All negotiations are psychological. You can’t really get around it. The ideal is for everyone to walk away happy. They achieve this by exaggerating their expectations and then compromising.
If I’m expecting to get say $100,000 for a book and they offer $100,000, I should be happy, right? Wrong. The opening offer is always just that—the start of a journey. I know there is a very good chance they will go up, and they know it too. If I took that amount, I would walk away feeling like I could have gotten more if I had only bothered to ask. Conversely, if they offer $100,000 and I take it, they are going to walk away feeling disgruntled, figuring that I accepted it so quickly that they probably could have offered less.
Let’s walk through this.
A publisher calls with an offer. The offer is $75,000. Now, I know that this is an opening offer and there is more there. I suspect that their real number is $100,000.
From my end, I know that my real number is also $100,000. So do I come back asking for 100K? NO! If I want 100K, I have to ask for more. So I ask for $125,000. Now maybe they’ll come back with the 100K. They probably will. But I have to be prepared for anything. Let’s say they come back with $85,000. What would I do? I would sigh and express my disappointment. I would tell them that the author is going to be disappointed. They may go up again, or they may not. If they don’t, that gives me leverage to push for all kinds of other things—retaining audio and foreign rights, a refusal of joint accounting if there is more than one book, better royalties on various editions, bestseller or performance bonuses, and a host of other things. I would ask for all those things no matter what, but if I don’t get the money I wanted, they become stronger pieces of leverage.
That, in a nutshell, is how it works. But that is just the nutshell. There’s a lot more to it. I didn’t even mention competition, which changes the landscape considerably. I’ll write about that another time. This time, I’m just explaining the bare basics. I should always ask for more than I expect to get. They should always offer less than they expect to pay. That way we will meet in the middle and everyone walks away happy.
It may seem elaborate, but without that dance, we will never know for sure. A good negotiation is a win-win.
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