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Welcome to the BookPeople. I'm assured as
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a writer, book editor, Podcast Producer, and the head of originals at bomb in this heartbreaking podcast, I demystify the publishing and creative industries, and uncover the biggest opportunities and challenges for writers in India today.
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Imagine this, you've finally finished writing your book, and a publisher has actually picked it up. This is basically a dream come true, you're super happy. But before you actually get the book out and published, you need to deal with that pesky contract. And trust me, I know that looking at contracts, and figuring out whether this contract works for you what all the details mean? And whether the details are right and in your favor as an author is really terrifying to know. But don't worry, I've got you covered. Welcome to the book people. This is one of those episodes where I take one burning question that all of you have about the publishing industry. And I'd really break it down to go to the depth of it. And today, I'm going to be covering eight questions that you need to definitely ask your publisher before you sign the contract. So let's dive in. So the first and most important question is who owns the copyright of your book. So as the author and the creator of the book, the copyright of the book should always, always rest with you. And trust me, whether you're going the traditional publishing route, or whether you're self publishing and taking the help of any self publishing company, the copyright of the book always rests with the author. And if you have a publisher who says otherwise, or if you see a contract that says otherwise, run immediately, far, far away.
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with question number two, we dive immediately into money, since that is one of the most important things in the contract. So the question to ask a publisher is, what advance are they offering you? Now the advance is something that publishers pay the author before the book is published. This is usually paid in three to four installments during the process of publication, right from when the contract is signed to when the manuscript has completed. And the book goes into production, to when the book is printed, and ultimately, officially out, which means that it's available in bookstores. These are the milestones that publishers look at when they're giving the advance to the author. And the advance is really important because it signals something, right, it signifies how much value the publisher is putting in you as an author in your book, and its ability to sell how much they think that readers are going to love it. Because this is the money that they're putting up upfront to have you on their list before they see any kind of sales and select authors can sometimes get amazing advances. So in 2013, our select Indian author, or Mr. Party actually got an advance of 500 lakh rupees from baseline books, in order to write a new trilogy, because of how successful his first trilogy had become, and how big of a celeb author he was, and how much they thought that you know, they were sure that he would write amazing new books, right? So 500 lakh rupees, that's sort of your upper limit your benchmark of the kind of money that authors can get as an advance for debut authors who are writing for the first time or for authors who are not, you know, who don't have any kind of celeb status or are not influencers as such. Usually, you can expect around 10,000 rupees to three lakh rupees as an advance for your first or your second book. Question number three is what is the royalty percentage? And how will it be calculated? No royalties are the percentage of portion of the price of the book that you get for every copy of the book sold. So if your book sells 2000 copies, then you get a certain percentage off the price of 2000 copies of books. Right and that's how authors make money and to know more about how royalties are calculated and what the entire concept of royalties even is, you can check out my other episode, which was released a couple of weeks ago, where I talk about how Indian authors make money and how much money can you actually make. But when we talk about royalty percentage here, there are two aspects. One is that there is a range of royalty percentage where the percentage changes based on the number of copies the book is able to sell. Usually your royalty
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percentage will vary from 7.5% to 15%, based on the number of copies that the book sells, and in some cases, it can go up as high as 20%. But what you need to check is whether the percentage is calculated based on gross price, net price or profit on. Because if your royalty percentage is calculated off profit on, that means that you're likely to see absolutely zero money that the publisher gets for selling the books. So beware of that. The next question you can ask the publisher is how will they do the loyalty payouts? Usually publishers calculate and send money to the authors on a quarterly basis, or six month basis? So that is something that you can ask them, and that's definitely something they can tell you. Another question to ask them is, how will they keep you informed about the sales figures for your book? Now, this is something that varies from publisher to publisher, and it's not something that is mentioned in the contract. But it's a good question to ask to make sure that there will be transparency in the sales figures with your publisher. Question number four, what subsidiary rights are included in the contract? And what does the subsidiary revenue breakup look like? This includes the money you would make from translations from the book being published in different regions, it could include the book being converted into an audio book, or the book being adapted for the screen as a TV series, or as a movie, say, for example, a filmmaker approaches you and decides to adapt your book for a movie. Now, the filmmaker will pay a certain amount for them to be able to take the book and use it for the screen. Now, this amount will be divided between you and the publisher, and the breakup of what percentage of the amount will be received by you. And what percentage of the amount will be received by the publisher is mentioned very clearly in the contract. So in each of these cases, the breakup will be mentioned. And in most cases, the authors get a larger portion of the amount than the publishers. And this will usually look like 6040, or 7030, or even 8020. And this is very, very negotiable. So even if at this point, you know, you're not sure that this will get translated, or you don't imagine it being better for the screen. This is something that you should be negotiating at this moment, just to safeguard yourself for the future. The only place where the publishers portion might be higher is in the case of audiobooks, if the publishers themselves are producing the audiobooks in house, because in that case, the publisher is incurring the cost of producing the audiobooks. And by the way, this is just a breakup. But what authors are doing nowadays is that they're also retaining their audio rights on their screen rights with themselves. So what this means is, they don't give these rights to the publishers in the first place. So that if they are able to, you know, pitch first screen and get the film picked up for screen, then the author will be able to keep all the money that they get from the screenwriter, instead of splitting the money with the publishers. So this is also something that you can consider and speak to your publisher about.
