出版与作家生涯2014priceonomics.com
写书的经济学
The Economics of Writing a Book
导读
这篇讨论写书的经济账：代理、出版社与自出版各环节如何影响作者收入，以及“机会很多，但靠卖书谋生很难”的现实。对写作者值得读，因为它把创作之外的商业机制摊开，提醒你算清渠道、投入和收益预期。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把写作当职业时，先理解代理、出版社、自出版各自的抽成、成本和收益结构，别只看表面版税。
- 02
投稿前研究代理与编辑匹配；好代理能争取更高预付、组织竞价并审合同，对职业虚构作者尤其重要。
- 03
自出版可以用低成本小规模试验验证市场，先投入少量时间和费用，卖出成绩后再扩大。
- 04
写作前主动评估作品的成功概率和目标读者，把“是否值得投入昂贵推广”当作创作项目的一部分。
HN 评论精选
代理虽抽成，但能显著提高作者收入和合同安全，尤其对虚构类职业作者。
评论指出，出版社通常不接受作者直接投稿，而要走代理；你得先说服代理你值得投资。代理一般抽成15%，但好代理会帮你匹配编辑、在多人有意购买时组织竞价、向出版社争取更高预付和更好条款，并审查合同细节。作者调查显示，有代理的科幻/奇幻作者预付约为无代理作者的150%—200%；对偶尔写技术/商业非虚构的作者收益较低但仍合理，对靠一年至少一本书吃饭的虚构作者则更关键。
cstross查看英文原文
Minor nit here: Generally, publishers don’t just accept submissions from any aspiring author. They go through agents. So you must first convince an agent that you will be a lucrative investment. As a rule, agents take 15% of everything you make from a book. Speaking as an author, I love my agent. My agent is on commission, on my side. A good accountant is supposed to save you more money than they cost you; a good agent will actually make you more money. The agent's job is to match your book with the right editor, or if there's more than one who's likely to buy it they run an auction: once they've got you a publisher they then squeeze as much money out of the publisher as possible -- publishers always low-ball the advance and terms they offer an unrepresented author -- and then vet the contract small-print for landmines. A survey an author of my acquaintance conducted about five years ago came up with statistics for agented vs. un-agented books in the SF/F field (which is what I write), polling professional authors on a mailing list; in general, the book advances of authors who go through agents are between 150% and 200% of those received by unagented authors. The benefits of an agent are likely to be lower for a non-fic author who writes technical/business books on an irregular basis -- but still reasonable. But for a fiction author who eats or starves on the basis of pushing out at least one book a year, the agent's ability to market the author and push their career track is essential. They are, after all, on commission. And the more they can earn for the author, the more they get to take home too.
自出版是趋势，但多数作者无论走哪条出版路线都很难靠卖书谋生。
他写了三十年，最终认定自己就是个写作者，并写了本关于任务清单/待办积压的书，还加入机器人小鸡。他研究出版经济后认为，那些“靠电子书赚七十万美元”的文章多半不可信；自出版是未来，但除大牌作者外，出版社开销太高、对小作者帮助有限。原文结论没错：21世纪出版机会很多，靠卖书谋生却很少见，多数作者无论走哪条路线都赚不到多少钱。
DanielBMarkham查看英文原文
After 30 years of writing both professionally and privately while I learned to code and then train teams, I finally came to the conclusion about what I am: a writer. I'm not a celebrity writer, a best-selling writer, or a major-league writer. Just a writer. So I wrote a book. Because I have a passion for technology teams, my book was about how to create, prioritize, and manage those to-do lists of work we all have: backlogs. Because I'm a science fiction junkie, it had robots. And because I'm a Douglas Adams fan, they were robotic chickens. Plug: http://www.amazon.com/Backlogs-1-Daniel-Markham-ebook/dp/B00JESGC6U I'm also a startup and business junkie, so even though I was writing the book no matter what the business model, I spent some considerable time learning the economics of book publishing. There are a hell of a lot of blog articles out there titled something like "How I made Seven-Hundred Thousand Dollars publishing an E-book. And you can too!" Meh. Not so much. I think it's clear that self-publishing is the future. Except for the big-league authors, publishers have too much overhead to be very useful to us small fry. However the author's conclusion is correct: "Without question, we can say that authors have extraordinary opportunities in the 21st century publishing world. It’s just that making a living from book sales is rarely one of them." There just isn't that much money for most authors no matter what the publishing route. The good news is that ebooks can be part of a larger conversation a writer has with his audience. In this case, the process isn't to create a "business book proposal" and then execute it; it's more like creating a community of people with similar interests, then having a conversation with them. Ebooks can be a useful part of that conversation. Self-publishing rocks, but it's not just the old way of publishing where you do it all yourself online. Wish it were that simple.
低门槛会带来大量试水作品，收入统计因此失真；认真作者可用低成本试验逐步放大。
用“年收入超过500美元的作者占比”来判断作者前景会误导：出版从未如此容易，试水作品会大量增加，但这不反映认真作者的机会。他是自出版作者，靠纸质书年入约1万美元；书最初只是实验，他把两部稿子做成纸质书，花约500美元和两周做排版设计，除自己做的编辑外不再另请编辑，然后等市场反馈。卖动后他才把更多电子书转成纸质书并专门做新书；若最初没卖动，他会被归入“年入低于500美元”，但那只是试探性投入，数据会误导。
graeme查看英文原文
Looking at the percentage of authors making more than $500 a year is misleading. It's never been easier to publish a book, so the pool of marginal books will grow. This doesn't necessarily reflect the prospects for serious authors. I'm a self published author. I make around $10,000 a year from print sales. My books started as experiments. I already had e-books. I decided to turn two manuscripts into print books. I spent about $500 and two weeks on formatting and design. I didn't copy-edit beyond what I had done myself. And I waited to see if it sold. It did, so I turned more e-books into print books, and made new books aimed at print. But if the books hadn't sold, I would be classed as one of the poor authors making less than $500 a year. But that would be a misleading data point, because my initial foray was rather tentative.
出版商的核心价值之一是替市场做成功率筛选，尽管付费的常是已成功作者。
评论认为作者漏掉了出版社一项重要服务：评估一本书是否可能成功。告诉不会成功的作者别白费力气（或至少别投入昂贵推广）本身成本很高，也是重要服务。讽刺的是，为这项服务付费的成功作者，往往并不是真正从中受益的人。
wisty查看英文原文
There's one very important service the publisher provided, which the author missed: assessing whether the book was likely to be a successes. Telling people who won't be successful not to bother (or at least, not to bother with an expensive campaign) is costly, and an important service. Ironically, the people who pay for this service (i.e. the people who are successful) are the ones who don't really benefit from it.
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