Samantha Warren’s Birthday Scavenger Hunt

Very nice lady and writer, Samantha Warren, has been hosting a blog scavenger hunt for the last couple days as part of a birthday celebration.  I’m rather flattered that she’s letting me participate.  🙂

One of her questions for today comes from me: What is the Net Present Value that I computed for 2016 through 2020 assuming sales decline by 10% after 2015 on a hypothetical successful series of books?

I’ll be nice and give a little hint, because that’s how I roll.  🙂  You’ll have to look back a ways to find it.  I was a bit perturbed over a discussion on Kindleboards about indie authors being approached by publishers and how to negotiate a contract with them.  The standard response was you gotta get an literary agent, because…well, because.  I cry BS on that one, because you don’t need a salesperson at that point.  You need a legal mind and a hard-nosed negotiator (spoken, a lawyer).  But one of the arguments used in favor of the agent need was the agent could get you a better advance (somehow), so I decided to explore how a writer can compute what an appropriate advance should be on his/her own, based on the writer’s indie sales history.  It’s not very hard to do.

Have fun finding the answer, and thanks for stopping by!