Coming out September 2022

Pre-order HERE

I’ve done this peek behind the business curtain thing a couple of times before because fans seem to enjoy it, hopefully it helps other writers, and it’s fun to delve into your royalties and see how your various books are shaking out against each other. I’ve talked about this on WriterDojo too in our business episodes.

Okay, first off a quick primer on how traditionally published authors get paid. First we sign a contract for a book, and part of that we are given an Advance Against Royalties. This is a payment up front to the author. The author doesn’t get any more money until after the advance “earns out”.

To make the math easy, say you sign a contract for a book, and are given a $10,000 advance (heh, good luck with that newbs! 😀 ) and for each book you sell you get a percentage of the cover price, to make this easy we will say you make $1 a book. The first 10,000 copies you sell, you won’t get anymore money because that’s earning out the advance. Then after that, for each book you sell you would get paid a royalty of $1. So if you sold 15,000 copies in the first royalty period, you’d get another $5k.

Most publishers pay royalties twice a year or quarterly, and there is a delay between when the book comes out, and when you start getting paid for it in order to give the book stores a chance to return what copies they don’t sell. This is called Remaindering, and what they keep is your Sell Through percentage.

So if a publisher does a big mega push of an author to launch a career and the bookstores get swindled into buying millions of copies, but only thousands sell, after desperately trying to get rid of them (i.e. the 70% off super discount hardcover bin) they return the rest to the publisher. Those are remaindered and the author will have a terrible sell through rate. (my rate is actually extremely good on most of my titles, thank goodness).

That means there’s a delay of when you turn the book in, to when it comes out, and then a full royalty period after that, before you may or may not get paid again. This is why advances matter.

After the delay, then if the book has earned out, you start getting royalties. Sadly many books never earn out. There just aren’t enough books sold, and that author never collects royalties. If that happens your career is usually toast with that publisher unless they’ve invested in you for some other reason.

This is the advantage of smaller advances. It’s easier to be a winner on their books, and you’re getting paid based on sales either way. However, if you get offered one of those rare mega huge advances, take that unicorn money and run!

My first advances were fairly small when I was a newb, but they’ve grown over time so that now they’re pretty dang good, but my publisher feels confident doing that because they’ve got a history of how I actually sell and I’ve got a track record. Even then I’ve managed to earn out almost every one of my Baen books in the first royalty period, which means I start collecting royalties the year after it comes out.

For me there’s usually the royalty spike of whatever the new hotness book is which most recently earned out. Sales tend to spike at first, and then taper off. The books that have tapered off from that spike, but which are still selling are actually how you make your living. Not the advances and spikes. The key to actually quitting your day job and making it as a full time author is all your old books which are still selling and earning royalties. This is called your Back List.

You can hope for a giant super hit book which will get made into a movie, but that doesn’t happen for 99.9% of us. You can hope for that, and its nice when it happens, but realistically most of us who do this for a living are able to do so because we consistently produce and have lots of old books that are still selling.

This is for my last royalty check I received in December. The one before that SUCKED because it was the one covering the opening period of Covid lockdowns, when most of the book stores in America were closed. Sure, there was still online, eBook, and audiobook sales, but if you are actually carried in stores that’s a big chunk of income which nut kicked all of us. This last statement was getting back closer to normal. Thank goodness.

I’m not going to cite any actual dollar values. I’m going to keep this vague as to overall amounts. I’ll just say that I’m not a mega super star with an HBO show. Those guys make millions. But I’m no scrub (unlike most of the bossy authors online who dispense writing/business commandments) I make very successful doctor/lawyer money, and have for about the last 8 years. My last royalty check would have bought our first fixer upper starter house outright (or paid for the current Yard Moose Mountain Driveway of Death).

The most recent new release on this statement was Destroyer of Worlds, which had a good sized advance but earned out immediately. That one book, by itself, was 31% of my total royalties for the period. That’s the new book spike I was telling you about. (not bad considering it came out in September 2020 and 2020 sucked ass).

