As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If the books are selling, the money will follow.
The business model - where books can be returned, and where a 50% sell-through is considered acceptable - is archaic and wasteful. Writers get small royalties, little say in how their books are marketed and sold, and simple things like cover and title approval are unheard of unless you're a huge bestseller.
One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.
I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.
I'm not a great shopper but I do buy a lot of books. I'm the publishers' friend - I buy a hundred books a year and read four.
I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.
I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea.
I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.
Why I have had such a huge career and why I have sold over four million books, is that people can do what I share with them to do.
I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth.