Tao Lin, author of the novel Richard Yates, announced on his blog yesterday that he’s signed a deal with Random House for his next novel, Taipei, Taiwan. The New York Observer broke the news that the novel sold for $50,000 (!!!) According to GalleyCat, the novel will be a short one – between fifty and sixty thousand words. Let me get out my calculator here, hold on a minute – that makes his pay scale, at the minimum, $1 a word. Man, if I had that kind of money for this blog post, I’d be at $98 already. This sentence right here is worth $13 on the Tao Lin pay scale. That’s lunch plus dessert at Whole Foods! Hey, there’s another seven bucks! Now we’re looking at a beer with that lunch. Wait, here’s another sentence – make that a bottle of wine! Yup, sure is sweet to be a writer these days. Sure is sweet. If your name is Tao Lin. Which my name is not. Damn.
Tao Lin Lands $50K Deal with Random House
Published
BookPeople 
That is not a lot of money. Jonathan Safran Foer got 10x that, $500,000 in 2003 for his first novel. His brother Joshua got $1.2 million for his book on memory. Back in 1999 or so, Dave Eggers got twice as much (more, considering inflation), $100,000 for his first book.
You’re figuring it wrong. First of all, take out 15% for the agent. That’s $35,000 — not exactly a great one-year income if you live in NYC like Tao does. But just as if it were income, he has to pay self-employment tax on it. I had a friend who didn’t know that and her first book was a best-seller and she didn’t pay taxes on her advances and royalties until the IRS found her and said she owed so much money they put a lien on her house.
Seven out of ten books don’t earn out their advance. He will make the real money on a paperback deal, a movie deal, and foreign rights, which I think an author has to share 50/50 with the publisher (and again that’s really less since the agent gets his 15% of the author’s share).
As Walter Kirn, who’s gotten advances over $100,000 put it, ““A low-six-figure advance has allowed me to work at less than minimum wage for three years.”
The book probably won’t be out for 2 years. So Tao probably can’t live on this, and he’s definitely not getting rich. It is probably better that he didn’t get a bigger advance, though, because it’s better to have a relatively modest advance like his and make money.
Look up n+1 editor Chad Harbach. His advance for his first novel was $650,000. So you either must be very, very poor or not really understand the economics of book publishing.
Perhaps you do not understand bookseller humor. This is a lighthearted post and should be taken as such.
While certainly not lighthearted (in fact, it is vicious) “Book Editor”‘s comment was valuable in that it shared an important truth: Most authors do not make a lot of money for their publications or their book deals.
Only a select few white and/or Jewish *men* (yes, women routinely do not get high advances or book deals for literary publications as opposed to genre publications) receive six figure book deals or higher.
Worse still, most authors are midlist, which means that their books have trouble selling high numbers and thus become relegated to a middling barrage of the many novels and essays that sell low or respectable amounts.
These midlist authors then have trouble selling subsequent books because the industry has become so commercial and few industry insiders truly care about the quality of the writing and the structure of the narratives, and in fact, there are so many competing versions of quality–so many vying standards–that it is impossible to tell what a soundly composed book narrative looks like.
So what does this mean?
I’m not sure what this means.
But, as you can see, I left this comment anyway even though I have absolutely no idea what the significance of it may be.
Good thoughts, Carol Ann, and certainly meaningful. Part of what we do here as booksellers is spend a lot of time telling readers about titles they’re not going to hear about – why won’t they hear about them? Because they’re midlist, which means not only do the authors not earn the big advances, but the books don’t have those big marketing bucks behind them. The number of books published every year (every month, every day) is staggering, with so much of the focus put on those heavy hitters which “guarantee” returns on a publisher’s investment, meanwhile all the other smaller titles are left to fight it out on their own on the shelves.
This is one of the things that personally worries me about ebook pricing – the continued devaluation of an author’s earnings. It’s already virtually impossible for an author to make a living simply from writing books, and the lower publishers and sellers shoot those price points, the less money there is for the people actually creating the book itself!
As a reader, the commercialization of the industry is a huge turn-off for me, and not at all helpful when it comes time for me to choose my next book to read. I become biased – if it’s on the NYT bestseller list, I automatically think I won’t like it (and then am surprised when, for instance, I end up reading something like Olive Kitteridge and enjoying it.) There are days when I wish publishers were smaller, when all the imprints were on their own and not under the umbrellas of the mammoth companies. But then of course I imagine there would be even less money to go around for quality (which, as you said, is always open to interpretation) writing.
So what does all THAT mean? If I had a million dollars, I’d give it to an author. But in the mean time, I’ll remain open minded when hitting the shelves for my own personal reading, and vociferous about those books I love when making recommendations to customers and friends.
I want this to be a good book, I really do, because his last one seemed like this to me: http://theopenend.com/2010/09/04/tao-lins-richard-yates-book-review/. It is good news, I guess, that Tao Lin is no longer a small press writer even though he started out as a small press writer. Oh well. I will probably read his new book in 2013, and I will think about Tao Lin’s writing again.