How Publishing Works - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #10 (2025)

Hey, welcome to Brandon Sanderson's writing science fiction and fantasy lecture series. Today we delve into the history of publishing and what it means for authors today. This is kind of a fire hose lecture where I'm just going to talk at you really fast for a while. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey everybody, welcome to writing science fiction fantasy. Yay. Um, you have survived until the end. This is our final uh set of lectures. This is the publishing industry. This is a fire hose uh lecture this week and next week. You can see on the board what I'm going to be talking about. Whatever I don't get through today, we will get through next week. So, we'll stop somewhere in the middle here. Uh there's more to talk about next week that I didn't even put on this board. But I'm thinking we might get to it, but not include agents, but who knows? It depends on how fast various parts of what I'm saying uh happen.

So we are going to talk about uh the history of the publishing industry, how it works, um why it works works in quotes, um and what ebooks and audiobooks have done as a disruption of the industry and how that's ongoing. All right. So let's talk about the history of the publishing industry. Way back when, long ago, you really couldn't make a living publishing books, right? Um, once in a while, you know, you'd have something that would sell well, but mostly this was something done by the people who were already well off and to sell to other people who were already well off. This started to change somewhere around Dickens, right? Um, and then we hit the 1900s. People started reading a lot. Children couldn't work anymore. Schooling happened. Um, and the world started to change in regards to entertainment.

Uh the first kind of big important thing for you as science fiction fantasy writers to be aware of is kind of the paperback, hardback and uh magazine divide that happened during what we call the golden age of science fiction. Back then science fiction mostly was considered a kind of pulp lowbrow genre. When I say science fiction I mean science fiction, fantasy and horror. uh to a lesser extent detective um as well. These were published in serial form in um magazines and things and serious literature was published by hardcover publishers. These are the holdovers from the 1800s that were prestige publishers that kind of had the same sort of air of these are well-to-do individuals publishing for other well-to-do individuals. This still has ramifications in our current environment. If you ask yourself sometimes about the divide between popular fiction and uh literary fiction, it started here. Um what the masses were reading, they would pay pennies for in magazines in disposable form. For a long time, that's where science fiction happened. Um it was done as juveniles. It was done in the uh the serials and things like this.

And then something happened. The people who had grown up reading those started to want more mature fiction that also had some of the same imagination and some some of the same wonder that they had enjoyed as young people. And indeed somebody came along named J.R. Tolkien. And J.R. Tolkien published Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings really did change the publishing world. Um Lord of the Rings came out and then people had grown up reading science fiction and fantasy as young people and they were maturing and the same thing happened in science fiction fantasy that would happen in film in the 70s. In the 70s, you had younger people, younger directors who had grown up watching kind of this sort of more exploitation slash horror slash u kind of lowbrow as they would call it monster movies, gangster movies um usually done as serials like before other movies and things like that or or alien you know things. And suddenly you had Spielberg um and you had Lucas and you had Scorsese make films for mature audiences using those same sort of ideas they'd loved when they were young. And so suddenly you end up with these great blockbusters that combine these fantastical ideas, gangster movies, aliens, um, science fiction, and then aging them up and creating something more kind of for an older audience. And this began the blockbuster era of film. Um, and it's no coincidence that we have Jaws and we have um The Godfather and we have Star Wars and we have um we have ET and all of these things coming out. Again, older audience, you know, ET is still targeted younger. Um, Star Wars is still would be considered somewhere in that YA to to new adult age, but the idea is taking serious filmmaking techniques and applying them to what had been below.

Well, Tolkien was ahead of that. Tolkien was uh a fan of fairy stories. And what he did is he took some of these things that had usually been mythology or told for children and he made a serious adult epic out of it. And the industry had no idea what to do with this. Science fiction fans did. They had already been reading the golden age science fiction authors that were begrudgingly published by the publishers. Your Heinleins, your Asimovs, your Jack Vances. Uh he's silver, right? He's Scorsese's favorite. Um Jack Vance, the father of modern uh rule-based fantasy uh magic systems. Um they had been reading all these things. I say we, I wasn't even born yet. Um and I'm old, right? So this is a long time ago. Um they had been reading all these things and driving them from the serials into paperback publishing.

Back then hardcover publishers and paperback publishers were separate separate companies. You had your snobby highbrow hardcover publisher, usually named after some snobby highbrow hardcover person. If you look on the spine of a book and it has someone's name who sounds highbrow, they probably were a dude who started a publishing company in the 50s or before to publish highbrow fiction. Houghton Mifflin, right? I guess they're mostly textbooks now, but you know, all of these people. Um, science fiction was seen as a paperback genre by then, but there were places that were growing up to publish it. Tolkien drove science fiction into being profitable, really profitable. People saw what was happening as mass audience adoption. And I say Tolkien, I mean everyone during the silver age there. Tolkien and McCaffrey um and all and Ursula and all these people who are publishing in the 60s that were doing serious science fiction. Um, and being serious, I mean using serious literary techniques. They were writing them out of a place of passion and skill. Um, not that you weren't getting that in the pulps. There's a lot of great stuff in the pulps, but it was, you know, it was different when you grow up reading it and you grew up writing it.

Now, you can understand a lot about the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry from the fact that at large publishing ignored us until we started making money. Because of that, a lot of science fiction publishing was grassroots. A lot of the publishers of science fiction fantasy grew up out of people writing it and going to conventions, figuring it out on their own, and then starting little publishing companies because the big publishers weren't interested. And so there was a very kind of communal feel to science fiction fantasy in those days, overlapping a lot with the political movements that were happening at the time and all this stuff. And it's all muddled together. Um, because of this, science fiction both was a very kind of it was a place where you could be a nobody and sell a book, but it was also a place where um it could feel like a club that you weren't part of, right? If you didn't go to all the conventions, cuz all these people got together and started conventions to yell about who their favorite Star Trek captain was. Um, right? I'm joking because there was only one back then. Uh, but you know, um, you know, they they got together so they could publish their Spock and Kirk slashfic and talk about it. That's real, by the way. Uh, back in the 60s, uh, the early fanzines. Um, that's the one of the origins of fanfiction. Um, they got together to talk about their favorite episodes of Star Trek. And also a lot of writers who are aspiring writers are going there and there's famous stories. Um I heard this one at the very first science fiction convention I went to about how there was somebody who got finally got published and he's like, "I'm too big for the conventions now." He was walking around and he went by the fanzine, which fanzines were they were publishing their own magazines where they would print them on their printers, dot matrix printers or whatnot and staple them together. And the person, they're like, "Hey, come make us help us make fanzines." And he's like, "I'm a serious science fiction writer now. I don't do this." And then Asimov's head pops out of a door and says, "I need more of page 53 uh to staple in." Um, that's a story that goes around. I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but I was told it at my first convention. Um, this this was the community.

