Let the dead rest?

This post is going talking a bit about Rogue One and will be veering a bit into spoiler territory but since it has now been out for a few weeks I’m assuming you’ve either seen it or aren’t interested in seeing it.

What I’m going to be talking about is the appearance of dead actors in new films, something that has become topical with the sad passing of Carrie Fisher. As well as appearing in 2015s The Force Awakens, Fisher had apparently signed up to appear in two more Star Wars films, I’ve heard that her filming for the next film was already done but according to media reports Disney – the owner of the franchise – is now in line to receive an insurance payout of perhaps $50 million. Which rather hints that she was due to have at least a reasonably significant presence in the third of this series. The question is will Disney write her character out or will Fisher appear anyway because recently we’ve seen there are options. Now those of you who have seen Rogue One will be aware that the film has seen the return of the character of a young Princess Leia and much more significantly Grand Moff Tarkin, as originally played by Peter Cushing. Since Cushing passed away more than twenty years ago and Fisher was no longer a teenager, these roles were fill by CGI ‘actors’, which has raised a few eyebrows.

Now in some respects Rogue One brings nothing new, in others it breaks very new ground. There is a long record of deceased actors appearing in new works via clever editing, smoke, mirrors and body doubles. If an actor dies during the course of a shoot – like say Oliver Reed during Gladiator – it is pretty reasonable that directors use what they have to fill in the blanks. Equally it doesn’t seem wrong reuse and modify clips of older work to do something new with an older actor/character combination – an example of this was a Doctor Who episode of a couple of years ago where with some careful editing the then current Companion was shown interacting with the Doctor’s various incarnations, the actors being in many cases being long dead.

Where Rogue One breaks new ground is with Grand Moff Tarkin, who supporting character with a significant speaking role. This is not old material being reused or a double being used to fill in few seconds of film, but instead new material wearing the mask of a diseased actor. Now in my opinion the digital Tarkin did not look entirely convincing but that’s just a question of technology and sooner or later we are going to get CGI character indistinguishable from flesh and blood. What will happen then. Will we see old favorites digitally rise from the grave to act again? In the case of Tarkin, I would imagine Cushing’s original contract allowed for his image to be used (pretty much the reason all those thousands of Star Wars toys could be produced) although I doubt anyone in the late seventies was thinking terms of digital actors.

I’d be really curious to know what the legalities of using someone’s appearance actually are. I know there have been court cases in regards merchandising, so I assume that if someone decided to make a new John Wayne film, agreement with his estate would have to be reached. As I write this the thought crosses my mind that I’ve been focused on actors and actresses but there are biopic films – there’s one on Jackie Kennedy this year – could movie studios choose to not to use an actor at all and instead have the image of the actual historical personage? Could we see digital actors that were never real people star in what are at least nominally live action films – an idea which know films have at least brushed against already.

The answer I suspect will, as if is so often the case boil down to this stuff:

Surprise!

Certain actors are inherently ‘bankable’, their appearance in a film guarantees a certain return. There is an entire secondary industry revolving around the private(ish) lives of celebrities. Would audiences be as attached to a collection ones and zeroes? Ultimately the entertainment industry will follow the money. If it makes sense on the profit and loss account it will happen. If it does not, then no matter how good the technology gets it will not.  In end it will be tastes of the majority that make the decision.

Problems of Self Publishing – Currency Exchange

At the start of this year I had hoped would putting out by now my next book; due to various changes in personal circumstances that basically isn’t going to happen. The amount of time I got to commit to all thing writing related took a hit and I decided to concentrate what little I got on the writing part of writing as opposed to the business part of writing, however with the benefit of hindsight that might have been for the best. As followers of this blog are no doubt aware I live in Dublin, Ireland, which is part of the Eurozone. What you might be less aware of, is that over half my book sales to date have been through Amazon.UK, which is priced and pays me in sterling. At the moment that’s not such a good thing.

Brexit

On the 23rd of June of this year Britain voted to leave the European Union, since then the Pound exchange rate against the Euro has done this:

And in October it has got especially exciting:

The source for these can be found HERE

At time of writing (morning of 12th October 2016) one pound sterling is worth one euro and eleven cents – less exchange costs. So let us crunch some very basic numbers.

My first book – The Nameless War – is currently for sale on Amazon.UK for £2.90 for the ebook version, so the breakdown is as follows:

£2.90 selling price, 30% of which goes to Amazon, leaving £2.03. Multiply this by 1.42 (£ to € rate on 19th Nov 2015) equals €2.88.

Do the same calculation again at today’s rate and:

£2.90 selling price, 30% of which goes to Amazon, leaving £2.03. Multiply this by today’s rate of 1.11 equals €2.25.

