April 9, 2006
It's been a sort of interesting weekend in my corner of the blog-o-sphere, if you've been tracking Lee Goldberg and JA Konrath's blogs. Joe wrote a piece about promotion and how you need to make money for your publisher, and some anonymous friend of Lee Goldberg wrote Lee a letter calling Joe the anti-christ, and Lee posted it--with a head's-up to Joe. The posters problem with Joe was the notion that a writer needs to live off his/her advance, and Joe's positing that he turns a third or half of his advances--which are considerable, at least compared to mine--over to promotion pissed him off.

Yeah, well, me too. My first novel didn't have an advance, and I spent a couple grand total promoting it, and I don't even want to do the math to see if I made it back (I don't have to; I didn't.) High Country and I have parted ways, amicably, but they probably weren't going to publish the follow-up to Dirty Deeds anyway, and I'm not sure it had anything to do with sales. They claimed they were re-focusing their publications anwyay. Whatever.

I'm gearing up for the marketing/promotion of The Devil's Pitchfork, and already I'm moving into the red financially, and I'm barely getting started. I don't know what to do about this except my best, to put a cap on how much time and money I will spend, and hope that I get some royalty checks and subsidiary sales to put me into profitability.

Am I happy about the way this fiction/marketing/promotion/profit equation seems to work, at least for me?

What do you think? No, I'm not happy about it. I'm taking it on faith that at some point the time and money put into promotion will have a return-on-investment, that I'll not only break even--which really, folks, is NOT good enough--but will turn a tidy or even large profit.

But I'll be honest. I don't know how long I can continue with a big chunk of my writing business acting as a financial black hole. If I want to do pro bono work, I might be better off writing press releases for the local animal shelter or doing free writing for the Michigan Democratic Party (boy, talk about a black hole).

This is the situation working writers find themselves in, and our situation is not all like Joe's, who boasts his second 6-figure, 3-book contract.

But this dilemma isn't limited to novelists or freelance writers. It's an issue for all business people. I write regularly for Podiatry Management and Podiatry Online on business issues, and I write regularly about marketing, and this problem of how much time and energy to spend on it is true for physicians, as it is probably for plumbers and electricians (whom I also write for).

You have to put some money back into your business. Freelance writers are lucky in that they don't have huge overhead. I was writing an article for plumbers recently about ways to remove invasive tree roots from sewer lines, and one of the methods was a Hydrojetter, which probably runs about $30,000 or more. Not all plumbers want that kind of investment, but the point is, that's an overhead the typical writer won't ever have to deal with. Imagine the overhead of a restauranteur, an independent trucker, a dentist, or septic field installer.

At least part of the problem is the typical novelist doesn't view themselves as running a business, and so don't view that there may be overhead costs outside printer toner and printer paper. Of course, I've never heard of a novelist going to the bank with a business plan and asking for a loan to cover marketing and start-up costs for their businesses, either. Probably just as well, because the humiliation of being laughed out of the bank would be pretty bad.

Best,
Mark Terry