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Now, let's get down to the process. So question number five that you need to ask your publisher is what their vision for the book is? How do they see it being packaged? What do they see the message being and who do they think as the audience for the book, this is really important, because if you and the editor especially are not on the same page about the book, this can create friction in the future where you might feel like decisions are being made that you don't agree with, or that the final book doesn't really look like what you had in mind. But ultimately, this isn't something that can be written in a contract. This is something that comes down to trust. And that's why this conversation is very important to have with your publisher. The next question is how much save will you have in the packaging of the book. So whether it's the cover design, whether it's the blobs, or the reviews that you get from, you know, interesting high profile people, whether it's how the book is packaged and talked about in the marketing campaigns. This is again, something that you need to discuss with the publisher upfront, so that you know how much creative control you will have. Usually, newer authors don't have that much creative control, because the publishers make the ultimate decisions. But for authors who have published multiple books and multiple bestsellers, as they go higher up in the ranks in the publishing industry, they start asserting more and more control over these kinds of decisions. Question number seven is all about marketing. How are they going to market the book? And how much money are they going to put in marketing the book
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This is very important to know upfront, because this will determine how well your book sells. Lots of times publishers make different decisions about which books do they want to put more of their marketing budget in which books do they want to put less of their marketing budgets and, and in a lot of cases, we're seeing more and more authors, especially debut authors, doing a lot of marketing things on their own, or hiring book marketing agencies to make sure that the book is marketed and being promoted really well, in addition to whatever effort the publisher might make. So this is also something to discuss with the publisher, right up front, so you know exactly what to expect. And if you want to invest in marketing your book, then you can start preparing for that in advance.
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And the last question, is you preparing for the worst. So imagine a worst case scenario where the book goes out of print, or if the publisher goes out of business, what happens to the book then, and what happens to your rights do all the publishing rights of the book revert back to you, this is something that you need to ask your publisher. And again, this is something that needs to be incorporated in the contract. So you know exactly what to expect in the worst case scenario. And honestly, this can happen to any publisher, whether they are big or small, in the most unexpected of ways, when Wesleyan books had to unfortunately shut down, a lot of the authors who signed up with them had very few copies left, and most of the copies were recalled and actually burn, right. So for a lot of authors, they have to buy their own copies in order to keep copies of the book. So again, this is something that can very rarely happen. It's nobody's fault. It's not the publishers fault. It's not the fault of any of the people working in the company. But things like this can happen. And it's good for you to know what your options are in this kind of scenario. So these are some of the very important questions that you should ask your publisher, but don't stop here. In fact, I would urge you to ask all the questions, ask every single question that comes to your mind get all of your doubts cleared? And no question is a stupid question. When it comes to you have a clarity on your rights and the details of your contract that you are signing with the publisher. And I hope that these eight questions and this episode gave you a lot of clarity on how to look at the contract and how to identify the most important aspects of the contract. In addition to this, you can also do a few other things. One thing would be to speak to other authors who have worked with this publisher before just to get an idea of what their experience was, like, you know, what they would tell you to look out for or what they would praise about the publisher, so that you can also go into this experience with more reassurance, more trust, more positivity, and focus on your book. The other thing that ever want you to look out for in the contract is whether there is any clause that requires you to purchase multiple copies of the book, because this, again, is a huge red flag and something that you should look out for. Usually with traditional publishing, it is the author that gets money from the publisher, and the author gets a few free copies from the publisher as well. And in the case of self publishing, it is the author spending money on getting the book published. But the publisher cannot force you in any way to purchase copies of your book. And you get all the money that you make from the sales of this book. So I hope that this episode gives you a lot of clarity on how to read contracts, and how to look out for the most important aspects and the red flags that you can find in these kinds of contracts. But that being said, make sure that you're completely clear that you're as savvy as possible, and go into your publishing experience with the most positive outlook as long as your book is published. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you found it informative. If you think of any other questions that are super important to ask to publishers, then definitely let me know if you're watching this on YouTube, you can let me know in the comments. And if you're listening to this on any listening app, then you can get in touch with me on LinkedIn or on email at Ushuaia unbound under.com. Or obviously you can reach out to bound in there on all social media platforms. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned next week for an amazing guest and a great conversation.