Science fiction and fantasy started making money. Books for the uh the average for the average person started making money right around the same time that films, blockbuster films happened. We're talking the 70s. Tolkien pre-aged this uh a little bit. The 70s is where it really took off. All the publishers are like, "So those science fiction nerds, they like to buy stuff. They're all in tech industries. They have money. Maybe we should be making books for them." And this coincided with some big shifts in the publishing industry that you can watch through the the the history of kind of just all retail. The hardcover publishers started realizing the paperback publishers were making as much or more money than them. So they started buying them. Suddenly you have a hardcover publisher that would print the paperback, would do the hardcover, and then release the paperback. In the past, you had this big prestigious hardcover publisher, and then the paperback publisher could do their science fiction stuff, but occasionally you would deign to let them have the softcover rights for your very important book that you would eventually release in softcover that other people could then read. I'm exaggerating this, but you you get the idea. They started buying up each other. Giant conglomerates started buying up those publishers, right? And so suddenly you have consolidation happening. Um, and you have giant publishers happening because this stuff is actually making money. Our first bestsellers in science fiction and fantasy appear in the early 80s. Before then, nothing that I've been able to see has charted. Even Tolkien was more of like he sold regularly, consistently, very well, but never had weekly spikes to the point that you could make uh the bestsellers, particularly because it's mostly selling in paperback. And the bestseller list didn't count paperbacks. They were only interested in the hardcovers at that point. And so eventually we start seeing it happen.

And the 90s is the biggest shift. This is when um and I'm not just saying this because it's my publisher and a book series I'm involved in. This is when The Wheel of Time is the big second shift in science fiction fantasy publishing. Tom Doherty starts Tor. So Tom Doherty is uh is the founder of Tor. He was a publisher. is the paperback publisher at Grace and Dunlap. He had one of he he was one of the people who just kind of published paperbacks, right? Um and there are several people like him. Donald Wollheim was one of them. Um there's just there's a group of them that are kind of they're business people and they see that science fiction is doing well and Tom goes to the uh owners of Grace and Dunlap and says, "I want to try some of the science fiction stuff." And so they actually bought Ace Books, a small paperback publisher, and put Tom in charge of it. He ran Ace Books uh through the 70s, and made real inroads, and then he started Tor uh to publish hardcover science fiction and fantasy. He eventually leverages his company um to Macmillan, selling it basically but with him retaining control to get money to launch The Wheel of Time, which is our first major consistent number one best-selling hardcover fantasy series in the 90s. Blows the doors off of everything. Sells in hardcover. This is a big deal because even still selling in hardcover is where the bulk of the money starts to come in. Um, hardcover is seen as kind of the first run movie versus the DVD at this point rather than being the prestige versus the non-prestige. The hardcover is where you kind of frontload with your fans. You produce a nicer product uh that that has way better margins and makes you way more money per copy in order to sell to the hardcore fans, which means hardcovers suddenly become for the hardcore fans rather than for the prestige. and the things that can sell a lot of books in hardcover suddenly make enough money to pay for all of the experiments you want to do and everything else.

Um during this time we continue to consolidate. One of the big things you need to be aware of is back in the day there were hundreds and hundreds, thousands of bookstores around the country all owned independently. So, you needed to have a sales force at your publisher who would go on the road to visit every one of those stores with a catalog and get them to order copies of your books either in hardcover or paperback. I went on one of these sales calls during the last years that they had giant sales forces uh before ebooks and Amazon destroyed this. Um, and so I just went on one to see how it went. It was really interesting. I went up to Weller Book Works, been called um uh what do they call it? Uh Sam Weller Book Company before they changed their name. Um and just sat as a fly on the wall as uh Macmillan's sales rep sold the science fiction fantasy line to this bookseller who I love, Weller BookWorks. Science fiction is not their thing. They just carry it because uh nerds. Um and so the his name was Larry Yoder. Fantastic bookseller, our salesman. He's like, "I know your market. I know exactly, you know, what you sell. You want this one, this one, and this one. Uh, this one will sell as new. It's it's more risky, but you might find an audience. You maybe don't want this one, and this one, this one." He had read every book on that list. He knew at Weller Book Works what they sold, and his reputation of being able to tell them that was really important to both of them. He knew what their bookstore would sell. they could trust him as a salesman to have read the books and know and to talk up the debuts that he thought were worth taking a shot on.

Now part of the reason they could do this is because in the 40s publishing almost died because everyone almost died because you know um well the 30s the 40s where everyone almost died but met you know the dust bowl all the stuff back in the Great Depression the 30s um so publishing came up with this idea no one was taking books by new authors they came up with this idea they said if you take the books some of our books by the new author and they don't sell you can send them back and we'll give you credit and you can buy our other books that are more successful so you never get stuck holding new authors books that you can't sell. This started something that still exists in publishing. It's called the return um system where any book by the big publishers is generally returnable. Meaning a bookstore can send it back for a full refund credit toward buying whatever else they want to buy from that publisher next. Still around, still here today. So, they're willing to take chances on new authors because the risk is very minimal. As long as the bookstore is going to stay open and the publisher is going to stay open, they can send those books back and they can get some more Stephen King books that they know will sell. Um, and this is how they convince author uh people to take new authors. So, this is when I broke in at the tail end of this uh when the sales force was still going out.

Well, Tom tells this story about what happened in the late 90s where um number one, Barnes & Noble comes in and then Borders behind it and starts closing the little bookshops. If you want a documentary on this, it's called You've Got Mail. Um joking, but man, I'm I'm glad you guys actually know that movie. That's that's an old movie now. Um but uh the big box publisher or uh bookstores started to put the little bookstores out of business. This was bad and good. It was bad that uh what happened is it became harder and harder to keep these giant sales forces going because there were fewer places to visit. Beyond that, behind the scenes, the distributors were also consolidating. Distributors are the places that would take the books and sell them to a lot of the even smaller markets. Usually, uh, gas stations. They'd have racks of paperbacks and things like this. And that was just usually a distributor bought space, went in, filled it up, things like this. The distributor distributors were learning that selling a hundred books didn't actually make them as much as selling 80. You're like, how could that possibly be? Well, if you have to go to all these little places and have all of these cars and all of this workforce to place those books and all those little spots and you sell a hundred, but you can lose half of your infrastructure and still sell 80. Economics says do that. So they did. So the bookstore, the book rack started vanishing from these little places and the big box stores started taking over this.

