About That Book Advance ...

Illustration by Paul Sahre
By MICHAEL MEYER
Published: New York Times ,April 10, 2009

“In the old days,” the novelist Henry Bech, John Updike’s fictional alter ego, once said, “a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village.”

Since then, Washington Square rents have soared, and writers of fair and ill repute alike seek advance payment for their books. Once minuscule, some advances have escalated into the millions, like the $5 million Scribner paid last month for Audrey Niffenger's second novel “Her Fearful Symmetry.” News of that deal may have seemed odd coming shortly after the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, Scribner’s parent company, announced that because of declining revenue the house would be “watching every penny.”

Indeed, in the latest of a string of eulogies for the book industry as we know it, Time magazine fingered advances as part of the “financial coelacanth” of publishing’s business model, doomed to disappear like brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Yet despite the economic downturn, and the fact that 7 out of 10 titles do not earn back their advance, the system doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. In recent interviews, a dozen New York-based publishers and agents told me, more or less, “Publishers have to keep buying books,” and “They have to bid for the best books” — which in large part means those that will sell.

Advances are seldom specified authoritatively. Amounts are coyly described like cigarette brands — the “mid-fives,” the “low sixes,” the “mild sevens.” In the preface to “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Dave Eggers broke form by telling the reader he received $100,000 for the manuscript, which — after his detailed expenses — netted him $39,567.68.
Advance envy is common. “Writers who can’t recall their Social Security number can say to the penny how much of an advance their nemesis received,” Elissa Schappell, a fiction writer and co-editor of the anthology “Money Changes Everything,” said in an e-mail message.

To an outsider, the numbers can seem arbitrary, even absurd. “No one ever says of an advance, ‘That’s exactly what that book deserves,’ ” Schappell said. “Yep, a coming-of-age first novel involving drug addiction and same-sex experimentation is worth $25,000.”

As a payment to be deducted from future royalties, an advance is a publisher’s estimate of risk. Figures fluctuate based on market trends, along with an author’s sales record and foreign rights potential, though most publishers I talked to cited $30,000 as a rough average. In standard contracts, the author receives half up front, a quarter on acceptance of the manuscript and a quarter on publication, though that model is changing, said the literary agent Eric Simonoff, whose clients include James Frey and Jhumpa Lahiri. “Now we see advance amounts being paid in thirds, fourths and even fifths,” Simonoff said in an interview. “For a writer dependent on those funds, that’s not an advance, it’s a retreat.”

Read Michael Meyer's full essay at NYT.