Continuing
again the vulgar theme of
money for writers, Mike R Underwood,
who is both an author and a publisher, on 25 Secrets of
Publishing Revealed! Despite the terrible title he makes a lot of well-informed,
professional sense. Highly recommended. Quote unquote:
If you sell a book to a major publisher, you’re agreeing to give over a big chunk of the book’s income in order to hire an army to go to bat for your book. If you sell to a smaller publisher, you’re hiring a smaller, more focused army. [. . .] You take home less money per copy sold, but you’ve got a lot more people on your side, who are working with you to make the book succeed. The entire army’s goal is to see each book succeed.
He is very sound
on the retail side of thing, covers and how to self-publish. But this, surely,
is nonsense:
Editors are some of the hardest and longest-working people I know, and they deserve all of the love and appreciation we can give them.
So here is one
of my favourite tunes from Frank Zappa’s 1968 albun We’re Only in it for the Money, “Take Your Clothes Off When You
Dance”. Bill Manhire’s How to Take Your
Clothes Off at the Picnic was published in 1977. I wonder if, by any
chance, they could be related.
I aspire to one of the "haughty aesthetes who lounge around in their offices all day reading books and then go off to fabulous publishing parties in the evenings".
ReplyDeleteNext week I hope to go to Auckland for the launch of my friend Phil Gifford's new book, at the Mount Eden Bowls Club. Glamour! Haughty, fabulous glamour!
ReplyDeleteSometimes, I wonder whether there is a connexion between Manhire's Making Baby Float (2011) and Yo La Tengo's How to Make a Baby Elephant Float (2003)
ReplyDeleteOr, perhaps, this: http://youtu.be/oYu7c4Vkmp0
ReplyDelete