This is the beginning of bestsellers kind of overtaking the industry in a way that I think I've talked to you a little bit about how the midlist is started to shrink. Well, this is because if you're you've got all this work to sell a 100 books, but you can sell 80 books with 50% of the work, the industry says, "Well, maybe we should do that." It's a little myopic because a lot of those 20 books that don't that sell are to people who wouldn't go to the bookstores who that raise new generations of readers or they're the people who are not quite getting served by the bestsellers might be people um who otherwise just won't read. They were reading in a niche genre of something they really like and the big bestseller doesn't get them. And over time we lose readers because they raise fewer readers and things like this. The bestseller mentality. Um though I am one of the biggest bestsellers in the industry is still worrying to me.

But how does this uh come into play for you guys? Well, this is what was going on in 2010 when the biggest shakeup happened since probably Tolkien um said, "Hey, by the way, nerds will buy books." Uh, and that is the release of the of Amazon's Kindle and the ebook shakeup. We had been bracing ourselves since Napster. You were almost all too young to remember how this was. But back in the day, we had to make mixtapes. They were awful. If you wanted to have a specific song and you couldn't afford the album, you had to call in to the DJ and then listen with your tape recorder and try to capture a copy of the theme song for Beverly Hills Cop, which they never played for you because they don't actually take requests. They just play the top 40. They just want you to think they take requests. I'm not bitter. It was three hours. Then I listened to that dumb radio station. True story. Um Napster and then iTunes came out, disrupted the market. We all expected to happen with ebooks and it didn't. And it didn't and it didn't and it didn't. And everyone's like, maybe it won't happen. Maybe people like their print books too much. Maybe our industry won't be disrupted and everything will just keep on going. Bam. Kindle smash um crash destroys the market in good ways. Disrupts the market in good ways.

What does the Kindle do? Um the Kindle proves that platform is king. People wanted an easy reading um experience. They wanted to have a platform. During those days up on Tor.com, I had a short story. Uh it's "Defending A Elysium." Um it's actually in promo. It's in uh it's in Tailored Reality. It's coming out later this year. If you haven't read it, it's also free on Tor's website. Um and it was back then. They're like, "Hey, this Kindle thing is working. Let's we'll put it on Kindle for 99 cents. Brandon, you cool with that?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." Then I got a royalty check and it was like five grand, which doesn't sound like a lot to you, but it was off of 25% of 99 cents, right? And for a story that had been up for free for 4 years, people didn't want to read it for free. They wanted the convenience of pushing a button on their Kindle, right? Like 20,000 people would rather push a button on their Kindle than go read it for free. This is the power of owning the platform. Okay? And this is what we learned. Making it easy, making people want to just push a button and buy.

The gold rush era of indie publishing was 2010 to about 2016. Those numbers can be fudged. uh on the 16 end during this era the publishers were not ready for ebooks yet but indie authors which uh continues to be kind of a case with indie authors were faster to move and uh led the charge was led by a few very big authors who had been part of New York publishing whose books kind of had all gone out of print and they put them all back up so they had huge backlists uh but also some indie romance authors who started publishing uh Amanda Hocking being one of them. And suddenly there was all these people had Kindles that they had bought and all these people wanted books on their Kindles and the publishers were slow to put them up and put them up expensively. Meanwhile, here's this Amanda Hocking book. It's $2.99 and you can click a button and read it. Gold rush era, uh, indie publishing explodes. An enormous boom of indie publishing and really good in a lot of ways for the industry. It does gobble up more of the midlist, making the New York publishers more gunshy on midlist. Midlist being those books that sell well enough to make a profit, but not so much to pay for anyone else, right? Um bestsellers being the ones that make enough profit to basically pay your overhead for all the new experiments you're going to do and things like that. Um like I don't have the exact numbers um but I remember looking once and um at Tor I was the number one book of the year um and I had sold like my my new book had sold like 500,000 copies in hardcover or something like that um across uh yeah um you're gasping or you're just yawning. Pretend you're gasping because that's a really good number. Pretend that like Diary of a Wimpy Kid doesn't sell like 9 million. Um um but Tor's number two was something like 20,000 copies that year, right? Um and the differences between number ones and number twos like in the film industry tend to be a pretty huge gap. Um I think I'm exaggerating that number a little bit. I'd have to actually go look at it. But the number two is not 80% of number one generally. it is a fraction of it because that's just how bestselldom works. Um and so um what's going on is your midlist are getting gobbled up by the indie authors and the publishers are like, "Why are we publishing any midlisters?" They still do, but they they don't want midlisters anymore. And this is part of the reason the gold rush era happens. Amazon realizes these indie authors could be giving them money and the gold rush ends about 2016.

This is when the publishers finally figure out how to price their books correctly, how to do sales on their books. Kindle also around this time, I can't remember the exact date, launches Kindle Unlimited uh and starts to have an all-you-can-eat buffet and a lot of the indie authors get uh go into that. Um, Kindle Unlimited when we've experimented with it has made significantly less money than not being in Unlimited. Um, their mileage may vary depending on how many books you write and how many are in Kindle Unlimited and things like this. Um, but it comes out, it's a monthly subscription that takes a lot of the readers who just want to be able to push a button and read. Um, and Amazon starts putting charging ads uh to its uh to its indie authors and publishers in order to get books placed. And for a little while, it was really bad. I remember coming to class one year and holding it up and we counted the number of ads on a page for uh The Stormlight Archive and there was something like 12 advertised books before you got to anything that wasn't advertised, including the second Stormlight book. um that you could click on to buy. They have since backed off on this, but for a little while, Amazon was pay-to-play, meaning you I had friends who were spending six figures in ad money in order to make 50 grand. So, they were like sometimes spending twice as much as they made just in ads to stay at the uh recommended enough that they were getting picked up enough and sold. I hear it's balanced out a little bit. And these days, Amazon ads are not as valuable as they used to be. Um, and that might just be because Amazon realized it was creating a bad user experience. And like we should go back a little bit to the algorithm of recommending to people what used to be. You go on the page and say people who like this book also like this book. And then people trusted that bought it and they were usually right because you know it was an organic algorithm rather than pay to put something there. When it started to be paid to put something there, people were like, "I don't like this book very much." Um, and then they stopped trusting those and so Amazon in the long run makes less money. Uh, they've balanced that out a little bit better. But even still today, the gold rush is kind of over. Doesn't mean you can't indie publish. People can be very successful indie publishing. Uh, but nowadays it is more work. You need to learn your keywords. You need to learn how and when to publish, how to do your promos. And I can't give you all of that. You need to go to serious indie authors who are paying attention to what works right now because anything I tell you will be out of date.

