“Some books are clearly disappointing, however.”

November 26, 2015 2:16 PM

Betting Big on Literary Newcomers [The Wallstreet Journal] The publishing industry’s hunt for the next blockbuster has given rise to an elite new club: the million-dollar literary debut.

The need to secure one of the few must-read books of the year has given rise to an elite new club: the million-dollar literary debut. At least four literary debut novels planned for 2016 earned advances reported at $1 million or more, a number agents say is striking in the world of highbrow fiction. At least three such debuts were published this year, and two in 2014. “City on Fire,” by first-time novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, came out last month amid a flurry of publicity after receiving a nearly $2 million advance from Alfred A. Knopf, one of the largest ever for a literary debut.

Related:

- Are big book advances a blessing or a curse? [Independent.co.uk]

Jonny Geller, the agent at Curtis Brown renowned for winning his writers big advances, points out that books make money in the unlikeliest ways. Sometimes it's from library sales, sometimes it's a serial deal. "Publishing is a gamble. It's all about hedging bets, but then no one pretends it's otherwise. But it's easier for a publisher to make a splash about a book and a sale than it is to publish a small book well."

- The Rise of the Seven-Figure Advance [Publishers Weekly]

George Gibson, an industry veteran who is now publishing director at Bloomsbury USA, warned against reading too much into the latest round of big deals, noting that they happen “fairly regularly during the year.” Nonetheless, Gibson acknowledged that the business has changed. For the Big Five, especially, the highly sought-after projects have become essential. “The game plan to make your budget, or exceed it, relies on having bestsellers. That’s always been the case, but it’s the case now more so than ever.” Because both midlist and backlist titles aren’t selling as well as they once did, Gibson explained, the big books, “are more important.”

- Is an Amy Schumer Essay Collection Worth $10 Million? [New Republic]

These big books suck up resources inside a company—they are particularly taxing on publicists, who often have to travel with the author and book an endless array of media appearances—and their extensive advertising campaigns don’t come cheap. But they also solve most publishers’ biggest problem: discoverability. As someone who has worked at a small press, I know how difficult it can be to break out an unknown author or to push a midlist author to a higher sales plane. That’s not a problem with celebrities like Kaling and Fey—when someone picks up a copy of their books, they know, more or less, what to expect.

- The New Literary Lottery [New York Magazine]

And the recession that has caused sales of all but a few books to flat-line hasn’t slowed the run on mega-advances; if anything, the desperation to find the next Alice Sebold has only upped the ante. In the past two years, a steady stream of first-time authors have joined the club. Yale Law professor Stephen Carter may have made headlines when Knopf coughed up an astonishing $4 million for his first two novels, but he is by no means alone. Medical student Daniel Mason received $1.2 million for a two-book deal from Knopf on the strength of his manuscript for The Piano Tuner, which appeared last fall. Hari Kunzru, a former editor at Wired UK, received nearly $1 million for the U.S. rights to his first novel, The Impressionist; Khaled Hosseni, an Afghan-American, whose first book, The Kite Runner, concerns life under the Taliban, pulled in a substantial six-figure sum, as did Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who received $475,000 for The Dirty Girls Social Club, which took the former New Mexico reporter six days to write (yes, that’s $80,000 a day). Arthur Phillips, a Minnesota-bred Gen-Xer, earned a similar sum with his debut smash, Prague. And the youngest recipient of publishing’s new largesse, local poster boy Jonathan Safran Foer—a 26-year-old Princeton grad living in Jackson Heights—received a clean half-million from Houghton Mifflin (not to speak of a very quick $925,000 for the paperback rights) for his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated.

posted by Fizz (26 comments total)

And thus another corner of the economy becomes winner-take-all.
posted by pmv at 2:44 PM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

And thus another corner of the economy becomes winner-take-all.

Doesn't have to be though, I know that I will actively seek out smaller publishing presses and try to support those authors too. It just takes some searching, but it feels good to give your money to someone who isn't part of the big five. I mean, the big five certainly have their place in the market, and I buy books from them too, but I like to spread the wealth around. There are plenty of smaller presses with authors that are just as talented and entertaining to read. I try to use my dollars to vote and make a difference.
posted by Fizz at 2:48 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have no problem with big advances.
posted by jscalzi at 2:59 PM on November 26, 2015 [51 favorites]

An important point that often gets overlooked about this phenomenon is that it's also the exit strategy for the pyramid scheme known as the MFA. Most folks take quite a long time to wise up and realize that the MFA course is basically a machine for manufacturing MFA professors, not teaching people how to write for a living; and every year a lucky handful (or fewer) maintain the illusion of success by cashing out to the tune of a first book advance in six digits, $100,000 to $400,000.

