The headline of today’s Times story about the new-model HarperCollins book unit that Hyperion founder Bob Miller is leaving the house he built to start up –“Book Unit To Skip Advances And Share Profits”– seems designed to provoke strong reactions. “As a writer, I’m very, very leery of this approach, especially as implemented here,” Paul Witcover writes on his blog. Well, right? What author or agent wants to gamble on profit-sharing? But actually, some authors and agents I talked to seemed fine with the idea.
The new unit, which I’m going to call “Unitled Bob Miller Project” or UBMP for short, plans to predicate its business model on some simple truths: publishers are routinely forced to overpay their name-brand authors in order to keep them, making it impossible for even bestsellers to earn out. And they also routinely overbid on debuts, doling out big advances to “unproven” authors whose sales rarely measure up to expectations. So eliminating advances in favor of a 50/50 profit split makes total sense, then — at least, it does for authors who are already known quantities. “The profit-sharing piece of it is interesting,” one editor mused. “Will he only be signing authors with an established track? Otherwise, why would an author forego an advance and bank on the never-predictable sales of their book?”
The answer is that Miller does only plan to sign up authors whose sales are a given. In the Times article, Miller’s new boss Jane Friedman cites Mitch Albom and Caroline Kennedy as models for the kind of author the UBMP will publish. And he’s told Publishers Marketplace that “short low-price hardcovers” are where the market lies.
Profit-sharing’s current poster boy, of course, is Stephen King. His latest deal with Simon&Schuster involved a low advance, compensated for by a more than 50% split of his books’ sales. For an established author, he says, accepting a whopping advance is tantamount to “taking out flop insurance,” which serves neither author nor publisher in the long run.
Other UBMP innovations include: no bookseller returns, maybe-free with hardcover purchase ebooks and audiobooks, and more serious attention paid to online marketing. The agents I spoke to were universally enthusiastic. “I actually think this is a worthy experiment and I think Bob Miller really gets the untapped potential of online marketing, direct internet sales and online market research,” one said. “I would be thrilled if as an industry we started putting serious money and brainpower into the online side of the business. As more and more book sales move online, we have to figure out how to target readers (particularly non-fiction readers) and the internet is much more efficient at doing that than the old bricks and mortar method of simply getting the books onto the front tables of bookstores in bulk.”
Another agent is more reserved, but still enthusiastic just because, well, it’s Bob!* “If it was anyone else, anywhere else, no way. (It’s actually similar to Vanguard Press’s business model) but it’s Bob Miller, which, as you know, means something. I’m not sure I’d want one of my clients to be the test case, but I suspect the whole endeavor could offer this endlessly ailing business a way forward.”
(Disclosure: I used to work at Hyperion, so naturally I am also a Bob fan.)