The other big disruption happened in the form, excuse me, of audiobooks. Audiobooks back in the day I listened to The Wheel of Time books checking them out from the library. There was like 80 cassette tapes. You're laughing, but I think it was actually 80. Like you got these giant books. They were like styrofoam. Any other oldies in here remember these things? Uh, and you'd have to like punch out, you know, like pull out uh the cassette, put it in, and it would go and then you put it back in. Um, and then you get out the next one, and you know, you hope they'd rewind it, but, you know, you usually just have to rewind it before you started. And that's how you listened to The Wheel of Time. Eventually, they became CD bricks like that um that you would get that were all so puffy because they're from libraries and they know people are going to drop them. Um, and then Audible came along and disrupted this market by saying, "What if we instead of selling you a $60 set of 80 cassette tapes that basically no one bought? No one really did. Truckers bought them and libraries. What if you could buy a subscription and get one for $15 a month? Any audiobook you want and you just put it on your iPod and you listen to it or your iPhone and everyone's like, "That sounds great. Let's do that." Uh, and while ebooks were starting to lull a little bit and stabilize, audiobooks just exploded. Uh when people started having enough hard drive space basically to just push a button and download an audiobook. Um, which again you young people that took a frightening amount of time. You don't understand. Waiting a half hour to Napster the theme song to Beverly Hills Cop, which is like two minutes long, and then it getting interrupted halfway through and starting over. And so you spend 3 hours downloading one song, and only then do you find out it's illegal because, oh yeah, that might be copyright infringement. Nobody knew. It was just a fun thing the nerds did. Um, so yeah, I'm serious. No one, we're all doing this. And then when someone said that might be illegal when when Metallica is like, "Hey, don't rip our music off." We're like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, you should sell it to us." And they're like, "It's on CD." We're like, "No, no, no. You should sell it to us so we can push the button. We like pushing the button." And then they did. Took them a little while for Metallica to jump on that one, but they did. Um, so anyway, audiobooks disrupted the market a great deal to the point that it's still today, the only segment of the market that is a very serious growth segment. All books tend to do better and better every year, like everything, but they kind of just grow with population um and things like that. Audiobooks have been gobbling up ebook and um and print book audiences, but also gaining new audiences consistently since kind of the the boom started. It's a it's tapered off. Um Stormlight 5, I believe, was under 20% print. I think it was 18% print and it was overwhelmingly audio. It was something like 50% audio, 30% ebook, 20% print. Uh for its few first weeks, we overperform in audio because uh people have credits and Stormlight 5 is 60 hours long. And you can look and see that and be like one credit 9-hour other person's book one credit 60 hours plus Michael and Kate are awesome and do just fantastic job with the narrative narration um and so we do overperform uh plus sci-fi fantasy does tend to overperform both in ebook and audiobook for instance middle grade still doesn't sell in either one very well uh ya it's a crapshoot um right um whether people are reading in print or um in ebook audio but sci-fi fantasy overperforms and I way overperform um until Michelle Obama uh released her book I was the top pre-ordered book in the history of Audible and then Michelle Obama beat me. Thanks Obama. The other Obama, but thanks, that was a nice record. I enjoyed that for for like a year.

So, let's talk about the parts of a publishing industry. All right. Any questions on my brief overly simplistic history of the publishing industry and the big disruptions? Now it's run by what big is it still five? Still five, right? Is it four? I think it's four. It's four. No, they were going to go to four, but then they stopped it. I mean, they still tell us in editing classes that it's the big five. It's the big five. Yeah. I mean, my professors might be out of date, but what's that? Hachette, Macmillan, Harper, Simon, who's the other one? Warner. No, Penguin. No, did you get Penguin? Yeah. How can we forget Random and Penguin? They're the biggest. So, there you are. There's your big five. Uh, the big five gobbled everything up. Uh, I asked my agent before anything he thought I should mention to you guys. He gave me two points. He said, number one, it's good for authors that the Simon & Schuster PR um merger didn't go through, just more options are good for authors. The other one he said is uh Amazon is scary. Uh, and we'll get into that.

So, questions? There was one back here on my brief overly busy history of the the industry. Okay. All right. Let's talk about where we are right now. What is traditional publishing? What's it good for? Um, right now as things stand, for a while indie publishing was the place to be. Now, I would say there are very good arguments for both. Unfortunately, indie publishing has become harder in recent years because ad spend has become, even if you're not spending on Amazon, spending it on TikTok or making trying to find ways to make your books go viral is a decent chunk of indie publishing. And there are upfront fees. To do well in indie publishing, you need to have professionally edited and professionally made cover. You can do this cheaper than I do it, right? Like what do we pay for a cover? It's like eight grand, right? Something. Depends on the artist. Depends on the artist. Yeah. But between like 25 and 8, 2500 and 8 grand depending on if it's a digital only, if it's a painting, it's something like this. Um, you can get very good covers for less than that. Um, but your cover and your cover design need to look professional. Your editing needs to look professional. Um, and so you do need to spend upfront. And I would talk to the indie people about how to do this on the cheap if you need to do it. Indie publishing, the only other thing I'll say is name of the game still tends to be being able to go viral managed with releasing as many books as humanly possible. The more books you have in indie, the better. Um, and a lot of people who indie publish like they'll say we you want a book uh every six weeks. Yes, you heard that. Six weeks. There are indie publisher authors who release a book every six weeks. That is some of the ones doing the best. Most of them do not do that. But still like I even Janneke when she uh did a big push, she released one a month after saving them up for several years because that's how you make a splash indie publishing is you have just you become mildly viral on Kindle Unlimited. You want people to tear through your catalog and if you release one book and they read it, you get almost nothing. If they tear through your catalog, you make a lot more. And so you have to be able to have people tear through your catalog. So indie publishing having a a large amount of books does tend to be the primary way. There are other ways uh that people do it, but that's one of the things.