By handing out these stonking advances to newbies the larger publishers generate a lot of news media buzz, possibly manufacture a bestseller that'll earn out the advance (about 20-40% of the time, I suspect) and demonstrate the virile turgidity of their ballance sheets. But they also indirectly prop up an industry that generates a metric shitload of hopeful submissions every year, some of which end up joining the midlist and might go on to be bestsellers without the pain of the six digit advance. In other words, you've got to average it out with the much smaller advances that most hopeful debutantes get.

NB to John: the trouble with big advances is that they're addictive. You kind of get used to the lifestyle, and forget that what goes up may also come down.
posted by cstross at 3:20 PM on November 26, 2015 [25 favorites]

Celebs getting big advances on book deals has been going on for a while now, but I'm fascinated by the fact that Ethan Hawke has a genre novel out this season.
posted by thecjm at 3:39 PM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

but I'm fascinated by the fact that Ethan Hawke has a genre novel out this season.

Slight derail: but on the subject of Ethan Hawke's new book, this is the most 'author reading a book for a book-store event' photograph that I have ever seen!! via: [SF Chronicle]
posted by Fizz at 3:43 PM on November 26, 2015 [13 favorites]

Time to start running some literary equivalent of those articles about the movies which lost most at the box office, I think. Which of these $1m advances will take the Heaven's Gate crown?
posted by Paul Slade at 3:56 PM on November 26, 2015

My ticket to the publishing big times is my revisionist historical semi-novel: "Killing O'Reilly".
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:00 PM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

Who could have dreamed that our children would grow up to say "Ethan Hawke? You mean the author?"
posted by No-sword at 4:08 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Time to start running some literary equivalent of those articles about the movies which lost most at the box office, I think. Which of these $1m advances will take the Heaven's Gate crown?

The was a post last year about the most expensive books of 2014. And I was sorely disappointed to find it full of giant art books, and not million dollar advances on books that sold under 100 copies.
posted by thecjm at 4:08 PM on November 26, 2015

If this meant that a larger portion of the proceeds were being redistributed to authors I would be more pleased, but this is just a concentration towards a small number of authors, which doesn't seem like something worth celebrating unless you are one of the ones who has won that lottery.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:41 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

All I know is that one of the books we published recently (Vikings! Time travel!) was so good -- so good that even I, the non-reader of such topics fell hopelessly in love with the book. I wish my small press could have paid the author a million dollars. She deserves it. But here we are.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 6:13 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wish my small press could have paid the author a million dollars.

Theoretically, if it is as good as you say, it will catch on and earn that million dollars, and good luck to you and the author.

Anyway, this is nothing new. Outside advances for first timers was enough of a joke back in the eighties that SPY magazine did Cliff Notes parody on the lucky winners.

An alternative system, safer for the publisher and potentially more profitable for the author, would be to offer a bigger cut of the pie as proceeds roll in (or not). Of course, there's no PR value in that, so I doubt it happens much, if at all.

The other problem is that the more seven figure deals there are, the less each one matters. I read through the links. Not a mention of my wife's cousin the Ohio English Professor who last April got a million dollar contract for his first novel at the London Book Fair.

(Perhaps I should start writing fiction. I have at least two killer ideas....)
posted by BWA at 7:40 PM on November 26, 2015

I read the sample chapter of City on Fire and was less than impressed-- it's all nerdy guy from the suburbs meets Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the Village in 1975, and it contains a technical error (about 8 tracks) which would probably not bother anyone else under the age of 50 or so, but it jumped out at me. The prose is average, though the page count is impressive (over 900), so it's one of those "statement" books, I suppose. It was just published in October-- anyone here read it, and can comment on the book as a whole? (2 million dollars. Yikes.)
posted by jokeefe at 11:06 PM on November 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Just read one of those seven-figure advance books, Cline's Armada. Quite possibly the worst book I've ever read, and (like the movie Pixels) one of those things that are so massively stupid at every possible level that the world would be a much better place if nobody involved in the production ever worked in their field again. But of course he's already gotten a seven-figure advance for the movie rights, and also a seven-figure advance for his next unwritten novel.
posted by effbot at 5:13 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Seems like only yesterday these kinds of numbers were literally the largest book advances ever, and they were going to sure things. Now it's just gambling.
posted by grobstein at 5:14 AM on November 27, 2015

I got a hundred pound advance for my book. I feel left out somehow now.
posted by dng at 5:35 AM on November 27, 2015

Ethan Hawke has a genre novel out this season.

