Last Call II

Why Prince of Havoc was my last BattleTech® novel.

For years there have been people who had circulated the rumor that whichever BattleTech® novel had come out most recently from me would be my last. These rumors have not been true in the past, but now, like a broken clock which is right twice a day, they are correct. The rumormongers should not pat themselves on the back, however, because until 19 May 2000 they were wrong, and there was no indication prior to that date that would have allowed them to make their conclusions. They were guessing and finally got it right.

This essay is meant to explain what happened just so any stories about it will be accurate. There is no one simple reason why I stopped writing Btech novels. What follows are the key points.

How Writers Are Paid

There are some basics about the business of writing that you need to know, and I apologize if this is tedious material. Authors, by and large, get royalties for their work. A royalty is usually calculated as a percentage of the cover price of the book. For example, with Prince of Havoc, my contract calls for me to make 4% of the cover price for each copy sold. It’s a $6 book in the US, so I make 24¢ per copy of the book. Royalties will run the gamut from 1% to as much as 15%, with the high end figure going to writers of Stephen King’s stature. Most writers get 6-10% royalties for their novels, with books written in someone else’s universe, like Btech or Star Wars®, generating a lower royalty since the property owner (FASA or Lucasfilm) also gets a royalty.

When an author is offered a contract for a book, he gets an advance against royalties. The publisher, or property owner (depending upon how the deal is done), will pay the author money up front so he can write the book, and then as royalties are earned by the sale of the book, that advance will be paid off, and surplus royalties will paid to the author twice yearly. When royalties exceed the advances, a book is said to have earned out.

Monies from foreign editions for books are similarly split up, with the translator also often getting a royalty on the book. Those who have read my BattleTech® novels in German, for example, have been reading the excellent work of Reinhold Mai. For his hard work he certainly deserves a royalty.

In the case of Btech, FASA provides the editorial work on the books, so the monies the publishers pay to publish the books are sent to FASA, who subsequently splits them between themselves and the authors. These royalties are not bonuses, they are literally the money the author has earned for his work. They are held by FASA in trust, to be paid to us.

A Truncated History With FASA and Royalties

I first started working with FASA on Btech novels in the summer of 1987, writing on the Warrior trilogy. FASA is a game company, and “game company” is pretty much synonymous with a company that is chronically underfunded and always in a tight cashflow situation. FASA has always been slow to pay and throughout my history with them has owed me money. When I needed money, I’d call and see what they could send. Back in the early days, when I had no health insurance, no house, no car payments, no IRA; getting $300 or $500 here and there was what I needed to get by.

This is not to say that FASA did not, at other times, get me some money and, for a long time, were diligent in getting me the advance money for books (without which they would not have gotten the books). In 1994, however, this situation changed because my circumstances changed. In 1994 I got my first Star Wars® contract and that provided enough of a cushion that I wasn’t having the cash shortages that made money from FASA a necessity for survival.

To FASA’s credit, it must be noted, they did offer to pay me advances for the reprints of the Kerensky books, and the new novels I’d done for them, despite their having cash flow problems. I happened to know, however, that there were other writers in their stable to whom they owed money, and that these guys had families and kids. Since I didn’t need the money, I repeatedly directed FASA to pay it to these other folks.

In 1996, when I needed money for the down-payment on a house, FASA did come up with $6300 very quickly for me, but aside from that payment, I got nothing from them between 1994 and 1999. By January of 1999, FASA’s own incomplete accounting of what they owed me totaled just shy $90,000.00. In fact, this total did not take into account foreign royalty payments that would have put the total over $100,000.00. With the sale of FASA Interactive to Microsoft, FASA did get a huge influx of cash and did wipe out the $90,000.00 debt they owed me.

By the summer of 1999, no royalties had been paid for book sales in the latter half of 1998. At that time I asked and was sent an accounting that showed FASA owed me about $6,000.00. I was told a check request had been sent in to accounting for payment. None was forthcoming; nor was there any word of explanation. Since FASA and Decypher were negotiating a buy-out I assumed payment was waiting for the deal to go through.

