have this first refusal option, the agent will submit the material there in the first round, since it already has experience gained from publishing the author's work. We should also bear in mind that although this author has an agent, many authors do not.
Although the author of this historical novel is established, she must still present the outline and some sample writing as part of her submission.
After about three months of sending submissions to various publishers, the author's agent receives an offer from an editor at a medium-size publishing house. The editor offers $20,000 as an advance against future royalty earnings. The editor and agent negotiate, and finally a $25,000 advance is agreed upon. In the publisher's contract, not only are terms spelled out for hardcover publication of the book, but all subsidiary rights are specified as well. In this case, the author will share in subsidiary rights, receiving 50 percent of any income derived from the publisher's subsequent sublicensing of mass-market paperback rights, book club sales, magazine excerpts, foreign editions, and so on.
The $25,000 nonreturnable advance may seem to be a tidy sum if one has another full-time job, but if the author is to labor over this work for three or four years, the advance may seem insignificant.
The advance is paid in stages-usually a third on signing, a third at an agreed point during the writing process, and a third upon completion and acceptance of the manuscript.
Authors' advances vary greatly. We know that multi-million dollar deals are made for such authors as Danielle Steel and Stephen King. But some authors don't receive any advance at all, even for long, scholarly works; others receive just $1,000 or $2,000.
If the average trade hardbound book sells six thousand or seven thousand copies, the author seldom receives more money than the advance. Such is the fate of our hypothetical historical novel. The book sells fifty-five hundred copies in hardbound, but never goes into paperback. For its author, her "profit" ends up as some good critical acclaim and a brief moment of glory. Then she is off to the library and the word processor for another three years to write another novel.
