Daily Finance has a long
article written by Sarah Weinman about Sarah Palin’s big book deal. Along the way
it drops some very interesting tidbits about that deal and others:
“Until recently, publishers
have long split writers' advances, paying half upon signing a contract with the
writer, and the other half upon a book's publication. But with the complicated
financials of conglomerates in the equation, many publishers now pay out
advances in quarters: upon signing, upon delivery and acceptance of the
manuscript, upon hardcover publication, and finally a year later, upon
publication of the paperback.”
Apparently the $1.25 million
retainer Palin was paid by HarperCollins will constitute the first of four
payments to be made to her (for signing and delivery) and the total payout to
her will be somewhere between $2.5 and $5 million (better than a governor’s
salary…).
Palin used an uncredited
ghost writer, believed to be Lynn Vincent, who will be paid something like
$200,000 (all these figures are estimates, as the actual numbers have not been
made public).
The article says, “If
Palin's advance is as high as $5 million, then HarperCollins willl need to sell
more than 400,000 copies of Going Rogue
to cover the advance and expenses for marketing and overhead.”
These big book deals
generate a lot of publicity but not always a win for the publisher. The article
points out, “The publisher had a huge bust this year in Jonathan Littell's
massively hyped thousand-page novel The
Kindly Ones, for which it paid $1 million that it didn't come close
to earning back. (Bookscan, which accounts for as much as 70 percent of all
book sales, last summer reported a disappointing 17,000 copies
sold.)”
Palin’s appearance on Oprah
may help boost sales of her book, but so far, dailyfinance says, the publisher
is not out of the woods in terms of making a profit on it.
(Want a big book deal yourself? Get my book, "Your Writing Coach"--it will guide you from idea through to publication. Published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers now.)