This is a drop of €0.63 or nearly 22%.

Now obviously this is a little bit artificial, it doesn’t include various fees, like bank fees and I don’t get to chose which day Amazon send payment for the month, so the arrival of funds in my account will probably not coincide with the absolute peak or trough of exchange movements. Also to complicate matters Amazon pays two months in arrears, I won’t see the money from a book sale today until the tail end of December but this example nonetheless gives a sense of the issue.

At the moment I personally can take a relatively calm view of this. My last book was published two years ago and while I am still getting sales in the UK, they are at a fairly low level so the reduction in the value of those sales is fairly modest. That however is for books that were released two and five years ago. In my experience the bulk of a new book’s sales are made in the first couple months, with an accompanying knock on to my other books. This means that payment comes in a few large lumps, rather than spread evenly over the course of the year. So while the reduction on say ten sales is only €6.3, on a thousand it is more than €600, which becomes harder to swallow. So if after months or years of writing those big paydays coincide with a slump in the source currencies value, then you are left to take the hit.

So what can I do?

The answer isn’t quite nothing but where I’m standing, the options are limited and all carry at least some downsides.

1. Sit on any planned new releases.

This is probably the simplest option. Keep your powder dry, wait out the fluctuation until at the very least things have stabilized. The downside of this is that your work isn’t earning if it is stuck in your desk draw. If you are with a publisher, contractually it might not even possible. If you are writing a series readers will not wait forever, they’ll either forget about you or get irritated, either way hard earned goodwill starts to drain away and with it your potential sales.

2. Peg the book’s price against a currency that is stable relative to your own.

This one is tricky and very dependent on the system you’re using. With Amazon self publishing it is possible to peg the price of book in other regions against the US$. Now Sterling is currently on the slide against the US$ so the very obvious downside of this is that the book’s price is going to start rising. In all likelihood some of the writers I would be competing with for sales are based in the UK, their price could remain static while mine rose. Their prices in other areas could fall or remain as is and they would receive more per sale when it got converted to their home currency – the upside of currency fluctuation. Either way the risk would be that you could be priced out.

3. Park the foreign currency.

While this one is even trickier. That means parking the foreign currency within that territory or in a foreign denominated account. Depending on regulations or cost this might be unworkable, either way this is delaying the inevitable, at some point you have to change it into the currency of the country you are in, especially if your writing income is you main income.

There are also other financial instruments for mitigating against foreign currency movements, but I don’t know enough about these to speak about and I suspect that many may not be suitable for relatively small amounts. The other thing I don’t claim knowledge or is what things were like back in the days before electronic self publishing, the answer probably depended on the contract between writer and publisher. Also in the old days books were not generally subject to global release. In the age of Amazon, a book can be available to anywhere on planet Earth with an internet connection and with that availability comes exposure to currency movements. If you are based inside the country where you make you main sales, then it is less of an issue but it is something that the modern writer needs to be aware or and ready for.

So any thoughts, comments or observations?

CORRECTION: A commenter points out I have failed to account for vat – value added tax – so my back of the envelope calculations in fact lean towards optimistic. Thank you and I will make the correction when I can – currently attending Octocon in Dublin.

Writing for a living

Over the weekend I attended a house warming barbeque and I got talking to cousin I haven’t spoken to in a while. They were telling me about an in-law who has recently moved back to Ireland and has yet to get a job and start supporting themselves. One of their alternatives to employment my cousin told me, was to instead write a book. I was not supportive. In fact I was even less supportive of the idea than my cousin is.

Hard information on how the average writer does in financial terms from their work is hard to come by. Based on the occasional article I’ve read and other anecdotal information, I believe this is where I fall on the old bell curve.

I published my first work in July of 2011 and since then I have sold a combined total of twenty seven and a half thousand copies. Of this twelve and a half thousand are the Nameless War, a little under eight thousand the Landfall Campaign, five and a half the Last Charge, with the balance covered by the Job Offer novella and the two tech manuals. What has this amount to financially? Well in three years after expenses and taxes I’ve made about the equivalent of one year of the take home pay from my day job. As a supplement, that’s really good. As an actual primary income, not so good.

In fact the situation is worse than that. The Last Charge was about my most efficient book; it took two years and about a thousand man hours to get it from the first word to the finished product. I have no idea how many man hours the Nameless War took but to say many, many thousands is probably no word of a lie. Of course all the expenses from living costs, editing, cover art, etc are all front loaded. You will have to pay these out months or years before you can hope to see a penny come back.

Okay but that’s self publishing, what about traditional publishing? I have never gone down the traditionally published road so what follows is deeply anecdotal.