All right, let's talk about a publishing company. Again, I want you to understand like we're pretending you want to be a professional industry. It's good for you to know the parts of all this. It's a fire hose. You can come back and watch this online later. Um, in a publishing hierarchy, you have the publisher. This is someone like Tom Doherty. A publisher is not an editor. A publisher is a business person. Their primary job is to herd nerds. Okay? Even at the non-nerdy publisher, non-science fiction publisher, everybody else is a nerd, right? This is a business person. Their background is in business. Their background is to actually make all these people who love books and don't care about numbers pay attention to the numbers. So that means that while Tom Doherty generally read one book by each of his authors, he knew science fiction fantasy. He loved science fiction fantasy. You could not sell a book to Tom Doherty. Peter and I didn't know this when we cornered him at WorldCon in 2001 and talked his ear off trying to get him to buy our books. Uh Tom Doherty can't buy your books. You're kind of barking up the wrong tree unless you know your daughter goes to school with his granddaughter and he can put in a good word for you. Like that does still happen.

Right underneath the publisher is usually um what we call an editorial director. All right. In some companies there's an associate publisher instead. So let's put right here associate. These jobs can be kind of interchangeable, right? Uh it depends on how big the company is and things like this. Uh a lot of times, so at Tor, uh during the the years when I was there, Tom had associate publishers, one over children's and one over like libraries and all of these things. Um and there was only an editorial director over Tor itself. Her name was Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan's um widow. Uh his first his editor, then his wife. She uh she met him, published him, then married him. Uh I joke it's like she wanted to make extra sure she listened to her editorial directive. Um right editorial director is somebody who has enough business sense and management sense to to be a nerd who knows how to pay attention to the business side whereas an associate publisher is just a publisher in you know a VP they they work and this is why it's kind of you run the gamut sometimes and often an editorial director will have their own line of books whereas an associate publisher won't and that's kind of one of the distinctions between them. They will manage a group of editors.

Let's say editors. There's going to be a certain group of editors at the company. And these will have various ranks based on how long they've been there and how important they want to sound. But generally, if they're at this rank, what that means is they acquire fiction. These are the people who can buy your books. They are the people actively searching for new books and they are book people first. A lot of them these days have come up through the editing programs at the various universities. So they have had to learn the publisher side a little bit which is generally good for everyone. When I broke in, they were all people who went to all these cons and just went long enough that someone said, "You have good taste. Why don't you start being an editor?" Moshe, my editor, he became an editor because he collected issues of Analog, the science fiction magazine, and he was missing one. So, he went to the editor's house, which was there in Manhattan, or I guess in Queens. uh walked up and knocked on the door and said, "Hey, do you have this issue?" And they're like, "Yeah, I think I have it in the back. Come on in." And he's like, "Did you like that issue?" And Moshe talked about what he liked. And he's like, "Here, sit down and read some of this slush pile and tell me what you think." Moshe read the slush pile and said, "I like this story, this story, and this story." They're like, "Those are the ones I picked. You want a job?" That is how Moshe entered science fiction and fantasy. He's like in his 20s. Um, right. He eventually does that for a while, gets hired by the science fiction book club to pick their science fiction uh things. Tor hires him, makes him an assistant editor um to David Hartwell um and he's assistant editor for a few years and then um I was at a convention and Jean Callas said we asked her, "Hey, who's acquiring right now?" She said, "Go look up Moshe Feder. He was David Hartwell's assistant. They just promoted him and said he could start acquiring. He doesn't have a list yet. He's going to be hungry." And so we found him at a party, Dan and I. Um, we talked his ear off. He talked our ear off. We both sent him books. He bought a launch. And then a few years later, he bought one of Dan's books. So that's how we that's how I broke in, right? Um, we'll talk about how you break in nowadays. It doesn't work the same way.

Um, so an editor's job is to act as a project manager for a book. This is something that people outside the industry do not understand. Okay. They think that an editor if you go if you're who anyone here in the editing program here. Yeah. If you tell people they'll be like, "Oh, so you look for typos." I mean, I do because I'm a copy editor. Okay. You're a copy editor. Yeah. Um, but that's generally not the editor's job. They won't be able to help themselves because they're that type of person, right? But an editor's job, an editor acquires a book and is project manager for that book. They oversee the editing of it, but also they interface with all the other parts of the company. So, let's say that your book is in this stack sent to them by an agent, because that's basically how it happens. now sneaking in behind the through the back door like I did doesn't happen as often anymore. They read your book in the stack and they say, "Oh, I want to buy this." They then will go to whoever's above them at Tor. During my era, it was actually straight to Tom to the publisher. Usually, it's the editorial director or associate publisher or whoever it is. Like at Random House, there'll be a publisher that's not of Random House that's just in charge of a line. like uh at Delacorte where I published uh my YA books. Uh they had a publisher um who just retired. She was wonderful. And her job was basically just to manage the five editors at that imprint. An imprint is when these big publishers gobbled up a small publisher, they usually liked the name and also the little publisher generally had like an editorial style and a good reputation. So often they would just kind of keep them as a little subsidiary called an imprint. Penguin Random House is the biggest. It has a like dozens of imprints. Delacorte is an imprint of Penguin Random House. It has a publisher for Delacorte and then a group of editors at Delacorte who all try to find books that match the Delacorte line that have a similar sort of YA feel to other things at in Delacorte. Um, and then that person uh will Beverly would report to a higher up publisher who would report then to the people above the publishers which are all like the money people at Macmillan and stuff like that that we're not even going to talk about. These are like these are like they could be selling shirts, they could be selling books, they don't really care. Does the line go up, right? Um that's their job. There's nothing wrong with that. Um that's why they have a publisher who cares about books and knows the industry running the thing.

So they they they get your book and they're like, "I want to buy this book." They go to whoever is up there and they say, "I found one. I think it's really great. We should buy it." Usually this person will read it or at least, you know, read part of it and be like, "Okay, make me a P&L." A P&L is a profit and loss statement or sheet. When I asked Joshua what a P&L was, he said, "Oh, it's a bunch of made-up numbers," and it kind of is. So, what a P&L is is the editor will go and be like, where what market do I think this will sell to? What what book will this sell? Like, uh where where how are we going to publish this? Will we do it in hardcover or straight to paperback? What's our market for this? Um, and they will do all the number crunching stuff that they don't like to do, but now they have been learned to do because they all went through the publishing program. Do they talk about P&Ls for you guys? Yeah, you do. You're a copy editor, so you don't have to worry about it. Um, so the P&L and they will plug in a bunch of numbers and they will take this and they'll talk it through and say, "This is what I think we can sell." And that will determine what they can offer on the book as an advance. An advance is an amount of money they pay upfront to the um to the author in order to buy the rights to publish the book in whatever markets they is in the contract. Um you get this money up front. You do not have to pay this money back unless you fail to deliver. So if you don't earn enough money, you don't have to pay it back. Now, this is an advance against your royalties. So when the book comes out and sells, you will earn a certain percent off of cover price for every copy sold. In the industry right now, that is generally between 10 and 15% off of cover price on a hardcover. So if they whatever the number is on there the regardless of how it's discounted every copy that sells you get between 10 and 15%. Usually this uh it escalates you start at 10% you sell a certain threshold you start getting 12.5 after uh then a second threshold you get 15%. That when I broke in it was fairly standardized at 5,000 first 5,000 copies got 10%. second 5,000 got he's got 12 and a half and everything over 10,000 copies got 15. Um and so you generally get between six and 8% sometimes 10%.