That deal collapsed. Still no payment, and no new royalty statements to reflect sales in the first half of 1999.

In early 2000 I got royalty statements from FASA that, because of a computer glitch, indicated that none of my books had sold a single copy in the whole of 2000. I pointed out to FASA that I refused to believe this. At the same time I pointed out that the royalty statements also did not cover foreign editions of books – copies of which I had sitting on my shelves.

FASA did an internal audit of accounts and uncovered a lot of foreign payments that had never been accounted to me, and presented a statement sheet showing that they now owed me $18,200.00; though that accounting omitted royalties for three books. Subsequent discussions with FASA about the royalty accounting program they use revealed that I’d actually been being underpaid on novels because of a change in the deal between FASA and ROC concerning how much FASA was being paid.

To my best estimate, FASA currently owes me in excess of $20,000.00. Not only is this a significant amount of money, but it’s my money. I appreciate the fact that it’s being used to cover payroll of folks I consider friends, but my payroll needs to be covered, too.

The Contract for Tide of Tyrants

Tide of Tyrants was the working title for the next book I was supposed to write for FASA. The Prince of Havoc contract offered me a 4% royalty and a $7500.00 advance. The Tide contract offered me a 3% royalty and an advance of $5500.00. This disturbed me for two reasons. First, I was very directly being told that despite having had five novels hit the New York Times Bestseller list, my work was some how worth less to FASA now than it had been before.

Second, the pay rate on the contract has to be looked at in context of what I get for work set in my own worlds. In my last original contract I had an 8% royalty, with a $30,000.00 advance for each of three books. Even at 4% and $7500.00 FASA was getting me at a bargain rate. The reduction of rates and payments was insulting and really rather silly, in light of the fact that they weren’t paying me anyway.

FASA’s editor and I did discuss and negotiate some alternative contract adjustments that would allow me to continue working on Btech, but these had to be taken to her bosses. Despite email sent to FASA subsequent to these negotiations to get a response, I heard nothing. Without a contract I wasn’t going do the work.

The lack of payment and an unsatisfactory contract, neither of these things was insurmountable. I’d worked that way with FASA for years. It did worry me that the slow-pay cycle had started again, while I saw no white-knight Microsoft deal looming to bring my accounts to balance. Even so, this too could have been worked around, but in combination with other factors, just made it apparent to me that it was time to cut my losses.

The ROC connection

The FASA book lines at ROC are in a tough position. They were acquired under one editor, who subsequently left. His assistant was promoted to take his place, and he left. His assistant was promoted to take his place and she left. A new editor was hired and handed a publishing schedule that included these novels.

I’m not going to impart motives to ROC’s editors, but orphaned projects – and FASA novels have clearly been through a series of foster editors there – are often resented by new editors. Editors like to craft their line, have the work they publish reflect their taste. When they have only 3 titles or 5 titles a month in which to make available science fiction and fantasy, having one of those titles eaten up by game related fiction – no matter how good – just doesn’t sit well.

I think a study of the covers of BattleTech® novels clearly shows how little ROC cares about these books. We started with great covers. I have two Boris covers, for heaven sake, then we have very cartoony covers for the Kerensky reprints and the cover of Malicious Intent is enough to gag a maggot. On Grave Covenant, in the catalog ROC used to solicit stores to buy they book, the cover they have shown there even misspells my name.

Perhaps you might have wondered why the Warrior Trilogy reprints are $7 books, when everything else is a $6 book? Funny you should ask that question. A courtesy call from ROC’s editor explained to me that they had a problem with the reprint books. ROC’s contract with FASA called for books of a specific length – at that time it must have been 100,000 words or so. She told me that Riposte was fine, but that both En Garde and Coupé were too long and needed to be cut.

