Book publishing deals are often announced in arcane terms, and even when the numbers are revealed, they can feel predictable: celebrity memoirs sell for millions of dollars, while mere mortals scrape by from contract to contract. But science fiction author John Scalzi has pulled off a feat: he made a book deal seem like important news. He and his publisher Tor announced that for US$3.4 million, Scalzi would write 13 books over the next 10 years. The contract sets a precedent for other sci-fi authors to use as a negotiating point, and it also gives him room to breathe. He talks to
I [went to Tor] and said I wanted a long-term deal. It wasn't the other way around. It is a big commitment. One of the nice things about Tor and the relationship we've had so far is … I've basically shown up at their door and said, "Hey, I've written a book!" And they've said, "Great, we'll take it!" So their interest in me has been more about me doing what interests me as opposed to trying to force me to do one particular thing or another.
One of the things we're clear about, when I showed them the list of "things I'm thinking about and how I would do them over the course of a decade", is that the future is unknown. So if, for example, one of the books I am imagining as a stand-alone becomes super-successful, then we can say, "Let's continue on that", and use one of those contracts to cover a series. Or there's a book in the contract that I know I'm probably not going to do, I will replace that with something else.
When I finished writing , I wrote a novella called , an oral history of the disease that is part of the world of . I had spent so much time world-building and building this disease and how it worked that I wanted to show it to people. But there was no place in the book to do it.
