ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE… What You Sell…

What do you sell out of your magic bakery? Simple answer… NOTHING.

You never sell anything. Period.

When someone walks in and wants all rights to use one of your magic pies, you simply say no. You sell all rights, you lose your pie. It walks out the door with the buyer and you can do nothing with it.

And as I said last chapter, you wave your moral rights and basically the same thing happens. You lose control of your pie. You still have your copyright, but no control over what is done with it.

You make all your money in your magic bakery from licensing slices of your pie. And how many slices of any one pie can you license?  Thousands and thousands. I have not seen or found an upper limit on a magic pie. I will talk more about that in upcoming chapters.

But right now I want to bash a myth that so many writers have. Traditional publishers want your book (pie) to make money selling lots of copies of it. Snort… Maybe the biggest myth in all of publishing.

In court, under oath, a major officer in a major publishing corporation was forced to say how many books a regular book sold (not bestsellers, which was the focus of the trial.) He said over 80% of all books published by major publishers sell less than 70 copies. No one objected. No one, because anyone inside of publishing knows that is accurate.

Some even thought the number too high.

They hide this number with books shipped and returns and credits and discount sales in bulk and so on, but sadly no one really cares and authors are too blind to figure it out.

So you sell your magic pie novel for $10,000 “all rights” to a traditional publisher, and in the end it sells 70 copies, and the publisher holds onto your book for the life of the copyright (70 years past your death.). And they make a fortune on it. You never see that fortune. You got your 10 grand minus agent fees , and you are done and can forget that book. But the publisher makes a fortune by putting the magic pie as an asset on their accounting books.

They value the pie at say $250,000 because of all the possibilities of the magic licensing. So they spent maybe $25,000 in author fees and other overhead and publishing costs allocated to that book and have a quarter of a million asset. Not bad for them. But it gets better.

Then, because it is IP property they own, they can depreciate the asset for say 25 years. So for the next 25 years they get a $10,000 write off on that property per year.

And then, because in the States the special rules of depreciation of IP, they can just keep going after the 25 years for the life of the copyright at the same rate. Under depreciation rules in this country, your magic pie never reaches no value to the corporation until it drops into public domain.

See why with your little book (pie) they don’t care if they publish it or not? The magic pie is so valuable to the big corporations that own these publishing companies, they just keep churning uninformed writers through their mill.

Now in this new world of indie publishing, writers get to keep their own magic pies, actually draw money from the licensing, and grow value of their business with every new pie they create.

And by the way, if you get to the point where you are advanced enough, making enough, you also can set up a corporation that will depreciate your magic pie assets, even while they are earning money for you. For that level, you will need an attorney and an accountant who understand IP. But this chapter is the only time I will mention that in this book.

So no worries. Back to basics in the next chapter. But I just had to take a swing one more time at that myth that traditional publishers want to publish your book to sell a lot of copies. They would be happy if it did sell a ton of copies because then the value on their accounting books would be larger and they win even bigger. But past the lowly editors, no one really cares in traditional publishing.

So never, ever sell anything. Your magic bakery is a place of licenses.