I explained to her that if Riposte was okay, then En Garde was fine, because En Garde was 5,000 words shorter than Riposte. She made a note to send that one back for retypesetting that would bring it down into the requisite number of pages (though, looking at a final copy, this was clearly never done). She still noted that Coupé was too long, which was probably right, since it came in around 110,000, as I recall.

I told her that I didn’t write to be cut and that other than a paragraph in the book that I didn’t write, there wasn’t anything to cut. She said that they’d run any cuts by me. I said, “And what if I am disinclined to allow cuts?” She said the contract with FASA called for books of a certain length, and I said it sounded as if, to me, the problem was between FASA and ROC, not with me.

Then I noted that she knew as well as I did that if they cut a single word, folks on the net would post the cuts to newsgroups. I pointed out to her that I’d just sold, for charity, a mint set of the original Warrior books through an Internet auction, and that it had brought in $275.00. I said, “Look, why don’t you just put a splash on the cover that notes these books are the 10th anniversary editions and charge a buck more for them? People want the books enough that they will pay.” (Yes, I was being a bit cavalier with your money there, but I figured a buck more for the full book was better than some frankenstein thing you got more cheaply.)

Take a look at your Warrior books: there’s a splash on the cover and a buck more on the price. And I happen to have in my files copies of the solicitation cover ROC used, without a splash and with a $5.99 price tag.

The reason I brought up this bit about the Warrior books was to point out that they had a word limit. In subsequent contracts, that word limit got dropped to 80,000 words. The only novel I’ve written even close to that limit was Prince of Havoc, and it still came in over the limit. In discussions about Tide of Tyrants, in which I asked FASA to ask ROC for a dispensation on that limit for me, all I got in response was having the book pushed later into the schedule so I’d be able to bring it in at 80,000 words.

Why is this a problem?

An artificial constraint like that will make me turn out a bad book. I’ve never brought a book in at the word limit. I, Jedi was supposed to be 125,000 words, but I turned in a 166,000 word manuscript. When my editor told my agent he’d find stuff to cut, I shot him an email saying, “Use a smaller typeface.” Once a Hero was supposed to be 120,000 thousand words. In the middle of it, when I’d hit 80,000 words and wasn’t quite halfway through my outline, I called my editor and asked, “Was that 120 a hard limit, or an advisory?” That puppy came in at 177,000 words. All of my Btech novels have run long, and some of them significantly like Assumption of Risk and Bred For War.

Why do these books run long? Because the story demands it. There are characters and themes that need to be explored. A good book takes on a life of its own, it has energy that has to flow, and you have to let it do that. I’m lucky enough that I don’t put in extraneous material. Why? Because I tie it all back in, making it very tight. I make the stuff relevant, so it’s not there to be cut. That’s my job, and I do it proudly. I even think I’m good at it.

I don’t want to be writing a book where I decide, “Gosh, I could use a Victor and Omi scene right here,” then realize that I can’t do it because it will take me over the word count. I refuse to work that way because I know it will turn out a bad book.

Given a choice between doing no books and bad books, I’ll do no books.

ROC’s Availability of Books

I find it rather shortsighted of ROC to reprint the Warrior books, and the Kerensky books, then to let Natural Selection, Assumption of Risk, and Bred for War go out of print. My novels are the spine novels. They are the core history novels. They are the structure upon which all the other books hang. Letting them go out of print is just stupid, especially when my Star Wars® novels are bringing readers over into the BattleTech® line. It makes no sense what so ever.

Unless you want a line to die.

The Loyalty Issue

I have never been stinting in expressing my gratitude to FASA for having given me my start. In working with them I have learned a great deal. Literally, without them I’d not be here in the position I am. Not only did they help train me to be a good writer, but Assumption of Risk was one of the novels sent for Lucasfilm to read as I was being considered for the X-wing® novels. Without FASA and BattleTech®, whatever my career might have been would have been very different.

