1/ So, this is going to be a long thread about furry publishing, engendered by someone going off on how furry writers are being taken advantage of by publishers who pay poorly and the Furry Writers' Guild is a cabal and so on. You know what? Let's examine that. Strap in. #noxp
2/ There are about a half-dozen furry small press publishers, FurPlanet being the biggest. They pay authors in one of two ways: novels get royalties and short stories are paid a flat rate, and the short story rate for furry fiction is what people complain about.
3/ Angry Furry Author said "industry standard is about 6¢ a word"; actually, the Science Fiction Writers of America defines the pro rate for short stories as 8¢/word. Now, there's only one furry short story *magazine* still "in print" (it's web only) that I know of: Zooscape.
4/ Zooscape actually pays 8¢/word, with payments capped at $80 (so really up to 8¢/word). Other furry publishers do anthologies, but pay flat rates like magazines, rather than royalty shares. (Put a pin in that.) So! Let's say you want to do a furry anthology and pay pro rates.
5/ You've bought 120,000 words: that's $9600. Add another $400 for the cover art, and let's pay the editor a half-cent a word for, you know, editing, another $600. Total: $10,600. (Yikes.) Let's price out printing with Ingram Lightning Source, the printer FP and others use.
6/ Call it a 256-page 5.5″×8.5″ paperback, color cover, 50# white paper; we'll print in batches of 100. That's $4.88 a book. So if we sell it at $19.95, our gross is $15.07. Our break-even point, exclusive of anything but creator payment and production costs, is 704 copies.
7/ So: how much do you think furry anthologies sell? Ten thousand copies? Two thousand? One thousand? Oh, sweetie. This is a *small* market. It's not uncommon for an anthology to sell around 100 copies in its lifetime. Hitting 300 would be a wild, earth-shattering success.
8/ And THAT fact drives furry short story rates, folks. Even going to 2¢/word and cutting the editor's pay in half doesn't break even until 200 copies. And, again, we're not taking into account shipping, tax, travel costs, dealer's tables, advertising, and so on.
9/ This is also why furry publishers don't pay royalties for anthologies. In fact, FurPlanet and some other furry publishers have novel royalty rates which are FAR HIGHER than the industry norm. FP pays authors 50% of net: in our pricing above, that would be $7.54/book.
10/ A typical trade paperback contract from a real publisher (you know, the ones who aren't screwing authors like furry publishers?) pays about 7.5% of gross; that would be $1.50/book. At FP's rates, dividing that $7.54/book up between, say, 15 authors, plus the editor?
11/ The authors might make more, but they might not! And to go over 1¢/word, we're again requiring uncommonly good sales numbers by furry standards. It's just not worth the extra record-keeping the publisher would be doing…for free. *record scratch* Wait, what?
12/ I can't speak for every furry publisher everywhere, but I *know* the people at FurPlanet and Sofawolf, and know a couple others a little bit. And folks, they don't pay themselves. It's not just that their publishing companies are side jobs, it's that they're labors of love.
13/ And this is what pisses me off with this "publishers are taking advantage of you poor starving artists." FurPlanet is not Random House. They're not Marvel. They are paying out way, way, WAY more than they're keeping. The truth is that anthologies are just a bad business.
14/ This isn't a furry-specific thing; novels sell more for *all* publishers. And while, with very few exceptions, furry novels sell way less than non-furry ones, our authors get several times more per unit sale. Let me repeat that: most of our publishers actually pay BETTER.
15/ I doubt Angry Furry Author knew any of this, and that's fine. Most people don't! But when people tried to tell them about this, it just made them angrier. And that's not so fine. Shouting at people is super fun, but get your damn facts straight first. /end