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Whenever you release a new book in a continuing series, it also causes people to once again pay attention of the previous books in the series. Son of the Black Sword jumped a bit to come in at a whopping 12% and House of Assassins at 9%. So the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series made up over half my royalties for that 6 month period at 51%(!).

Now that series is really interesting, because none of those book spike as high as something like a Monster Hunter novel. Much like the main character, Ashok Vadal, that series is a slow burn. Lower opening spike, much larger tail, overall slow but continual growth. I’m told this isn’t weird with epic fantasy series though, because so many fans have been burned by lazy unprofessional writers turning in great opening books and then never finishing, that buyers hold off until the series is finished, or it looks like it is likely to get finished.

Son of the Black Sword moved past Grimnoir two years back to become my #2 overall series. And it did that with 2 books against Grimnoir’s complete trilogy of 3.

Then there is my Monster Hunter series, which is the one that actually pays the bills. This one is always interesting to watch, because the backlist is large and remarkably consistent. Every single MHI book still sells well, and more importantly, every time I release a new one, I see a corresponding bump in all the earlier ones.

So this statement was a non-MHI period, but even then MH titles make up 33%. I already know when I get the royalty statement with Bloodlines on it, I’ll see a significant jump. MHI is the opposite of Forgotten Warrior, in that it gets a BIG spike for a new release, narrower tail. That’s because the hard core MHI fans tend to buy as soon as it comes out.

Now behold the power of backlist.

Monster Hunter International, which came out 12 years ago(!) is still 5% of my royalty income. It’s been a consistent seller for over a decade. Now, 5% doesn’t sound like a ton, but by itself its enough to buy a decent used car or pay several mortgage payments.

Monster Hunter Vendetta, 5%. Monster Hunter Alpha, 4%, Monster Hunter Legion, 2%. Monster Hunter Nemesis, 4%. Monster Hunter Siege, 4%. That stuff adds up. These numbers vary period to period, but if you’ve got a reliably continuing series with a good fan base, you can make several thousand bucks per book, every six months, for YEARS.

The bigger the back list, the more of these you have, the easier it is to meet your needs. That’s why authors need to be good AND prolific. New book in the series, causes all those old ones to refresh and get a bump.

Plus, there’s the MH spin off stuff, with the memoirs. Each of those is only at 1 or 2%, but keep in mind that’s my HALF. So if it was the full value they’d be in the same range as the others, though I’ve found that the overall spike on collaborative books isn’t as high as on my solo stuff. I suppose that’s just market hesitancy. Beats me. Monster Hunter Guardian is still pretty new, and it’s at 6%. Except again, that collaboration, so that’s just my percentage, not the overall total of sales.

Up next is my Grimnoir, which has now fallen to the #3 spot in all time sales as Forgotten Warrior surged ahead. Those are at 9% for the trilogy. Which sounds sad in comparison until you realize that the last of those 3 came out in August 2013! That’s almost 9 years since I’ve done anything in that universe. I’ve been collecting money off of work I did a decade ago. I’ve got another trilogy planned, and when that eventually starts I imagine it’ll cause another bump for Grimnoir.

4th this time are the two Target Rich Environment collections. TRE1 is at 1% and 2 is at 3%. Being short story collections, that’s pretty awesome actually. It’s enough to buy a nice sniper rifle. 🙂

Last on this royalty are the Dead Six novels with Mike Kupari, at 2% for the trilogy. Which again, ain’t bad when you realize that’s just my half, and the last book came out 6 years ago.

So there you go guys. New books are awesome, but backlist is how you pay the bills. When you’ve got a couple books in backlist, if you make a little money for each that’s nice, but you can’t live off it. But if you’re making a little money for each, but you’ve got 23 items, that adds up fast. And honestly, but the time you’ve got a couple dozen items, you’ve probably built up enough of a fan base that it’s not a little money each, it’s several thousand bucks each. And then you are styling.

Gun Runner will show up next, followed by Monster Hunter Bloodlines. GR I’m not sure how it did because it came out in February of everybody panic and freak out and shut down the world. Though that had gotten better by the time Bloodlines came out, when I had the weirdest pandemic, post-apocalyptical book tour in September.

