Friday, August 31, 2007

If I Loved Math I Wouldn't Be A Writer

The subject of author royalties has been raised in a thought-provoking post well worth checking out. The comment trail is interesting as well, with varied thoughts on the subject.

I don’t feel I have much useful to add here. I have some confusion. Publishers never receive RRP, do they? I mean, standard is something like 50% of cover price is what booksellers pay for the book. (Yes, this varies, depending on distributor, publisher, who the bookseller is – major purchasers often scoring higher discounts than independents because they’re favoured by distributors because of their volume sales – all of which speaks to the issues the blog post is addressing.)

The only thing I can say is that in my limited experience the contracts often are so convoluted, I’ve had authors with two, three books to their name tell me they have no idea how many copies they’ve actually sold because their statements are impossible to make sense of.

I guess this blog post explains why that is.

You know, Harlequin has (or had - I'm not really up on this) some imprints where they didn't do royalties. If you have a book picked up for the line you just get $10,000. No muss, no fuss, no headaches and that’s about what I earned annually working in education. Shame I’m not a romantic. I wonder if I could fake it?

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