Congrats! You’ve finished your novel. But what happens now? Get an agent? A publisher? What other options are available to authors today? I’ll be at the Maidstone Literary Festival to tell you everything you need to know about publishers, agents, advances, royalties, self-publishing and more. Click here for tickets.
Kent History & Library Centre, James Whatman Way, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 1LQ
I finally have a Kofi page! ‘What’s a Kofi page?’ you may ask. It’s a place where delightful people like your good self can donate small amounts of money to poor, wretched writers like me. ‘Hang on,’ you continue, folding your arms and narrowing your eyes, ‘you’ve written films and had books published by big publishers… Shouldn’t you be loaded?’
Yes. Yes, I should… But I was paid for Unwelcome three years ago (almost to the day!) and that was the equivalent of two years’ salary of my old job. And because Warner Bros much such a limp effort of promoting it that it will never earn its budget back and I’ll never get the fifty grand of my fee that I deferred just before filming (won’t make that mistake again).
Nautilus, the Disney+ TV show that was my idea has been filmed and is in post-production, but has just been dropped by Disney so I won’t be seeing any money from that soon.
And yes, I have been published by the likes of Simon & Schuster, but it wasn’t a huge advance and I’m on a joint accounting contract which means I don’t start earning royalties until the first three books have earned out (to learn more about how all this nonsense works, click here).
And also yes, I have been self-publishing a few of my books, but that’s also an expensive business and turning into a bit of a money pit…
So if you like my stuff and you’ve bought all the books and seen the films, then do please consider dropping three quid in the Kofi tip jar. I reckon if 231 of you do it, I might just be able to pay my overdraft off. I’ll be popping all my blog posts and other exclusive bits and bobs over on Kofi, too, so it won’t just be me panhandling. Pop over have a look…
It was a delight to welcome back Sarah Moorhead to the Bestseller Experiment podcast this week. There’s a moment early on when she talks about creating great characters and how the ‘grit in the oyster makes the pearl’. I think the same can be said about Sarah who found herself in the perfect storm of her debut being launched in lockdown at the same time as she was dropped by her agent and publisher. There are few authors who could bounce back from that, and Sarah has done it brilliantly with her new novel The Treatment. Get inspired and have a listen/watch below and if you want more like that, there’s an extended version for podcast supporters where Sarah answers listener questions on resilience, self-belief, plotting, structure, why learning to write is like learning to drive and much more! You can get access to that and hundreds of hours of extra material by becoming a Chart Topper supporter of the podcast here.
I had a great time speaking to Chris Deacy on the KMTV Kent Film Club show about the four films that mean the most to (that week at least… ask me again now and it might be four different films!)
Can you guess what they are? There’s a slight spoiler in the blog’s pic…
Mark Stay Writes 