The moral of this story is work. Work your ass off. Produce. Keep trying to get better. Keep growing that fan base. I self published my first book in 2007, had my first Baen publication in 2009, and have continually worked and tried to improve that whole time. This business it is not easy to be successful, but it is super easy to fail. Don’t get jealous of others who are doing better than you, instead observe them and see what you can learn from them, if anything.

And have fun. That’s the most important thing. If you’re having fun writing it then the readers will have fun reading it.

Pacing can make or break a book and it’s something that many authors struggle with. Hosts/Authors Steve Diamond and Larry Correia return this week to discuss the different approaches to pacing and provide some helpful tips on how to pace yourself.

If you would like to join our supporters, you can support this podcast with a small monthly donation to help sustain future episodes at: https://anchor.fm/writerdojo

IMPORTANT- if you are a Supporter and I don’t have an email for you PLEASE send your email to Supporters@WriterDojo.com

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/writerdojo/id1581703261
Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy80ZTMyNmU1Yy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==

Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/fxhj56si

Radio Public: https://radiopublic.com/writerdojo-6vP0qX

RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/4e326e5c/podcast/rss

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2X7bG3PMqln9ZKinIDjs27 )

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WriterDojo

---

This week’s episode is brought to you by Matthew Howe’s Waypoint

You’ve been abducted from your home. You wake in a strange hotel room to make a terrifying discovery—there’s a bomb strapped around your chest. You have 24 hours to travel a thousand miles and find a code that disarms the device

It’s about one question: How much do you want to live?

---

Also, big shout out to Nancy Frye for the awesome job on the ad- if you’re ever in need of a professional VO actress, I highly suggest you give her a shout! http://nancyfrye.mystrikingly.com/

Gun Runner, the Dragon Award winning sci-fi novel by me and John Brown is now out in paperback.

Gun Runner

This was a really fun project, and it came about in a weird way. Basically this novel is everything a 10 year old boy thinks would be awesome in a sci-fi story, crammed into one book.

John and I started writing about the same time, and we had gone on book tour together so we’ve talked a lot about writing. We were asked to teach a class on plotting. Now normally in those sorts of things the authors are given some story elements from the audience, and then they take those and use them to plot a book on the fly, live, to demonstrate the process. Problem is, the audience loves to give authors really goofy shit, which we inevitably make work, but that wastes a lot of time, and we only had two hours.

So John and I got together a few days before, and he suggested rather than use plot suggestions from the audience, we get some in advance from one person, so they’d be coherent. My (at the time) 10 year old son was nearby, so I shouted at him, “Hey Joe, what’s cool stuff to have in a sci-fi story?”

And he immediately came back with “space pirates, giant robots, war, and monsters.” John and I were like, okay, we can work with that! Then while we talked about a plot using those elements, Joe sat there and drew pictures of the giant robots. (One of which John kept, which we stuck in the back of the book as an illustration)

Then we did the class and plotted out a whole story live in front of an an audience of about a hundred people in two hours. At the end the two of us looked at the dry erase board that had a cast and list of scenes from beginning to end, and we both said, yeah, I could actually write this.

Fast forward a few years, and Toni Weisskopf asked me if I had any new collaborations to pitch her. I pitched this one and Servants of War with Steve Diamond (which comes out next month).

Another funny anecdote about this one, anytime I do a collaboration with another writer I like to pick out an actor or someone we know for various characters, that way we are both visualizing the same person as we work. It keeps the collaborators on the same page.

One of those was Captain Nicholas Holloway, who is basically in charge of the smuggling crew, and our main character’s boss and mentor. We decided that we would use Nick Searcy for that role. (all around good dude).

Then when we were trying to name the ship, we wanted to have it be something North Carolina based (that’s where the captain was from) so we asked NC residents on Facebook for name suggestions. We were getting bunches of them, but then Nick himself chimed in, and said he’d name it The Tar Heel… Boom. The Captain has spoken. Tar Heel it is.

