OK, But WHY The Hell Did Milo Yiannopoulos Get a $250,000 Book Deal?

Here’s what Simon & Schuster has to say for itself.

When word came out about alt-right poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos’s $250,000 book deal at the end of 2016, I explained how many such deals come together. But why is Threshold, the conservative imprint at Simon & Schuster, willing to throw that much money at a shitstirrer like Milo? Particularly when it’s true that many employees at S&S probably are less than thrilled about the arrangement?

The answer is simple: The “corporate viewpoint” is that they think there’s a good chance a book-like object with Milo Yiannopoulos’s name on it will make a ton of money. So let’s take a look at what makes them think that.

1. If you follow the book publishing industry, particularly if you want to be a published writer one day, you hear a lot about “platform” and why you should have one, the bigger the better. Basically, “platform” is just a shorter way of saying public visibility and potential audience. In Milo’s case, Threshold (or any other publisher that was pitched a book-like object with Milo’s name on it) would consider the fact that, among other things, he’s got a regular gig at Breitbart News, that he occasionally appears on cable news, and that he’s already got a good sideline on the college lecture circuit. It’s true that he’s been kicked off Twitter, but he’s still got more than 1,000,000 fans on Facebook, along with 129,000 followers on Instagram—and his groupies still talk about him on Twitter all the time, anyway. All in all, setting aside what the little twerp actually stands for, a reasonably decent platform, from a strictly corporate viewpoint.
2. Publishers rely on comparative sales figures, or “comps,” to make decisions on just about every book deal, but they’re especially relevant to book deals involving public figures like Milo. Threshold has some experience publishing right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, so they can look up those sales numbers pretty easily, and they can also use Nielsen Bookscan to get a rough idea of how effectively other publishers are able to peddle people like Ann Coulter or Greg Gutfeld. From that, they can start to make ballpark estimates about how many copies of Milo’s book-like object they might be able to foist on the public.
3. So, what does a $250,000 advance tell us about S&S’s expectations for Milo’s potential sales? The math I’m about to do here is extremely back of the envelope, so please bear with me. The book-like object, which has been given the title Dangerous, is already listed on Amazon with a hardcover sticker price of $26, and an ebook price of $13.99. Now, for just about every book deal, the royalties on hardcover sales are 10% of the suggested retail price for the first 5,000 copies sold, then 12.5% for the next 5,000 copies sold, and 15% for all subsequent hardcover sales. With those numbers, Milo could earn out his advance selling roughly 67,000 hardcovers—ambitious, but not impossible.
4. And, of course, those aren’t the only numbers. Standard ebook royalties are currently at 25% of the amount received*, rather than the suggested retail price. Let’s assume neither S&S nor the major online bookstores decides to run a sale on Dangerous, and it sells at $13.99. Each ebook sold, then, earns Milo just under $3.50** in royalties—and with his audience, he’s probably gonna sell a good number of ebooks, and even if the price does drop, it’s still going to bring down the number of hardcover copies S&S would need to sell for the advance to earn out. PLUS, that 25% royalty rate also applies to the amount received for digital audio downloads, like, for example, from Audible.com—and Milo’s audience will probably go for that to some degree as well. (Then there’s the audio CDs, which if I remember correctly are assigned a 10% royalty; the CD of Dangerous is currently listed at $17.99.)
5. PLUS, publishers will often consider not just the hardcover sales, but the first year’s worth of paperback sales, as they figure out how much money to offer for a book. There’s no trade paperback of Dangerous listed yet, but let’s say it’ll cost $16, with a 7.5% royalty on each copy sold.

And here’s a late twist: We’ve been assuming all along that the $250,000 figure cited is just a straight-up advance, split into three payments: 1/3 when Milo and Threshold’s publisher, Louise Burke, signed the contract; 1/3 when Milo delivered a manuscript that Threshold deemed acceptable to publish, and the final 1/3 due shortly after March 14, 2017, when the book comes out. (A publisher would probably try to split the payments out into fourths, saving the last bit for the publication of the trade paperback, but let’s assume that Milo’s agent rejected that idea.)

That might not be how the deal is configured, though. Threshold could have offered Milo significantly less than the reported $250,000 as an initial advance, with bonus advance payments at certain sales milestones. For example—and I’m completely making these numbers up—a publisher might offer someone $50,000 as an initial advance, and then say, “If the book sells 10,000 hardcover copies, we’ll send you another $50,000 advance.” Throw in enough achievement milestones and bonus payments, and pretty soon you’re looking at $250,000.

(Why did I say $50,000 to start? Remember the hardcover royalty rate. The royalties on the first 10,000 hardcover copies would be just shy of $30,000—but it would only take 5,300 or so ebook sales (at full price) to make up the difference. And 10,000 hardcover sales and 5,300 ebook sales seems like a reasonable estimate for Milo.)

However the contract between Milo and S&S is configured, though, it all comes down to this: Simon & Schuster is betting that there are roughly 100,000 people in America who are sufficiently interested in Milo’s neofascist rhetoric to buy a book-like object, an ebook, or an audiobook full of it. Beyond that, as long as he isn’t actually calling for people to be rounded up and sent to the death camps, and he doesn’t write anything about other people that leaves S&S liable to a lawsuit, they aren’t particularly concerned with what’s in the book-like object—nor would any other publisher at that level. Nor are they much concerned about any potential boycott.

And that’s why Milo Yiannopoulos was able to get a $250,000 book deal.

*Originally, I’d written “actual price” there, but as a commenter on Facebook was kind enough to remind me, it’s more accurately the amount received for the digital unit. The reason that’s more accurate is because…

**…digital vendors take their commission before passing the proceeds on to the publisher, so as a followup commenter on Facebook pointed out, each digital unit at $13.99 would net an author closer to a $2.45 royalty.