On a mass market little paperback cover price. You generally get between 6 and 10%, sometimes 12, but usually around 8 to 10 off of a trade paperback, which is the oversized one. Yeah.

Are those percentages retroactive? Uh, so once you hit that five, that 10,000? Nope. It's kind of like the tax code, right? Does that make sense? Those first 5,000 earn you this much, next 5,000 earn you this much, and then that. It's not retroactive. Good question.

Um, in this regard, for a long time, cuz these uh contracts were really heavily negotiated over a century's time, they got pretty standardized and they were relatively fair, I feel, to the author. Uh, you might say 15%. That's not a ton, but remember, retail is keeping 50%. Okay. So, if we run, these are very rough numbers, okay, exceptionally rough, but if we run some numbers and let's pretend that a book was $10. That's not an actual number, but it's easy for math. So, a $10 book, we're giving around $5 to the bookstore, right? $5 is coming to the publisher. Um, to print a $10 book, you will expect about a dollar in printing fees, 10% printing, and another 10% is warehousing and shipping and all of that stuff. So, there's really $3 left. 150 of that, if you're selling well, goes to the author and 150 of that goes to the publisher. It's actually a pretty fair split. Again, only $1 we go do on the first part part. Part of the reason for that is um they're going to pay for cover art and co um copy editing and all these things that are a sunk cost. It's a certain amount to make a book and it doesn't increase like printing does. If you print more, you get a cheaper price for printing, but you still have to pay for every book. The more copies you print, the more all of those sunk costs get a million amber get split among all the pieces. So this percentage I felt was kind of because we got two over here. Um, that's kind of like distribution slash all of that. This is very simple. Those numbers actually are not as even as I make them seem, but that was a pretty decent split. The publishers didn't really like that that it was so even a split.

And then ebooks came along. And ebooks generally work under a different model of $10. Usually the um the you get 25% of net. Okay. So net is defined, fortunately, not in a Hollywood accounting way, as what the publisher actually takes in. So usually 30% goes to Amazon. It's going to be Amazon. Amazon's 90% of the ebook market. Um, and then of that $10, $7 goes over here. They pay you 25% of that, right? How much is that? Uh, math people, how much is 25% of $7? Little under two. Little under two bucks. We'll go two bucks. So, you get $2. You're like, "Wow, I made 50 cents extra. We're all doing great." How much does the publisher make? $5. How much are they spending in printing fees? None. None. They took the money from the printing fees and the warehousing fees and they just put it into their pocket, which is why everyone was up in arms that 25% and that became the industry standard. You should still be up in arms about that. It has not changed. Um, but it is that is what happened and that is where the publishers managed to make a little edge in the disruption of the market that came um it can be budged. You can do things that will make them give you more. I can't say because of contractural obligations what you can do to make them budge, but I can tell you Stephen King did it and I think he talked about it. So um, but there are there are they can be creative. You have to be a big deal to make them be creative. Okay. What they will tell you is they have contracts in their their contracts that say they can't pay you higher than 25% of net because they pay you higher. They have to pay everyone higher. They have lots of authors who have most favored nation clauses. That is true. Contracts can do all kinds of things. So, we'll just leave it there.

All right. So, they will come back to you. They will offer you an advance. Average advance um 10 years ago was five grand. I don't think it's increased. Um, it's not a lot of money, is it? No. Um, and that's five grand being pulled up by the people who make 250 grand and things like that. Um, a good agent should be able to get that higher than five. Five is pretty low. Um, but I got 10 uh 20 grand for two books. Basically, it's what Joshua got me to in 2005. Um, that is an advance. Every one of those dollars you earn in royalties will go against that advance. So, you can run the numbers. If you were making a $1.50 per book and you got a $10,000 advance, you could see how many books it would take you to sell before you start getting a royalty check. Okay.