Because I like this setting, I’ve actually used it for two other projects as well. Lost Planet Homicide (novella) and A Tank Named Bob (short) are both set in the same universe as Gun Runner. (totally different planets, but all the tech works by the same rules). There is also two Easter eggs in Gun Runner related to another one of my series, but I leave those to astute readers to find, enjoy, and then extrapolate out and go “Oh shit… So that’s how that works.” 🙂

Anyways, Gun Runner is in paperback now. It is also on Audible narrated by Oliver Wyman (who also does Monster Hunter and Lost Planet Homicide). I hope you like it.

I think this is going to become tradition. Every time I get off a 30 day FB ban (my next one will put me at 1 year in the gulag!) I can do one big post about all the news items I would have commented on had I been around. Like this –

https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/11/17/current-events-november-2021/

This one was more of a 60 day though, since I came back from that one (where I had to work to earn it!) and almost immediately got banned for an innocuous joke (Internet Idiot Arthur Chu was praising communist China, and somebody asked but could I beat him in Jeopardy? and I said no, but I’d like to beat him with a stick, and boom, ban! Honestly, if I’d known that was gonna get me tossed for “bullying” I would’ve been way meaner).

So let’s see what’s in the news, and what I would’ve said about it at the time-

A. Canadian truckers are awesome.

B. It is amazing how shamelessly disgusting the news reporting on that has been (and every step of the way the useful idiots repeat this crap). First the news lied about why they were protesting, saying they were upset about “road conditions”. Then when it grew they flipped and tried to say it was small, and the length of the convoy was exaggerated because it was just a handful of trucks real spread out. The next day, okay, there’s a lot of them, but they’re all fascists. Today they’re an invasion of violent white supremacists (lots of Sikhs in there for some reason) who are causing irreparable trauma to twitter leftists with all their honking.

C. Justin Fidelito Trudeau “got covid’ and had to isolate at a super convenient time. Oh wait, narrative update, he didn’t, he’s had to go into hiding because of the giant mob of racist white supremacist death truckers. HONK. (in ye olde times fleeing like that is how kings got overthrown)

D. The media really hates Joe Rogan, because he’s taking CNN’s lunch money. They despise the guy because he doesn’t tell people what to think, he just brings on people from all sides of the spectrum and asks them questions so they can talk in depth for hours at a time. Which is the total opposite of what media is supposed to do, where they bring on approved “experts” in 10 minute segments to provide official narrative talking points which are easily regurgitated by useful idiots, so that anyone who disagrees can get beaten into submission. That’s real news!

E. What’s stopping Saint Fauci from going on Joe Rogan? It’s not like that malignant little tyrant doesn’t love going on “proper” TV.

F. When a petition of 300 fake ass doctors didn’t work, out comes Neil Young. Neil Young is a dipshit, who thought his foot stomping tantrum demanding government censorship would work. He’s now being joined by a bunch of increasingly less famous musicians like some dumbfuck virtue signaling drum circle. It’s funny how lefties are all “Fight The Man” until they are the man, then they obediently lick the boot.

G. It turns out Neil Young’s music is actually owned by a giant mega corporation, which also owns major news corps, led by a drug company CEO who directly profits off of all this censorious bullshit. So now I’m sure the CorpoUniParty will force the independent guy to cave. Way to fight the power and rage against the machine and all that, you fucking hippies.

H. In some ironic timing, because our news totally isn’t a crafted propaganda tool used to manipulate people, while the left was demanding censorship on Spotify, a small town in Tennessee nobody has ever heard of removed a book from one grade’s required reading list, so we could have hundreds of angry articles and millions of posts about how book banning is bad, and BOTH SIDES ARE THE SAME.

I. Moral Equivalence Police aside, as a writer I am super sensitive to book banning (the left has tried with me, but thankfully they are super inept). But as soon as you look at what actually happened there you discover that pretty much everything on the news about it is hyperbolic horseshit. And I think Maus is an important work, and should be used in schools, but since I’m not a leftist I don’t claim to know what’s best for everybody else’s kids.

