Even a very modest advance won't help if your book didn't sell for beans.
There'll still be production costs, distribution costs, and that basic marketing and promotion that real publishers do for all their books no matter how small. There'll also be Contribution to Overhead, which is your book's fractional share of the cost of running the publishing house. If your book doesn't earn enough to cover those, you're still in the red no matter how tiny your advance.
Some years back, so long ago that alg (http://alg.livejournal.com/) was a cute little cartoon-watching moppet, there was grumbling about the very low advances being paid by one of the big trade houses.
As the authors and agents pointed out, if said publishing house honestly thought the book was only going to sell enough copies to earn out one of these pitiful advances, there was no way the book was going to cover its basic costs, and so they ought not be publishing it. But since they were publishing it, they obviously believed it would sell quite a few more copies than that -- and consequently they should have been offering higher advances.
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There'll still be production costs, distribution costs, and that basic marketing and promotion that real publishers do for all their books no matter how small. There'll also be Contribution to Overhead, which is your book's fractional share of the cost of running the publishing house. If your book doesn't earn enough to cover those, you're still in the red no matter how tiny your advance.
Some years back, so long ago that alg (http://alg.livejournal.com/) was a cute little cartoon-watching moppet, there was grumbling about the very low advances being paid by one of the big trade houses.
As the authors and agents pointed out, if said publishing house honestly thought the book was only going to sell enough copies to earn out one of these pitiful advances, there was no way the book was going to cover its basic costs, and so they ought not be publishing it. But since they were publishing it, they obviously believed it would sell quite a few more copies than that -- and consequently they should have been offering higher advances.