Assuming you’re first time writer, based on what I’ve read, advances on a first book are likely at best single digit thousands, with little likelihood that there will be anything beyond that*. This is to be expected, there aren’t many lines of work out there where you immediately walk into the top job, you have to prove yourself and writing is no different. Also once again even with traditional publishing, that first book is going to have to be written before you approach a publisher, so you’re front loading the living costs while you write.

Does this mean I’m saying you shouldn’t even try? No, definitely not. What I am saying is that even you’re a really good writer with a compelling story to tell, writing is difficult way to earn money and if you get to the point where you earn minimum wage through writing, you are doing very well. Certainly for several years something else is going to have to meet the bills. It is worth remembering that even the boys and girls who’ve made it big in publishing were often several books in before they started to see major money.

So in conclusion writing as a means of earning a living. Possible? Yes. Easy? No. Fast? Definitely no.

 

 

* If any readers can offer better information I would certainly welcome hearing from you.

I can’t eat publicity

Something topical culled from the internet.

There’s been a lot of talk online about authors being asked or expected to do events for free, or virtually for free. So I figured I’d stick my oar in on this.

When I started out as an illustrator, I took crap jobs for crap money, because I figured it was the price of getting established. And it was. There was no back-up or support for illustrators, particularly in Ireland. You were on your own. I sometimes took even crapper money for good jobs, just to get those jobs to have in the portfolio. I don’t do that any more, because I’ve been at this malarky for a long time now, and I expect to be treated like a professional.

But one of the most valuable lessons I learned was that I had to sell myself as a tradesman. If you wanted my work, you had to pay me an hourly rate. If you wanted ideas, I would charge you for the amount of time I figured I could put into coming up with that idea, and what it was worth to you.

…

As I did when I was an illustrator, I took on a lot of badly paid events, and free stuff and daft stuff, because I considered these the price of learning the ropes, getting established and getting publicity for my books. Most authors – particularly children’s authors – start off the same way

…

And while events are an essential part of getting publicity, if we were to do it for just the publicity, there would be almost no full-time writers, and therefore no one available to do these events, and certainly to do them to the standard that people can expect today.Let’s say you run a festival, and you want a writer to do it for free – for the publicity. Let’s say they’re a typical mid-level, full-time author, so you’re confident you can get an audience for them: maybe fifty people. You could maybe get more in than that, but you don’t want to hire a bigger hall, in case you can’t fill it. Let’s be really generous – to keep the numbers simple – and say that the author gets one euro for every book that sells for ten euros (they often don’t) as a result of that session. If every single person in that audience bought a book, that author would get fifty quid for travelling to your event, and performing for an hour with skills and experience that take years to develop. Does that sound reasonable to you?

…

All the various people and organizations who build their businesses around books expect to get paid for the work they do, but it’s astonishing that writers, and to a lesser extent, illustrators, whose work is the foundation of these businesses, are expected to give their time for free, in return for royalties they may eventually earn after every other person involved in the sales chain – most of whom are employed full-time – has been paid first.Do you work for a company or organization? Would you be willing to travel to another town or county to work for free, in the hope that you might get paid a little more somewhere down the line in return for this work . . .

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And if you’re running a big, prestigious festival that can draw audiences because it has a powerful brand, and you think you can offer little or no fee on the basis that an author should be grateful they’ve been invited, then bear in mind we’re all talking to each other a lot more these days. Word gets around fast. And the problem with brands is that once a company’s brand becomes tainted, everything they do and everything they’re associated with becomes tainted too.

…

If you want people to bring their time and expertise to events you intend to hold, and you are counting on those people to attract audiences and make your events a success, you can’t expect them to come for free. We’re professionals. And professionals get paid.

The full post can be found here, I’ve met Oisin Mc Gann at a couple of the small conventions here in Dublin and he is an informative speaker.  Myself  I’ve never been asked to speak at event; since I am pretty small time and content to be an amateur writer this isn’t surprising. Still what I would take from Oisin is that a writer (or anyone creating with the aim to sell) has to grasp sooner or later is that it is a business. Sure not everything is about the pursuit of the mighty Dollar/Pound/Euro/Insert-Name- of-Reasonably-Hard-Currency-Here but unless independently wealthy, an average standard of living requires a certain amount of cold hard cash each year.

We can loop this back to what I said about linking to Amazon, that reaching out to a small geographically limited group is probably never going to pay its way even if the event is in the writers hometown and expenses are minimal. If further a-field then travel and accommodation are factored in so then the average writer will have to sell a significant number of books just to break-even on a single event. At the end of the day publicity might be nice but no one can pay next months credit card bill with it.