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As the June 1st release of The Secret Queen draws near, interest in The Empyrical Tales series is growing.

Here is a brand new review of Book I: The Fourth Queen from The Reader's Roundtable.

You can, on twitter. @AuthorMark - https://twitter.com/#!/AuthorMark

I want to be followed, except for that one guy that is literally following me. Stop it. Seriously, stop.

Hopefully folks in Mount Dora and Central Florida can stop by and see me! I love hearing from readers!

I will be signing my latest release, Book III of The Empyrical Tales: The Secret Queen, and I will have a few surprises.

First stop, Barrel of Books and Games in downtown Mount Dora. Today (June 2) from 4pm to 6pm, come check out this amazing store. They have a huge selection of new and used books. Plus, their collectibles are amazing. They have everything from Angry Birds to Big Bang Theory Bobbleheads to Star Wars. AT 144 W 5th Ave in Downtown Mt. Dora about 45 minutes from Orlando.

On June 9th, I will be at HighFive Frozen Yogurt in the Loch Leven Landing shopping center. This one is for a good cause. Both the author and HighFive will be donating a portion of the proceeds to our local elementary school PTO. I will be there from 1pm to 4pm. I want to see somebody come challenge the HighFive Titan! The store is at 18977 US Hwy 441, in between Five Guys Burgers and Publix.

This is only the first wave. I am working on events with some author friends and at least one of the public libraries. If you can't make it in person, I recently updated my website where you can order autographed copies at a new, special price - www.MillerWords.com

For all you Kindle readers, I have the privilege of being one of the first to use Kindlegraph Live! Kindlegraph.com is a site where authors can personalize autographs for their digital readers. With KG Live, when you see me at an event, you can buy one of my eBooks on your eReader or smart phone. Then I can send you an autograph. All you need is an email address, and it doesn't even have to be a Kindle address.

Keep following my blog or follow on Facebook.com/EmpyricalTales to stay informed of the latest appearances.

As requested, I’m going to start a contract workshop. Now and then I’ll do a post explaining some (probably not all) contract terms that you might want to be aware of. And what they mean. Since this is our first day of class I want to break you in easy and begin with the advance. While most of you should know what an advance is, I’m often surprised by how few know what it really means.

An advance is NOT what you are getting paid for your work. It’s not like working a job and getting paid $100,000 a year. In other words, it’s not at all intended to reflect your “value.” An advance is just that, it’s an advance against future earnings. Think of it this way: if you went to work and your boss knew you were having hard times and offered to give you a $10,000 advance on your salary, he’s not saying you’re worth only $10,000 to him. No, he’s saying that he has faith that you’ll complete the work you need to complete for him, successfully, and he’ll gladly dock your future pay to help you out. That’s an advance.

With most publishers an advance usually reflects your book’s earning potential the first year it’s on sale, less costs to the publisher. What does that mean? Traditionally when publishers run those elusive numbers they try to figure in how many copies a book will sell it’s first year in print, then they try to figure out how much it’s going to cost them to make that book—design the cover, pay for paper, printing, and shipping costs—and then they will figure out how much you might make on the book based on your royalty percentage. And that’s your advance. It’s your share of the book’s profit its first year in print. Of course the publisher (and you) hopes you far exceed that number and that first royalty statement blows the advance out of the water.

Advances are usually paid out in segments. Ideally it’s half the payment on signing of the contract and half the payment upon delivery and acceptance of the manuscript. The key word there is "acceptance." Just because you delivered the book on May 2 doesn’t mean your payment is put through on May 3. No, your payment will be put through when your editor has finally had time to read the book, write a revision letter, received your revisions and approved your revisions (in other words, found time to read your book again). Sometimes (ideally) you can get a time frame written in on when acceptance needs to happen by. Oftentimes, you cannot.

Nowadays, though, the ideal is changing. It seems that more and more publishers are dividing payments into thirds, or more. Partial payment on signing, partial on delivery and acceptance, sometimes partial on the delivery and acceptance of proposals for any other books, and the dreaded partial payment upon publication. I hate that. Authors hate it. Agents hate it and publishers love it. It’s becoming standard now at most houses, so complain all you want, you’re not getting out of it, no matter how small your advance is.

My advice on how to handle a really small advance? Negotiate the hell out of it. And if that doesn’t work, prove them wrong. Sell so many copies of that first book that they will have to pay you a ton on the next.

Jessica

Below Evan Schnittman shares his personal opinions on royalties and advances. This isn’t Oxford University Press’s official stance - but represents just one of the many opinions floating around our office on this very tricky subject. We hope that by sharing his views an open dialog can be initiated.

In his blog post Royalties Macmillan CEO Richard Charkin, posits that trade publishers and authors/agents would be well served if the standard for paying authors switched from a percentage of retail price to a percentage of gross earnings. He writes, “How about agreeing new equitable royalty rates based on real money not a notional recommended retail price?

Charkin also points out that, “The percentage is linked to a price which applies in only a minority of cases. It doesn’t apply to all sales overseas; it doesn’t apply to nearly all sales made in supermarkets, Internet bookshops and many bookshop chains.” In other words, paying on the percentage of a price that isn’t applicable to the majority of income isn’t logical or easy – which may lead to wildly confusing royalty statements.

As expected, within hours a series of rebuttals hit the comments field by individuals and groups rejecting Charkin’s notion as folly; stating the view that the retail price is the only thing that is transparent on publishers’ royalty statements, which are notoriously mysterious and murky at best.

While the debate will continue, it misses a far more important problem. (more…)

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We have the mouse, we have the whale, and now we have clean air! According to a recent Yahoo! article, Orlando took fourth place in the list of US cities with the cleanest air. Oh yeah! O-town rules! Listen, I've got no swampland, but for a small fee, I will send you a vial of our fresh air. You cannot get this stuff anywhere else. (Well, maybe three other places. If you live in those three other places, I am not talking about you.) Hurry now, supplies may be limited.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favourite books. This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors). For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Rupert Thomson is a British novelist born in 1955. He is the author of eight novels including Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Awards and by World Book Day for The Book to Talk About 2008. His next book is a memoir, due out in 2010. You can read the first chapter here.

There are some books that cast a spell over you. They stay with you long after you have turned the last page, making your life feel richer and more magical. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is one of those books. I have known about it for some time – it was first published almost thirty years ago – but only got around to reading it this year, perhaps because Faber have just published a new paperback edition. For once, you can judge a book by its cover. The image of a single-track railway viaduct disappearing into the mist in a heavily wooded landscape does perfect justice to the poetic, haunting quality of Robinson’s prose. The novel is the tale of two sisters growing up in the care – if ‘care’ is the right word – of their disturbed aunt Sylvie, the sister of their dead mother, in the tiny, isolated town of Fingerbone in the far north-west of the United States. The narrator is the younger of the two sisters, Ruth, and she inhabits that eerie and yet utterly convincing space between the everyday and the extraordinary, demonstrating a child’s ability to adapt to anything, no matter how strange. And this novel is definitely strange: Sylvie makes her nieces eat their supper in the dark, and she sleeps on top of the covers with her shoes under her pillow. Though Housekeeping is, at one level, an investigation of madness, and the mystery of madness, and although its themes are loneliness, abandonment, and that infinitely human attempt, especially where children are involved, to make sense of the world in which they have found themselves, the writing is so beautiful, so subtle, and so wise that the book manages to be both heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Another book that has definitely cast a spell over me is 0 Comments on Holiday Book Bonanza ‘09: Rupert Thomson as of 1/1/1900