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Originally Posted by Kickaha
What advice would you give to someone who is about to enter the viper's den?
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I'm not really familiar with the textbook market, so this is just super-general advice. I hope it helps...
I recommend almost everybody try to court an agent, but the textbook market might be
totally different. (Some markets, like poetry, are totally unagented.) So first I'd advise you to
get thee a book on publishing! Just a general overview, a la
A Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Your Book, or maybe one specific to textbooks, if you can find one. Libraries tend to have lots of books on writing/publishing. As an added bonus, you'll essentially be studying a published textbook!
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What's a reasonable set of compensation terms?
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We'll start from the beginning. A definition of terms:
Royalty - the cut you get out of every book sold
Advance - "guaranteed" money you get before the book is published. Usually the royalty for the initial print run of the book. So your royalty account essentially starts off in a hole, and you have to "earn" your advance first before you get future royalties. For example:
My Amazing Novel catches the attention of publishers. My agent (who I got because they know way more about selling books than I do) holds an auction, and two publishers bid against each other for the rights to publish
My Amazing Novel. The winning bid will include an advance, and royalty rate and the size of the initial print run will
usually be decided later. We'll say
My Amazing Novel gets an initial print run of 25,000, and my agent and I earn $2 per book. I will receive $50,000 (less my agent's commission) up front, but I will need to sell 25,001 books before I start making any more money. (It's the
advances, and not the recurring royalties after them, that make up the bulk of many authors' incomes. A book doesn't have to totally sell out its initial print run to be considered a "success.")
The royalty/advance system is the system for nearly all published works, including textbooks, with the exception of books written
for hire (for a flat fee).
Harry Potter earns J. K. Rowling a royalty; crappy paperback
Magic: The Gathering novels are written for hire. Some textbooks will probably fall in each category, but if you wrote a textbook and are now trying to publish it, you're working in the royalty/advance system. If an editor approached you and offered you $X (with no future royalties) to write Y, you're writing for hire.
How much is a fair royalty? That's hard to say. Depending on the publisher, your royalty will be calculated based on
list price or
purchase price (after discounts) - switching between these two systems is not normally up for debate in the typical book contract signing sessions. Purchase price royalties tend to be higher (percentage-wise), since many books are purchased below list. For
My Amazing Novel above, I assumed 10% based on the
list price of a $19.99 hardcover. If there's an intense bidding war, or you're a celebrity author, that number could go up to...well, anything, really. An agent that specializes in the textbook market would know far more about what to expect than I would.
Agents in the US almost universally collect 15% of your advance and royalties. Agents in the UK collect 10%, the lucky bastards. They're worth it, IMO, even if you're already in contact with a publisher. (In fact, if you already have a publishing
deal, you can still go back and get an agent to help you with the negotiation process, but they should be getting less than 15% at that point.)
Agents should work solely on commission - they should not get their income from "reading fees" or selling you services to book doctors (which they receive kickbacks from). They should make their money by
selling your book, not by making you buy services. Agents sometimes cap the cost of supplies (postage, copies) and bill any amount over, say, $300 to the author; this is reasonable (if they agree to take it out of your eventual royalties, as they should, it's even a bit of a show of confidence). But they should not be pushing you to go to a book doctor right out of the gate.
There's a lot of crappy agents out there. But they're invaluable (if textbooks are an agented market).
Listen to any editor - they're the ones you need to please - but don't let them take you for a ride. Editors need authors, all publishers need authors, no matter how poorly they treat them sometimes.
If you do get a book deal, try to remove any joint accounting clause from it. You know how I said that, with the advance, each book starts out in the "hole"? Joint accounting means that if you publish a second book with that house, they will share that same hole - so if you still haven't "earned back" $2,000 of your previous advance, they'll make you "earn back" that,
and your new advance, before you start getting royalties. Each book should stand on its own. Many houses also try to get first refusal rights, meaning you have to submit your next book to them first; these are a bad idea with your first book because you don't know how they're going to really treat you or your book yet. A multi-book
deal is, of course, entirely different.
Hope that helps!