Calculating Advances and Other Fun Facts

Anna Genoese, an editor at Tor, has been doing a lot to inform us aspiring and business-unsavvy writers about the ins and outs of getting a book from accepted manuscript to your local bookstore shelves. Her latest post gest into the nitty-gritty of the costs of such an endeavor, including how publishers figure an advance. Get your math hats on and bust out those calculators, this post is thick with number crunching. But it's a great post that sheds some light on the black box of the business of publishing. It also gave me some ideas about how the seemingly normal connections I've established via a few writing endeavors (my crit group, etc) may help boost my sales on that grand day when such a thing will be more than hypothetical. Or at least I think it will.