... and without worrying if there's a book deal at the end of it.:)
On the subject of "book deal
", I would like to point out that they typically are not worth much and take a great deal of effort to obtain. There are authors who command amazing advances against sales, like Hillary Clinton ($8M) or Neil Donald Walsch ($1m), but advances are more typically in the range of $3,000-$10,000. That might seem like a lot of money to some people, but consider this: there are a lot of professions that allow its practitioners to earn much more in the time it takes to write a book and then find an agent and publisher. When I worked for Sony as a CG artist, I earned almost exactly $13,000 a month. If my interest was money, there is no way I would have taken six months off, a loss of about $70,000, against the possibility that I would get an advance that was much larger than even established authors. For instance, when Ann Coulter was published by Regnery Press, her advances were $50,000 per book. She became famous after the first one, but could hardly have expected that. Despite her sudden popularity, her advances didn't change until she switched publishers, at which time she was already a proven author. A more extreme example is J.K. Rowling, who earned 1500 GBP for the rights to her first book, Harry Potter. Keep in mind that Rowling and Coulter are successful authors but they were not given huge sums upfront when they sold their first books.
Many authors are paid nothing or close to nothing and then earn about the same in royalties because their books don't sell very well. I once knew a Jewish publisher who had a captive audience (he was a charismatic lecturer) who told me that selling 10,000 books was extremely good for him. I have read elsewhere that other publishers feel the same way, even big publishers. What this means is that most books do not sell 10,000 copies. Actually, most don't sell 5,000 copies either. Three thousand copies is the break even point for many publishers, so when they take on a book, they are usually trying to beat that number and think they have a fair chance of doing it. Five thousand copies is a reasonable but not extreme profit, and ten thousand copies is a respectable profit. How much money does an author earn who is consistently able to sell 10,000 units of their books? If they self-published, had no middlemen and no printing or distribution costs, a fifteen dollar trade paperback would yield $150,000. Not a fortune, but a respectable income if it could be earned every year of one's life. However, there are costs: printing, distribution, advertising, website maintenance, travel for promotion, and other expenses. This would easily cut the value down to about $100,000. This is still respectable but it is also very unusual for a self-published book to generate this kind of income. If this is published by an established firm, they will have spent $75,000 on the book, taken at least half of the remainder as a fee for publishing, and left the author with about $35,000 in earnings. This is what someone can expect if things go well, by publishing industry standards. $35k is less than a manager at a fast food restaurant makes (I know, because I have a relative who had such a job).
But then there is Neal Donald Walsch who was paid a very high sum for his first book (according to his biopic). This is a highly unusual situation and cannot be expected. In general, paranormal subjects do not sell well. There are exceptions, like Eben Alexander's book, Pim van Lommel, Shirley MacLaine, and Jane Roberts, but these are all exceptions. Also, there is a huge difference in sales between research-based books (van Lommel and Alexander) and New Age (MacLaine and Roberts.) New Age books, when successful, can be much more successful than research-oriented books. Walsch's book, in my opinion, is more fairly compared to Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard, than anything in the New Age category.
Book publishing is far from a sure thing (I still haven't earned any money at all from "Dreamer", and royalties on my computer graphics books remain modest), but that doesn't mean that some people are too naive to know this. Perhaps, like thieves who steal famous paintings then discover they cannot be sold because they are too famous, there are swindlers who make up phony reincarnation stories in the hopes of getting a fat book deal like Hillary Clinton. It is highly unrealistic, but maybe they try anyway. Elsewhere in this thread I posted a link to a story about someone who I think may be naive in this way, and is trying to capitalize on an untrue reincarnation story. Bob Snow does not strike me as being naive in that way. A man who is going to go to the trouble of listing every book he reads, every gallery he visits, is not going to be naive about the value of things. After spending years of his life tracking down some information that appears related to a past life reading, is he then going to naively imagine that fortune is only a book away? Also consider that he had already spent years tracking down the information. That investment is something he cannot have initially expected to make, nor would he have had any way to recoup it. He wanted to be an author and had written a dozen books about police work. Who are his publishers? Praeger, DeCapo, Plenum, Daybreak, Rowman & Littlefield, and Berkley. These are not publishers who are famous for the huge advances they have paid out, and only two (Praeger and Berkley) are semi-well known. His book about his search for Carroll Beckwith was not his first published book but his fifth. There is no way he was naive about publishing and what he could expect to earn from it. My book "Dreamer" is ranked on Amazon higher than several of his books, leading me to think it is likely he isn't earning much more than I did. Maybe he thought his book about Beckwith would bring him fame and fortune, but it is a highly implausible theory given the following:
1) Snow had a publishing history of five previous books, none of which were best sellers
2) Snow's publishers were not top tier publishers and he must have known this
3) Snow's personality clearly drives him to uncover facts and assumes that it takes effort to verify them
AP
