Mark Taylor, president of Tyndale House Publishers, has urged Christian publishing houses to resist the temptation to "make unrealistically large advance royalty commitments to authors."

In an article for the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s (ECPA) September E-Link newsletter for members, since quoted at other Web sites, Taylor wrote that competition among publishers "sometimes hurts all of us."

The scenario is played out when an agent pitches a publisher with a proposal for a can't-miss book, which has yet to be written, by a well-known Christian author, he said. The agent then lets the publisher know that other houses are competing for the deal, which requires a sizable advance.

"So we get the deal," Taylor wrote. "We pay the advance. The manuscript comes in. We begin to wonder why we paid so much for this average manuscript. ... And at the end of the day we take a huge write-off. If we're lucky, the book earns a net contribution to overheads. But in most of these scenarios, the book generates a loss even apart from overheads."

Taylor said he believes that "the antidote is to be willing to push back from the table. If an agent is asking for an advance that feels too high, it probably is too high, and we should push away from the table. Of course we'll lose some deals we really wanted, but that's nothing new. And in the end, we will be more successful at reducing our write-offs of advance royalties."