The Johnny Denovo Mysteries

Recently, there’s been a good discussion about profit and publishing, much of it emanating around the disclosures made by Lynn Viehl, the best-selling author of “Twilight Fall.” According to Viehl, she’s made only $25,000 or so from her book, once expenses for her agent, the writing process, and the submission process are subtracted. Viehl also guesses that her publisher has grossed about $450,000 during the same period, and netted about $250,000.

In a later post, agent-extraordinaire Nathan Bransford disputes Viehl’s math, factoring in discounts given to book retailers, and arriving at a figure of about $105,000. In addition, Bransford knows that this figure doesn’t include marketing costs, overhead for editing and designing and manufacturing the book, and shipping and management costs. Also, since this best-seller has to provide revenues that many failed books can’t, these relatively thin margins are spread even further for the publisher.

The bottom line?

This is the value of transparency. It makes it clear that authors shouldn’t write fiction for the money, because there are very few (probably a few dozen out of thousands) who actually can quit their day jobs because their books make them rich. And publishers, who do publish for money, are also publishing many things that don’t make money while carrying the risk for the authors. They deserve whatever relatively meager margins they get from their fiction sales.

And for the occasional major best-seller that comes along? When the author and publisher both make a killing?

As the old saying goes, even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut.