After perusing this forum (I'm new as of tonight) I saw a link to Choice of Games. They take submissions for Interactive Fiction/Choose Your Own Adventure Games which is something that's always intrigued me. I'm just curious if anybody has experience in this area? Specefically with this company? How did it go? Also, if accepted there's 2 payment plans 10% royalty and larger advance or 25% royalty and smaller advance... this is getting ahead of myself, but after seeing that it made me wonder what the better option would actually be. Thoughts?
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've concluded that, for me, the second option is better - smaller advance, higher royalties. I'm in this for the long run, and hope to put out a couple of novels a year. If someone enjoys a book, what do they do? They find that author's other books and buy them. That means your sales will grow steadily over time, and you'll be getting 25% of each sale rather than 10%. For authors who only have one book in them, or will be putting new books out infrequently, I would go with the first option. Many (most?) debut authors don't earn out their advance, so it's the best figure they'll ever see from publishing. Sales are likely to dip severely soon after release, and then trickle in very slowly. This is just my opinion and based on an average book release. Of course you might become a massive bestseller with book #1 and kick yourself for accepting a piddling advance and 10%. It's a betting game.
Hmm, that's certainly true... but what about for games like this I wonder? The games roughly sell for $3.99 and after a bit of research, I've seen they have a pretty solid following with several games being downloaded 50,000 to over 100,000 times. Doing the math, the higher advance wins in every scenario once you reach 15,000 downloads. But I didn't think it would be getting that many at all. I thought this was kind of a small company so the $10,000 + 10% seemer safer. It's hard to safe though, because those downloads could be for free versions as well. Anyways, thanks for the input. An actual print book I'm with you: take the higher royalty every time. You never know what could happen; like you said you could become a best seller OR your next book could become a best seller making that first one you took 10% on skyrocket in sales.
I have written two of them for a joke/entertainment website called tickld.com. I didn't get paid for it or anything. It was just something I did for fun and it was received positively. I love playing those games, but writing them is a pain the butt for a pantser like me.