Any questions on that before we start talking about how artwork happens, how editing happens, uh, and and all of that in distribution? Yeah. Is there anything that like we as consumers other than just being super vocal about it can be more up in arms about it to like push for change? What can you do to push for change? This is a good question. And I my uh Joshua actually said the number one thing you can do for put to bush for change is actually buy your ebooks from places other than Amazon right now because this honestly I don't like this but this is on the authors and the agents to change not on the the consumer right you can support indie authors uh if you like indie authors but I don't think you shouldn't support traditionally published authors they still want you to buy their books even though this uh the way that ebooks have gone is unfair making videos like I'm doing here and saying, "Hey, publishers, you were fine with a $150 before. What changed? Why isn't this a better a better split? You know how bad this looks. You should be ashamed of yourself. They really just should be, right? Um, you know, the p the industry did really well uh splitting evenly with the authors. Um, and so yeah uh we can do that but uh the bigger problem is Amazon. So Amazon dominating the market to the level they do is bad for everybody. Not a lot we can do. Uh the publishers had some a snafu with them um back in 2011 2012 or whatever that ended up with a department of justice judgment against the publishers um for things they had done. and Amazon came out very well in that exchange. Um, and the publishers are very gunshy against uh going against Amazon right now. It's hard because most of the people who work at Amazon are great bookloving nerds just like the rest of us who just want to work in publishing. They have no power to change this. Uh, and the people who do have power to change this are the equivalents at Amazon above this person. And they just say, "Yes, but the number is going up." Uh, and that's what we want it to do. And you know uh the problem with them controlling the market is they just for instance for indie authors they can just say now you have to kind of pay us a bunch of money in order to advertise in order to sell. Indie author authoring no longer makes the better margins once in a while the reason to do this is indie authoring you got to keep the $7. So even if you sold half as many books indie publishing guess what you're beating the two bucks. So why wouldn't you? Well, now you have to spend a bunch of that money on ads and so because you do your royalties and also Amazon has a little behind-the-scenes extra fee they charge uh to indie authors. It's not very big for most, but they charge a distribution fee to them and not to publishers. Uh if you don't have art in your book, it's not significant, but for the Way of Kings, we calculated be it would have been like about 70 cents a book because of the artwork we put in it. Um, and so if in Way of Kings were indie published, uh, we would be losing an additional 70 cents or something like that. Peter knows the actual numbers. Um, and so there's there's all these things going on with Amazon being able to squeeze they, for instance, they allow the publishers, Joshua brought this up, they allow the publishers to set any price for their ebooks they want. Indie authors have to keep them under 10 bucks, and that's the same price now as it was in 2010. Indie authors haven't been able to raise prices on their books since two 2010. Um, and that means that if you have a book that is three times as long as someone else's, you can't charge $12 compared to their $9 book. Even though it's three times as long and has all this artwork that they're charging you.7 cents for, you still have to charge $9.99. It's your maximum. 2.99 is your minimum. There are things like this that just make it hard for the indie authors um and things like that. So real change is going to require number one that to happen but number two um something to happen where the authors are able to force uh the publishers to bend on this 25% of net. Um, and you know audiobooks are still kind of highway robbery for the same reason. Uh, we talk about this but it's actually different over here. Um, Audible isn't paying $3 off of the the 10. Um, they're paying a fraction of that. I think they're paying like 30% to the author instead of 70%. Um, and we got them to change some of that, but they haven't still haven't even rolled that out yet. Uh, and it's a marginal increase. It's not an enormous increase. So, we'll see when they finally do roll that out. Uh, what Dragon Steel's efforts have managed to do there to get them to bend a little bit. Uh, but basically all the tech bro industry people have said, everyone's so eager to publish books and they're really easy to take advantage of. So, let's just take advantage of them. Um, whereas, you know, uh, in video games, they know they can't get away with it. So, they they give them the higher royalties and things. So, that's not part of this discussion. I can't really get into that. Let's just kind of go through. You get your advance, you get your royalties. We talked about what the royalties are. By the way, on audiobooks, it's also generally uh 25% of net. Yeah.

Can you negotiate a lower advance or not having an advance to get a higher royalty? You can't. Maybe someday you can. Uh, basically you will have to be able to threaten to walk away from all of the big five publishers and be able to do it on your own and cost them significant amounts of off their bottom line before they will agree to a deal like that because if they do they know that that is opening that floodgate and that is bad for them. This has been very good for them because while um while u the India book market has gobbled up the mid list, they've been able to focus on bestsellers and make this percentage off the majority of the best seller instead of this percentage. Um, and so it's been how the publishing industry has kind of survived, right? But you know it's at the expense of authors. So, um, so your book gets picked up at that point. Again, editor's project manager. What they're going to do is they're going to send you an editorial letter. This is a long letter of here's everything wrong with your book. If you're in YA, it'll also tell you the good things about your book. I'm joking, but it is kind of a stark difference uh working in YA and middle grade with those editors where they'll be like, "Oh, I love this smiley face here. Oh, blah blah blah blah blah." Whereas working with uh with New York editors where like Mosha once said to me, he said, "This sucks. You didn't used to suck. What went wrong?" and Harriet once circled a page uh in the Wheel of Time, crossed it out and wrote do better. Where over at Delicort they're like oh smiley face heart heart there's like hearts on half the pages. Um, yeah. Yeah. Difference between YA and adult. Um, or at least the publishers I've worked at. Um, New Yorkers. Yeah. They're just New Yorkers, right? Like uh what's that? Mine was nicer. Yours was nicer. Yeah. You you didn't yours yours. Yeah. It might also be that Christa Delicort, she's from LA. People smile a lot in LA. Mosha is a died in the wool New Yorker. He is as New Yorker as you can get. Right. And like the when I after we signed and I met him and I went back, he's like, "When did you get so fat?" I'm like he's like, "I don't remember you being this fat. You have to live a long time to make me a lot of money, lose weight. Anyone who's known New Yorkers was like, "Yeah, okay." That he was being really nice, wasn't he? Yeah, he kind of was. Um, he was he did it endearingly and he wore all Yankees. He wears Yankee stuff everywhere. Um, just straight up, you know, you won't ever catch him without his Yankees jacket on. Um, so they then will editorial letter, they'll work with you. Um, I'm making it sound worse than it is. I've had a wonderful experience with basically every editor I've worked with. Their job is to help you make a better version of the book you want to write. They are not trying to turn it into anything you don't want it to be. They work with you. They talk it over. They uh once you've signed the contracts, the editor is your friend. Uh during contract negotiations, they're the enemy. Every other time, they are your friend. They want the book to succeed. They will be your in-house advocate. they will start going to marketing meetings because over here you have P and M publicity and marketing uh defined a little differently I found depending on the place but in general marketing is where they spend money on ads of any sort and publicity is where they go direct to the fans doing some sort of publicity of uh event like publicity sponsors uh your book tours They they help you with your Tik Toks. They, you know, do things like this. Marketing goes and buys ads in newspapers, which they really shouldn't do. They don't do that much anymore, but buys ads on Amazon, buys ads on Tik Tok, right? The the difference being they're you know, publicity is kind of like not I don't know you maybe you can kind of see the difference there. Uh, but post publicity, your publicist will generally handle getting you on talk shows, which you'll never get on. Uh, George got on on one um on Col Bear. I was on Col Bear. My face was on Co Bear. Uh, back during the day of the Col Bear Report, he had a rant he made about Zeppelins and he held up a copy of USA Today. There was an article about me on the bottom of it. So, I've got a screenshot of my face on the Co Bear Report. Um, but uh Shannon Hail got on uh Good Morning America. This sort of stuff authors don't go on and it's not that big a deal anyway anymore. So, um, but they will they know how to do the whole Tik Tok thing and stuff like that. So, um, one of the cur curious things to know about that's part of marketing is what we call co-op. If you walk into a bookstore, anything but the actual shelves is paid for. Okay? If when you walk into your Barnes & Noble, there's those nice displays of books that say summer reads or something, that's paid space. If you look behind the register and there's a wall of books saying new awesome book here, that's paid for space. Most of the end caps are paid for space. That's at the end of a thing. Um, this is all what we call co-op. And when I say paid for, it's not paid for in this way you might think. It's paid for in that they will say, "Hey, Barnes & Noble's like, "Hey, we got space on this Zen cap cap. If we put yours there and we sell it, can we have an extra 50 cents?" And the publisher will be like, "Yeah, sure." Um, and that comes out of their $150, not yours. So, you really like it when that happens. When it happens over here, it comes out of both of yours because it's net. Um, so once again, it's one something they changed for the ebooks. When Amazon comes and says, "Hey, we got a promo. You sell your book at $5 and we will put it a part of our newsletter." Usually co-op for Amazon is less than getting a bigger percentage and more bringing your price down or something like that to do a value. Sometimes it is getting a a percent or something like that, but usually it's this. Then you uh you split that uh with the the publisher. You you both take the hit. So, yay for progress. Um, so, uh, if they don't ask and discount it, then it doesn't come out of either of yours. Uh, this is rarely relevant, but it happened to me once. Do you guys remember, any of you old enough to remember when everyone got mad that they put, uh, YouTube's new album on everyone's iPhone? They also put The Way of Kings on everyone's iPhone, but Bono's a bigger target, so nobody noticed me. They just did it and then they paid us for them all. I made like 800 grand. Yeah, it was enormous. Uh, yeah. Uh-huh. They just did it. It's just Apple. They're like, "Well, whatever." They We heard that people like The Way of Kings. You can have it for free if you buy a new iPhone. People bought new iPhones. They put the Way of Kings on it and they sent me a check. I sent to a check who sent me a check. It was really great. We loved it. But yeah. Yeah. If they'd asked us, we would have been like, "Yeah, give it out for free." Then we would have got nothing. But they this Apple, they just didn't ask. They just did it, you know. I'll take your money. Um, so, uh, so yeah, publicity marketing, they'll be talking to them. They'll be talking to the in-house accountants and all this stuff. The accounting people will handle the contracts. Your agent will negotiate that with them. We'll talk agents next week. Um, because as I assumed we weren't going to get there because we got to Hey, contracts, royalties, retail. Um, so contracts, you will be offered a contract and your agent will negotiate it. We'll talk in depth about what those are, but you eventually when you talk royalties will go to retail. They will ship them all to the bookstores out in the world and the bookstores can return them. And so you won't get paid until after they know how many books are getting returned. This can be very frustrating. They keep what's called a reserve against returns. Uh where they are like well we these books could come back at any time. Basically they get to keep your money and earn interest on it a little longer worrying that there might be returns and your agent might yell at them and say we have the book scan numbers which are like the Neielson ratings. We know that they sold you have to send us money. the publisher will be like all right fine and then they'll send you the money. Um, okay, you understand the publishing industry kind of now this is how the industry works editors acquire they love books they then get everyone in house excited when a launch got published was giving it to the the accountants he was giving to everybody getting them all excited for the book you get everybody hyped publishing marketing gets involved they will hopefully do some publishing marketing book tour buy and co-op are the main two ways that they would do that then the book comes out and then you hope that people buy it. And we'll talk next week about how hard that is to get people to do in today's market for a new um authors.

