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Good tip, Worldshown - thanks!

Hello you lovely people!

Any authors out there using Windows-based PCs might like to check out Mike's Name Generator, a pretty handy (and totally free) utility that can generate billions of unique names - never again will you find yourself trawling through the phone book or scouring the credits on the closest CD in order to come up with names for your characters!

Visit my website - //http://www.iol.ie/~carrollm - to find out more about the program and download the latest version!



Cheers,
Mike

I've always wanted to write a book, and think I've "got one in me" because I'm arrogant like that, but when you say so many novelists can't make a living, one has to wonder - if that is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve you -  how do useless cunts like Dan Brown and James Patterson earn a living via the literary drivel they churn out?

Is it marketing? Luck? Connections?

Obviously Patterson had a whole cadre of advertising and media chums to plug his shite via his old "day job", and he also had an expert insight on what "sells", but Christ almighty, his books are shite.

Well, Patterson and Brown are in the 0.1% who make a living because lots of people buy their books. That sounds like a glib answer, I know, but it really is as simple as that.

Now, as to WHY lots of people buy their books... That's a question that requires a somewhat longer answer. The truth is that the average reader doesn't devote much time to reading. I don't know the exact figures but I'd be surprised if the average person reads more than ten books a year. Books aren't a huge part of their lives - they just don't care all that much. So their primary criteria for choosing a book are recommendation by friends, brand recognition and market visibility... This last one is key: people pick the fruit of the best-seller tree and don't often forage any deeper.

So best-sellers are best-sellers because they're best-sellers! Gotta love that!

That part of it is all down to marketing: a successful book rarely has anything to do with the quality of the writing or the storytelling, because success is judged on sales and the sales are almost entirely the product of the skills of the publicity department.

In many cases the publishers decide in advance which books will be their best-sellers. To make a book a best-seller the publishers offer quantity-based discounts to the big bookstore chains (seventy or even eighty per cent isn't unheard of), and on top of that they buy prime shelf-space to ensure maximum visibility: those big window displays of the latest best-sellers in your local bookstore don't come cheap!

Sometimes a book will break through on its own, but this really only happens maybe once a year. The Da Vinci Code is a textbook example: its initial sales were about average, but somehow it caught the public imagination and people started talking about it. The publishers capitalised on this and started pushing it like crazy. Pretty soon everyone was buying it to see what the fuss was about.

It's possible for a publisher to deliberately ignite the public interest, but it's a very unpredictable science. One Big Name publisher (who shall remain nameless) recently paid a huge advance - seven figures in UK money - to a new author for a three-book contract, and they used that as the focus of their publicity campaign: "Look at how much money we're giving this author! That just shows you how much confidence we have in the books!" When the first book was published the author was interviewed dozens of times on prime-time TV, radio, top newspapers... The sort of blanket coverage of which every author dreams. Unfortunately, all the interviews focussed on the impressive advance and pretty much ignored the books.

The books themselves - while certainly not terrible - were nothing particularly special and sales were only slightly above average. So the bookstores were left with thousands of unsold hardbacks, which meant that when the second volume was published a lot of the bookstores didn't want to know. A friend of mine who's well-immersed in the book trade receives the UK's sales figures every week, and through those figures we were able to calculate that said publisher would have to sell the same amount of books more than three hundred times over just to recover their costs.

To break that down:
Let's say that the advance was £1,000,000 (it was actually quite a lot more than that, but let's keep things simple).
Let's say the hardback sells for £10 in the shops... Out of that, the author will receive a royalty of about 5% - 50p a copy.
£1,000,000 divided by 50p means that the publisher has to sell 2 million copies (of the three books in total, not of each book) to cover the advance.
However, since the publisher offered huge discounts to the distributors and bookstores, the author's royalty would be reduced. Let's say it's down to 3.5%. This means sales of 2,857,143 copies to break even.
But we haven't even added the costs of publicity yet... Advertising isn't cheap. We'll err on the side of thriftiness and give them a budget of £100,000... Now they have to sell 3,142,857 books, but a book that sells well but isn't a genuine best-seller might shift (in the UK) 30,000 copies over the course of its life.

