Category: Uncategorized

A few weeks ago, I pointed out how the former president of the SFWA declared that no-advance deals were “wrong”, “a Shitty Deal”, and possibly “worse than no deal at all”. Other traditionally published writers have even described them as “unethical”.  The former president also asserted: “Advances are typically all authors make from a book.” This is important to keep in mind when one considers what SFWA presently considers to be a professional payment as per its membership requirements.

1. Word rate: $0.05 per word, increasing to $0.06 later this year
2. One Paid Sale of a prose fiction book for which the author has been paid $2000 or more.

As it happens, Castalia House had just released two books, one by Mr. Kratman and one by me, which allows us to compare the real world results of the traditional professional model and the no-advance model which various authors have criticized so vociferously. Mr. Kratman has generously permitted us to use his book as a general example. Let’s look at the word rate model first.

1) At 20,000 words, Big Boys Don’t Cry would have commanded a flat-fee payment of $1,000.00.  Depending upon the publisher and the publication, Mr. Kratman would have received the payment between two and eight weeks from the time he delivered the manuscript. He delivered the manuscript on February 21st, so he would have received $1,000 sometime between 1 March and 12 April. He would not have received anything more than that.

2) If he received an advance of $2,500, that would have been against a royalty of 25 percent. He would have received $1,250 about a month after signing, then another $1,250 sometime between 21 March and 21 November 21. (Having been signed to Pocket Books, I am well aware that the check is seldom delivered promptly upon delivery and approval of the manuscript.) This is actually a conservative estimate, as increasingly payments are being divided into three parts, signing, delivery, and publication.

The performance of Mr. Kratman’s book is spelled out in comparison to the traditional model on the Castalia House blog. Due to the speed with which Castalia publishes and pays royalties, Mr. Kratman can expect to receive his first payment by 18 March, 23 days after publication. And he can also reasonably expect to receive more than $2,500 in royalties several weeks BEFORE he would have been likely to receive the second part of a theoretical “advance payment”. Moreover, once the $2,500 figure has been surpassed, he will continue receiving TWICE the royalties he would have under the traditional model.

Now, publishers are not stupid. They will not continue to publish authors who regularly underperform their advances. So, logic dictates that the only advantage of advance payments is to provide a small measure of very short-term security to authors who are unsure of their ability to sell their books and are willing to give away half their future earnings in exchange for that security. Nor have book advances been the historical norm, as the New York Times noted in 2009.

“In the old days,” the novelist Henry Bech, John Updike’s fictional alter ego, once said, “a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village.”

Both math and history make it obvious. Advances are for no-talents and the no-advance model is materially beneficial to the author. So, if you are an talented author who is confident in his ability to sell books and therefore interested in working with Castalia, have a look at our Concepts page, as there are certain books we would like to publish that none of our current authors are writing.

UPDATE: Since we have had a few inquiries, please note the following submission requirements for Concept-based submissions: “While we normally require completed drafts for submissions, in the case
of Castalia Concept-based submissions, we are willing to review
five-chapter novel submissions so long as they are accompanied by a
complete and detailed outline of the book or series. Novella submissions should still consist
of complete drafts.”

Sarah Hoyt ties the ongoing series of SF/F debacles to the coddling of the Millennials:

Anyway – the most important influx of these writers, who got doors thrown open for them because they were the right age/gender/upbringing – most of whom were very young and female – was about ten years ago.  Young women just out of college were getting huge offers for books that were what young women just out of college and with no life experience would write (and no, I’m not committing the error above.  This wave of what I call “red carpet acceptances” was targeted at young, just out of college and parroting the right “truths” – no life experience or rational thought wanted, or, in fact, accepted.) – very derivative, with a lot of sex and, in mystery, a lot of shoe and fashion shopping.  (I read Manolo shoe blogger, but look, there are limits to how much I care about shoes.)

Which brings us to now.  These young people, often very protected, were taken in and told they were the next best thing.  Not because of what they did, but because of what they WERE.  Success was their right and inevitable.  Like the poor kid who wrote the essay I linked, they were told they were so smart and brave and stuff for exactly parroting what they’d been taught.  And by and large – with a couple of exceptions – their stuff didn’t sell all that well, though they’ve won awards and been fetted and told how wonderfulglittery they are.

And even the ones who were successful are now shaky, because all they ever did was enter into traditional publishing and be massively supported and do fairly well within that framework.

I don’t even know if the smartest ones know all the breaks they got.  I doubt it.  First of all, because in publishing this stuff is all hidden and it’s hard to realize how much support you had, or even that other people didn’t get it.  (Unless you don’t get it, in which case you start wondering how the process broke down, then find out this is standard.)   Second because it’s human to take credit for our own success, no matter how helped.

So, you see, in their eyes, they think everyone else got this sort of magic carpet ride.

I think this may be a factor, but I think a more important one is the ideological element. As Tom Kratman and others have observed, leftist infiltrators always make a priority of bringing more of their own kind into an organization with the aim of taking it over. Talent and performance are tertiary at best, as both ideological correctness and “diversity” are deemed more important.

Add onto this the intense discomfort that the mediocre have when forced to compare themselves with their superiors and it is only a matter of time before an infiltrated organization is filled with soft, nasty, small-minded and petty mediocrities.

For illustrative purposes, compare John Campbell with Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Or contrast Louis L’Amour with John Scalzi. One doesn’t even need to read a single word, simply looking at pictures of the two individuals being compared is enough to tell you what sort of fiction they are going to publish and write.

The mediocrities brought in the clueless young women because they were the only sort of writers around whom they felt comfortable. Men writing masculine tales of technological competence and bravery? That not only made them feel uncomfortable and inferior, it wasn’t something to which they could even understand, let alone relate.