![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
- I am writing a book. Don't get too excited – it's a glorified picture book. And it's the umpteenth book about Kurt Cobain.
Well, it's official – I went on Friday to sign a contract with Barnes & Noble Publishers, making me the writer of a book with the working title A Pictorial History of Kurt Cobain.
Yes, I am going to be the author of a book. It will be sold nationwide, and it will be "By Chris Molanphy." That's the exciting part.
What tempers my enthusiasm is that I'm a gun for hire. Less than three weeks ago, an all-points bulletin went out to a few Internet forums, including one music-related e-mail list to which I belong. In sum, the message was that a boutique publisher needed someone, with decent rock-crit or music-industry credentials, willing to write a few thousand words about Kurt Cobain on a tight deadline. "Hey, I can do that," I thought. In fact, I thanks to LiveJournal, I already sort of had.
Rather idly, I sent an e-mail back, describing myself and linking to my Cobain-related LJ post. To my great shock, the editor at B&N got back to me within the day. I guess my willingness to do the job for the rather meager sum they were offering (and, no surprise, no royalties) made me the immediate front-runner.
There are other catches to my agreeing to this arrangement. As its name suggests, Barnes & Noble Publishing is a unit of the nationwide book-retail chain, and as such, I can forget about this book ever being carried by any competing book outlet. That includes, sadly, Amazon. (No obsessively tracking minute-by-minute Amazon sales rankings for me.) Thank goodness B&N has their own well-appointed web retail operation.
And then, of course, there's the subject matter, and its utter lack of freshness. A quick search on Amazon under "Books" and "Kurt Cobain" turns up about 10 books actively in print and another 10 or so on record but out of printor out of stock. Like books about the Beatles, Nirvana books are a cottage industry. My editor readily admits that the publisher has jumped on this bandwagon following the resurgence in interest in Nirvana, as both their greatest hits album and Kurt Cobain: Journals sold well through the holidays. The book will be part of their ongoing series of coffee-table books (insert Kramer/Seinfeld joke here) about pop-culture icons. They did a rather nice, and thorough, book about the Who a couple of years ago, as well as one that more closely approximates the size and length of my project on (gulp) Princess Diana. There's plenty of text in these books, but they are each dominated by more than 100 pictures about their respective subjects.
That's what I hope will distinguish this book from the myriad others about Cobain – the pictures angle. My main text will take up only one-third of the book; the other two-thirds of what I write will be in the form of photo captions. And the pictures will drive the "story," such as it is. I have seen a couple of the photos they've acquired, and some are really cool. It means my narrative text will be brief, and this is a relief – not to have to retell the story of Kurt and Aberdeen and Olympia and the rotating drummers and the drugs and the breakthrough and the sad end. I don't have a research budget, and anyway, it's already been better chronicled than I ever could (most impressively by Charles Cross, in the definitive biography Heavier Than Heaven; I'm in the middle of reading it now).
My thesis for the book – motivated by convenience, I admit – is that images of Kurt Cobain may be the purest representation we have of him, besides his songs. Millions of fans' abiding love of Kurt resides primarily in his knotted, perverse, strangely beautiful lyrics, because they explain him in a way his interviews – and the absurd legends that have grown up around the band – cannot. To me, images of Cobain are similarly fascinating, and if, rather than just presenting them in an isn't-this-rock-star-cool kind of way, I can navigate a story through them, I will have made a teeny-tiny contribution to the vast body of work about him. Still, it's going to be tough coming up with new angles on the most praised, examined musician of the past decade.
Anyway, between this project and a major piece of consulting business that kicked off a month ago, I am fairly choking with work right now. The good news is the financial remuneration. (Even the Cobain project comes with a nice hunk of change.) The bad news is I have less time for other writing I love, including this blog. So if I have seemed distant for the past couple of weeks, I offer apologies and ask for your patience – this condition will persist for a few weeks longer.
I'm just happy that in the end, I'll have a very tangible thing to show for all this labor. And it'll be on-sale at a superstore near you for $9.98.
February 3 2003, 19:55:33 UTC 9 years ago
do you know when it'll be published?