I have long maintained that I would do a book a year for FASA for as long as they wanted me to. I felt I owed them that. They have been very good to me. I consider the folks there good friends, not only people with whom I work, but people with whom I socialize as well. To disengage from them is not easy at all.

And BattleTech®, boy, I’ve been working in that universe since 1987, and helping to shape the history and direction since that point. I introduced and characterized virtually all of the main characters who now exist there – many of them are wholly my creations. I’ve made some of them grow up and I’ve killed many others. All of these characters I know better than I know my friends. In some ways I guess I now have an inkling of what Adam must have felt like being driven from the Garden of Eden. I’ve poured a lot of brainsweat and creativity and personal energy into that universe, coming up with the twists and turns that have kept readers on the edges of their seats for over a decade.

I have well over a million words in those novels.

Loyalty doesn’t just run one way, however; and it isn’t just something between FASA and me. Do I think a failure to keep accounting up is a sign of disrespect? Do I think that a failure to attend to contract negotiations in a timely manner is a sign of disrespect? Do I think that not paying me money owed to me is a sign of disrespect? How can I not think these things?

Yes, they are signs of disrespect, but not malicious. They’re the by-product of some serious disorganization.

As I noted above, the loyalty thing isn’t just FASA/Stackpole. I have to be loyal to my readers. I know there are a number of folks who will feel betrayed by my leaving the line. They might even feel deeply hurt. I don’t like that idea. It pains me to think about it.

The simple fact of the matter is, however, that whatever violence I’m doing to their psyches by quitting; greater still would be the violence I would be doing to them by turning out bad books. I don’t ever want to write bad books. I would hate like all getout to have my worst novel be a BattleTech® novel.

Another factor in the loyalty equation is loyalty to myself. For some Btech is an escape, for others it’s a hobby and for still others it’s a religion. For me it’s a little bit of all of those things; but it’s also a business. I’m not at a point in my life where I can afford to work for free, or for a promise of payment in the future. I also can’t work with artificial constraints that concern packaging and the price of paper and the number of books you can jam in a box and ship to book stores. Books may be inventory items, but stories are not. I tell stories, not churn out SKUs.

At the same time these marketing and business considerations do have their impact on what I do. The publishing industry is notoriously volatile, and technology and the Internet are changing it more quickly than tradition publishers can possibly grasp. For a child born today, the very idea of going to a bookstore and browsing the stacks will be nothing more than one of those quaint stories dad tells about the olden days.

After I’d composed my letter to FASA resigning from the line, I got an insight that was chilling in its clarity: my future was not in BattleTech®. I’d known this for years, but hadn’t grasped it. With the way publishing is changing, it would take bigger projects than Btech to get me into a position where I would survive. Projects like The DragonCrown War or a mystery novel I’m working on; these would be the things that put me into a position where I could continue to grow as a writer, continue to be a storyteller, and actually prosper while I was doing it.

Please be aware that while I know my future is not in BattleTech®, that does not mean BattleTech® may not be in my future. One learns, pretty early on, that you never say never in this business. Walking away from Btech doesn’t mean I hate it or FASA. I’m not repudiating this part of my life; it’s just not a thread I’m continuing with right now.

Please do not take this essay as a call for letters or email to FASA. I don’t want that. I don’t want email or letters to ROC. I don’t want a firestorm in chatrooms or newsgroups. That’s not why I sat down to write this essay. I know that if I’d called for such things, the response would have been staggering and, for that, I thank you.

And I thank those who have already written. Your letters were most kind.

I have to hope that those of you are who are angry or sad will forgive me. I hope those who are willing to read more than just BattleTech® will continue to follow my other work. And I hope that maybe, out there, some of you will feel inspired enough to sit down, work on your own stories, and become authors so good that folks will forget I ever wrote BattleTech® stories.

I’d like to thank you all for having been along on this ride. It’s been great fun, and might well be fun again. For now, though, it’s over, and time for me, however reluctantly, to move on.