I really hope this doesn't go as wrong as I think it might. ^_^;

Also, $55,000? You passed the 'almost choked' along to me.

I hope so. I got my fingers crossed for you.

that is pretty exciting! I expect your inbox will become horrifically bloated though! haha. I'm working on my comic, SLG is one of my favorite companies. Once I get some stuff thats good enough together I'm going to submit. *slaves away at ye olde drawing board*
Will anyone from SLG be at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda this weekend?

I do want to point out I was speaking specifically about larger publishers who wanted to take on a major initiative in order to reap greater rewards on an industry-wide scale, not indy or small press who work at the grassroots level working subtle but often more dynamic changes. I ran a small fiction novel publishing company for two years (before starting my pursuit of comics) and never did we offer advances (and found plenty of amazing writers in spite of it), but we did pay 10%-14% of gross sales (that's gross, not net) with no holds on returns, no administration or "office fees", and were paying out royalties within six months of publication. It was a straight-forward model that worked and made both us and our authors happy, but it isn't a model I'd use were I a major publisher expecting extremely quick turnaround or an expectation to hire the best of what's out there to do a major push on what I would expect to be a global line.

I would love to know specifically what you mean by large advances being responsible for problems in the publishing industry, however, and what you mean by "large". If I'm producing a book a year, $55,000 or so seems like enough most anybody can build a decent life on (pay for a car, a house in a decent city, raise kids on, etc), and color me critical, but it seems any mid-size to large publisher will do whatever they can to make sure they never ever have to pay out royalties if they can help it. Small publishers are different because IMHO, there's more dedication to actual creators . . . but I would never trust a major publisher to ever do more than try to get as much profit out of their creatives as they can by paying as little as they can get away with . . . and loopholing their way out of everything else. The only way a major publisher will gain my trust is by putting more up front instead of giving my promises of later (because I've been screwed there before as have many creators). But, as always, that has to be earned on my end as well, and a creator does that by showing their publisher that if they pay that kind of money, it better as HELL be well worth it!!!

I'd love to hear whether you agree or disagree, though.

Sorry to go off topic of your main post, but I felt the need to put that statement in context so that people don't think I advocate bankrupting small and indy publishers! THAT goes against everything I believe in! Small and Indy publishers have as much of a place in publishing as the big guns, and I believe the techniques and approach are so wildly different between the two as to be incomparable. Please never think that I would expect small publishers to act, create, or market there books the same way as a large publisher, nor do I expect them to offer the same set of benefits to their authors. That would be suicide for every local label out there. I love and support small and local businesses. And I don't want anybody to every believe I would promote something that went against those beliefs.

Right -- I wasn't clear at all in how I put it, but I was trying to say that for us to pay someone a $55,000 advance would be equivalent to the seven-figure advances that larger publishers have paid.

Unless you're a big name novelist you cannot expect to make a living from books. When I got my MFA, we had a whole class devoted to how to get money from writing things other than novels or stories or poems. Some students got upset about that because it carried the implication that we would not be able to make money from our creative work and were failures before we ever started. I wanted to tell them to shut up. That is the reality. Writing columns for Publishers Weekly isn't as romantic as being a Lady Novelist, but it gives me a little money while I send out my novel to agents and write another novel, another short story, hoping that I get picked up somewhere while I'm still young and attractive and marketable, though I'll never be as young and attractive and marketable as a Zadie Smith or some other fiction world darling. Zadie Smith, superstar novelist that she is, incidentally, still seems to do a lot of work writing columns for newspapers.

I've gone off far on a tangent here.

Assuming that a book in this instance is written and drawn by one person, and is at least 100 pages, the $55,000 isn't that far off current standards for larger publishers, and is less than some publishers I have worked for.

Though perhaps unrealistically high page rates are part of the problem, rather than the solution. Personally, I prefer the percentage of sales based pay structure. Also, I don't believe in advances. Why should I get paid for work I haven't done yet?

Once a book has been complete and turned in, it's no longer an advance for work not done. So the scenario you describe there is not what I was talking about. I did not say that a person should not be paid until release.

Yeah, the first book can be a challenge, but hardly impossible survival wise. After the first book, you work on the second while living off the money from the first. And so on.