One would be forgiven for wondering why on Earth the publisher shelled out so much to begin with: there's only about 60 million people in the UK and it would be madness to expect one person in every twenty to buy a copy. However, publishers can usually expect to recover a lot of their costs by licensing the book to other countries... But that'll only happen if the foreign publishers are interested, and they'll only be swayed by the number of copies sold, not the amount of money paid to the author.

Hmm... I know I had a point before I started all that!

Oh yeah, now I remember! People buy James Patterson and Dan Brown books because those are among the few books to which the people are exposed. They can't easily buy books that aren't on the shelves.

It's the same with comics, of course... 2000 AD used to sell a quarter of a million copies a week when it was prominently displayed in every newsagent. Now, well, you'd be hard-pressed to find a copy in a newsagent within a five-mile radius of my house (and I don't exactly live in the sticks). It's a matter of debate as to whether the comic doesn't sell because it's not being stocked, or it's not being stocked because it doesn't sell...

-- Mike
(We've kinda gone off-topic here. A bit.)

I have to ask - where's the pun in Tharg?

Sorry. Perhaps I'm being thickest of all.

- Trout

I don't get that pun either... The only thing I can think of is that some people pronounce "TH" as "F": that makes it "fargfargfargfargfarg", which - kinda - sounds like someone swearing.

[Tharg]

Tharg

(hint: say it 5 times in rapid succession)

Um... Not sure about doing that. I've seen Candyman.

Man... This is way harder than voting on the pics! So many great ideas, and (for the most part) great execution.

1. His Lordship Rac
2. The Legendary Shark 2
3. Strontium Dog 90. 1

Honourable Mention: Godpleton

-- Mike

Oooh! Nice one, Pete!

Cheekily I ask: have you ever thought about getting a job?  

Oh, many times... But I always go and have a lie down until the feeling passes!

That said, I'm actually more than a little tempted by the Production Assistant at Rebellion job - I reckon I could do that, and three months wouldn't be too long a sojourn in Oxford... But would the job pay enough to cover living expenses?

Mike decides to nuke the place from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Sorry, Ush...

The truth is that 99.9% (at least) of novelists don't even earn the minimum wage from their books. I work between 60 to 80 hours a week, often more, and I'm still not earning as much as I would working a 35-hour week in McDonald's... And that's with fifteen published novels behind me!

But don't let that discourage you too much: you never know, your novels might hit the big time and really take off! Just, y'know, don't go spending the money until you actually have it!

Mike, impoverished author
Visit my website to learn more about my books, or even buy some. At the very least, click on my AdSense links so I can earn a few pennies! //http://www.iol.ie/~carrollm

//http://www.iol.ie/~carrollm/3d-marvel.htm#thething

... There's good money in novels...

Bwahahahaaaaaa!

Oh man, now that's funny!

-- Mike

I'm with Brendan on the McMahon front. I loved his early stuff right up to the start of the Cursed Earth saga, where Dredd suddenly went all skinny and big-booty. But even that was okay... Until a couple of years later when his art became cartoony and all the characters looked like cardboard cut-outs.

I understand that artists' styles evolve for a number of reasons (time versus page-rate being a likely suspect in many cases), though there are some artists whose work looks - to me - to be the result of realising that their die-hard fans will accept whatever they do, no matter how much or how little work they put into it.

Steve Yeowell is another example. His work on Zenith Book 1 is beautiful stuff, but by Book 2 it began to get messy. Now I can't even read The Red Seas because the artwork just looks so rushed and incomplete.

But that's just me. There are LOADS of 2000 AD artists for whose work I don't care, and I know I'm in the minority (doesn't mean I'm wrong, though).

-- Mike

Poor ol' Jacko.

The exact cause of death has yet to be determined, but early reports say that doctors have ruled out the sunshine, the moonlight and the good times.

Michael Jackson (possibly).

That's a shocker...