Wow, he’s really serious about getting into character for the next Before Sunrise film.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:51 AM on November 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

I have garnered advances from $12,000 to $50,000, from various Big Five and smaller houses. And the one thing I've learned as an author is: the advance is the only thing you can guarantee.

The house can promise you tender, loving care, they can promise you that you'll love the cover, they can promise you publicity and marketing the likes that you have never seen-- but they won't put that into the contract, and they will take it away without hesitation. The publishers don't know if they will manage to sell subrights; they can't guarantee book-club placement.

But this, I have learned: the bigger the advance, the more likely they are to actively promote the book, and seek out PR and marketing opportunities, and do their best to get a good cover on it. The lower the advance, the more likely you end up on what my Random House editor called "the greylist." These are the spaghetti test books: they put them in the catalogue, and then wait to see what happens.

As you can imagine, books without advertising, that the sales staff don't read, which feature ugly covers that Barnes & Noble refuse to put on their shelves tend to fail. Books with lots of advertising, that the sales staff read and actively promote, which feature attractive covers that encourage B&N to order 10,000 copies instead of 1,000-- well, they tend to succeed.

Self-fulfilling prophecy? Probably. But as an author, give me a big advance any day. 70-80% of books never earn out (never sell enough to recoup the amount of the advance, thus making the author entitled to royalties,) so the advance is the only money the author ever sees. The size of the advance is the only real signal you get indicating your publisher's confidence in the title.

So for me, bring on the big advance. If it succeeds, then everybody wins. If it fails, at least I paid off some bills.
posted by headspace at 10:08 AM on November 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

I have always assumed that the books that become the "best books,"( prize winners best sellers, staggering works of literary genius by 20 year olds, etc.) are in fact just a teeny tiny percentage of literary content of that quality. This leads me to wonder if part of the point of giving out million dollar advances is not so much to secure an author of genius, (though I probably underestimate the auction effect,) but rather to establish the lucky writer as a genius and the books as must reads because they are worth a million dollar advance. How much is spent in publishing and promoting a New Genius Book anyway? Is a million dollars a large or small part of that?
posted by Pembquist at 10:41 AM on November 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

anyone here read [City on Fire], and can comment on the book as a whole?

The Times Literary Supplement had a lukewarm-at-best review of it recently, IIRC.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 3:33 PM on November 27, 2015

I read "City On Fire." It's a big, often-untentionally hilarious novel about extremely self-serious teenaged punk rockers (whom the author takes very, very seriously) and decadent, morally compromised Upper East Side WASPS in 1970s New York, written by North Carolinian born in the 1970s with a not-exactly airtight grasp on history/ period details (and I say this as another North Carolinian born in the 1970s). The prose is nice and literary and sometimes pretty (though all of his POV characters distractingly speak/think in the same voice). It's mostly not boring (except for the "documentary" materials in text, which include an entire issue of a fictional teenager's punk rock fanzine. It reads exactly like an ordinary kid's punk rock fanzine--and gives the author an opportunity to time machine back and write a negative review of the first Clash album). There are parts of "City on Fire" that are so over-the-top (revolutionary bomb-hungry anarchist cells born out of the fragments of feuding punk rock bands, moustache-twirling, creepy, evil, rich uncles and aunts who recreationally disown people and hold Masque of the Red Death-themed Christmas Parties, an ancient guild of Italian fireworks makers, etc. ) that I wish Hallberg would either go full-weirdo, paranoid Pynchon or go full soap opera. But his narrators are all moralistic, humorless wet noodles with absolutely zero sense of fun. That said: the book could easily be adapted into some gloriously tasteless and zany 1977-"Gossip Girl"-but-with-The-Dead-Boys-and-Terrorists television series. I would probably watch that.
posted by thivaia at 6:22 PM on November 27, 2015 [7 favorites]

Thivaia, that was fantastic. Thank you.
posted by No-sword at 11:45 PM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yes, Thivaia! I'm a little over halfway through and you summed up my feelings perfectly
posted by (Over) Thinking at 4:45 AM on November 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

All I know is that one of the books we published recently (Vikings! Time travel!) was so good

I hope is not too much of a derail to ask what this book is titled?
posted by jcm at 4:59 AM on November 29, 2015

I hope is not too much of a derail to ask what this book is titled?

(Probably not the right books, but I pasted "vikings! time travel!" into Google and discovered the wonderful world of Sandra Hill, master of vikings, time-travel, silly jokes, and book covers with half-naked hard-bodied men. She's even got her own questionable content strip.)
posted by effbot at 8:27 AM on November 29, 2015 [1 favorite]