February 26 2003, 20:41:38 UTC 9 years ago
September, it turns out
Sorry – what I posted earlier was incorrect. I'm done writing in March, and editing/compiling of the book is finished by April, but between printing and "set-up" (whatever that means – certainly not publicity), the book won't appear in stores until the fall.February 26 2003, 21:27:15 UTC 9 years ago
Re: September, it turns out
That's seems to be a good time for it, it'll make a wonderful christmas present for someone i know.February 4 2003, 07:54:34 UTC 9 years ago
February 6 2003, 12:24:14 UTC 9 years ago
the initial amount an author gets (the advance) is not a signing bonus, although authors often get some portion of it upon the execution of a contract. instead it is an advance against royalties--you're giving the author some of their royalties before they've earned them. the advance is a gamble for a publisher. you want to offer a high amount so the author chooses to publish with you (if it's a hot author) but you also want the author to "earn out" the advance. if the author doesn't earn out, then you've paid them more royalties than you had to, cutting into your own profit.
so the real question isn't whether B&N should have given chris royalties in addition to the agreed-upon lump sum, because that's not done. it's whether the book would have been likely to "earn out" that sum, resulting in them having to pay him more royalties. if it doesn't sell enough copies to earn out that amount, then chris has made out like a bandit; if it sells more than enough to earn out, B&N has gotten a bargain on his services.
how many copies does it need to earn out? i figure that the break-even point is about 2,675 copies. B&N has about 500 stores, so call it 5 copies a store. more realistically, though, let's assume that chris would have had to hire an agent to achieve a more favorable contract, so maybe 6 or 7 copies to cover their fees. that doesn't sound like very many copies, but lots of books, actually, sell in that range. i think B&N made a pretty good guess about the advance. it's likely that it will sell more than that, but i wouldn't expect it to sell, say, three times as many copies. by hiring chris, they've gotten someone who counts the experience as worth something so they can get away with low-balling it a little.
i don't think B&N will spend the money they've saved on advertising. you do see B&N ads, but i am pretty sure they are co-sponsored by the publishers of the books in question. since they're publishing this one themselves, i doubt they'd bother. also, they haven't "saved" very much money -- it wouldn't go very far as an advertising budget. what chris should hope for is that they put his nice, budget-priced book next to the relatively expensive, not to mention impenetrable, journals.
not to go all dismal-science on you -- this is just the fate of many books that aren't by grisham or clancy. i will hope to be proved wrong.
February 6 2003, 22:18:46 UTC 9 years ago
Ahem. But seriously, thanks for the explanation on royalties – very useful. But are yosure this applies in my situation, which is a very clear work for hire arrangement? The contract and says nothing about either royalties – the word "advance" doesn't appear anywhere in the agreement. I think they're just paying me a one-time fee, full stop, rather than an advance on capped royalties or some-such.
Or do you know that already, and your explanation above is a hypothetical, comparing what I ended up with to a more traditional publishing contract? Sorry, confused...
February 7 2003, 07:39:14 UTC 9 years ago
both of these sentences seem vaguely to imply that you could, theoretically, have been offered straight royalties in addition to the lump sum "advance." i was explaining why this never would have happened, even had you been offered a traditional contract, which as you point out, you were not. it's not worth being disappointed over something that was never a possibility!
Anonymous
February 10 2003, 12:33:23 UTC 9 years ago
I Swear I Don't Have a Gun
Hey — I’m not anonymous! I am somebody! I’m Trip, dammit.Congratulations, though, on the Cobain-ography. Unless you’re trying to be the next Sebastian Junger, you gotta take what you can and make it the best you can. Visually speaking, the SO and I rented a couple months ago the Sonic Youth tourdocpic called “1991 – The Year Punk Broke”, about their tour with, inter alia, Nirvana through Europe in the summer of 1991, and it was super cool. It’s kinda like the way Matisse spoke about his work, that if the work doesn’t describe itself, then what’s the point of analyzing it further?
While I don’t worship at the altar of Saint Kurt, it was definitely visceral excitement to see him there, I mean right there so you could practically touch him, live on stage, before the single was released stateside, doing his thing and making everyone in the audience feel his life for a moment.
Anonymous
February 26 2003, 11:31:09 UTC 9 years ago
Wow!
That's very cool! Sorry I've been away from reading your blog (and, well, writing my own) for quite a while, but now I'm back at work, so blogging is like my own cigarette break. Anyway, your thesis sounds kind of interesting, in a Susan Sontag sort of way. (I admit to never having read On Photography, but there you go.) Also, now that you're writing one of these books, you really have to read Liz Phair by Camden Joy, as it's about, well, someone writing one of these books. Have fun and let me know if you need someone to cast an editorial eye over it. Someone other than Emily, obviously...-- ME-L (http://www.triptronix.net/ishbadiddle)