All right, we got five minutes for questions. Any questions? Uh so you talked about like audio books kind of shook things up and ebooks. Is there anything coming up that is there anything coming up to shake up publishing? We don't know. Um, for a while I was worried that the big shakeup would be driving books uh prices down further. Uh, which is why I moved into uh into premium editions as Dragon Steel's primary business model right now. Um, and I feel like I preaged something because a lot of people followed um, premium editions after we started our big our dragon steel editions. um premium editions became the thing and I think uh think Al Crate and Loot Crate and Fairy Crate and all of those. Um, this was back, you know, I I started this in like 2011 2012 uh building the um the additions with our first one coming out in 2014 um I think uh or 2015 um and premium editions. So what happens? Why premium editions? Well, I have this philosophy that that you can still make money as an artist if the more wellto-do of your fans subsidize everyone else who gets the uh the thing for cheap or free. It's basically the model that the music industry has used for a long time. You have the premium uh concert experience. Everybody else can listen to the the music basically for free. Uh royalties are crap in music and even before then there was the radio. Uh, and so I was like, if books are going to go to 99 cents, I need to have something to subsidize that. Uh, and that's why we built Dragon Steel. Uh, keeping your premium edition rights, therefore is something I would highly recommend. They She says they won't let you. Your your editor might be able to make them. Yeah, it's because of all the books. All the book crates are they're very much harder. So, I started keeping my audio book rights and then the publishers realized they shouldn't do that. and everybody else has had trouble keeping their audiobook rights. I kept my uh my um my premium rights and now it's hard for every I'm sorry to do this to you all. Um basically whatever I end up doing the publishers won't let anyone else do. Um, but uh try to do whatever it is you see Dragon Steel doing. Uh, yeah, I was just wondering when you're pitching your book idea to like a publisher, what can you do to make yourself stand out? like what are they looking for in a novel? What are they looking for in a novel makes you stand out? Um, if you have a pitch session, I recommend um Boy, we should talk about pitching next week. Yeah, let's Well, I'll have Rachel remind me. We'll talk about pitching next week. Next week. Because that'll go into query letters as well. Okay. Yeah.

As far as audio books go, how expensive on average is it for an indie author to get an audio book? uh audio book. Getting an audio book made um it's about for top tier talent is about 10 grand for a uh for one of our um secret projects. So not the super long books cheaper. You can get it cheaper than that, but you're looking two to three grand I think for quality talent that's not uh the top tier names. Uh am I right on that? Do you're Yeah, that's right. That's Peter's department, not your department. So I think two to three grand. Um, if you want to use professionals and not amateurs. Okay. Uh, yeah, it's by finished hour, by the way. They you'll find how much they charge by finished hour. Uh, does anyone have a is it like 300 bucks per finished hour sometimes? Something like that. Yeah, 300 bucks per finished hour. 250 bucks per finished hour. 10 hours is a is a an average shorter book. So, uh, yeah.

Over here. Have you ever been pressured by a publisher to include or exclude any content? Have I been pub pressured by publisher to include or exclude content? Never. I've never heard of it happening to anyone I know um in science fiction fantasy. It might be different in romance. People wonder that a lot. Never happened to me in my entire life. It happens in it's happened on the Wheel of Time movies or television show because they wanted a Game of Thrones. But in publishing, this is basically a non-issue. Uh never even heard of it. Yeah. Uh over here. Do you feel like the narrators with the big names like draw people? Do I think narrators the big names draw people? Yes. I like the nar really good narrators, but your mileage may vary. I don't know if you go get Michael and Kate and you pay the extra money if it's going to be worth the value to you until you already have a fan base. Uh save your questions, write them down. We'll have a whole Q&A episode, the last episode. Thank you all very much. Um appreciate I know [Applause]