J. Breyer is retiring. Meh. We’ll trade a reliable leftist for another reliable leftist. The real story here is that this is confirmation the democrats know they are about to get fucking steamrolled at the midterms, because they have totally sucked and even the world’s most advanced propaganda engine can’t hide how shitty democrats are at governing.

K. In a related note, we’re now up to like 30 democrat congressmen retiring rather than running for re-election. Even the news that primarly exists to prop up democrats keeps using the words “red wave”. Reap your whirlwind.

L. Joe Biden talked for 2 hours, and did such an awful job that he made a war more likely, and tanked the stock market. Just stop. Give that creepy old man a pudding cup and stick him in a closet. If he talked for 3 hours the country would disintegrate and he talked for 4 a giant meteor would hit the earth.

M. True story, I checked my RobinHood account after Biden’s speech. And in that moment for over a hundred stocks every single one was in the red except for Lockheed Martin. Oh shit, that’s funny.

M1. Heh, a couple related things. Lots of morons were trying to say that Spotify’s stock had tanked because of them choosing Joe Rogan over Neil Young, except I own Spotify. It tanked like everything else did after Biden’s talk (down 18% for the month) and it’s up 3% this week. Holy shit the left can’t meme.

N. Unlike everybody else on the internet I’m not going to pretend to be some military/political geostrategy expert on the Ukraine. All I know is that I wouldn’t trust the Biden Administration to not fuck up opening a can of cat food, let alone running a war with another nuclear power. This is the same cadre of geniuses who screwed the pooch in leaving Afghanistan.

O. If a CDC truck full of lab monkeys crashes, DO NOT PET THE MONKEYS.

P. Even as countries all over the world finally throw in the towel on pointless, do nothing, Covid theater, my local con (LTUE) decided to double down on vax passes, tests, masks, and social distance. So I told them I was out. I’m tired of humoring hypochondriac shitlibs (Judging by K, I’m not alone).

Q. A poll came out showing that some truly alarming percentages of democrats were totally cool with concentration camps, or taking away the children of non-believers. I say alarming, but considering the democrat party’s history, not surprising. These people also act baffled at the idea of why the rest of us want to own guns to protect us from them.

R. Patton Oswalt was forced to apologize for saying he was friends with Dave Chappelle. Come on. Nobody believes Patton Oswalt has “friends”.

S. Jussie Smollet is found guilty of what is possibly the dumbest fake hate crime ever. I can now go out and edit out the multitude of “allegedly” the lawyers forced me to put into the last Tom Stranger!

T. Since the only border our administration cares about are the ones next to Russia, there is a really interesting video going around of Border Patrol agents arguing with the BP chief. I would encourage everybody to watch it. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. The cracks are showing.

U. The Olympics are here! I’m sure this will be a fine celebration of mandatory anal swabbing. I look forward to events like the concentration camp fence pole vault, the thousand meter monk toss, and the cross protestor tank slalom. If our social credit scores are high enough we might get a medal!

V. Related, I don’t know anything at all about basketball, but this Enes Kanter Freedom guy seems like a badass.

W. M&Ms are now more diverse and inclusive. FINALLY. This was keeping me up at nights.

X. The FBI wouldn’t come out and admit under oath how many agitators on January 6th actually work for them or are CIs. And how dare you insinuate that feds would ever do crime, you crazy conspiracy theorist! Seriously, I am super offended, and HOW DARE YOU ask about UCs or CIs, even though the FBI just got caught doing that a few months before in Michigan, and that’s pretty much the entire modern history of law enforcement, and they’ve even made movies about all the most interesting cases.

Meanwhile, at every single gun show in America – “Hey buddy, could you help me cut this shotgun barrel down to 17.9 inches?”

Y. Speaking of my gun store owner PTSD, I bought a Springfield Hellion/Croatian VHS-2 rifle, but that’ll get its own review post.

Z. Even though the world seems to be falling apart, I’m actually really optimistic about the future. I think we’ve hit Peak Woke. I believe we are seeing a critical mass of people finally getting fed up with the lies, bullshit and fuckery. For the longest time too many regular folks have kept quiet because of social pressure, but once the dam bursts, and a sufficient mass of people realize they’re not alone, it’s over.