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Got a little letter:
Dear Moonrat,
I'm a recently published author. I just got my first-ever royalty statement from my agent, and it turns out my book hasn't earned out yet. I was surprised, because I heard a couple months ago that the book went into a second printing only three weeks after publication. I did some math for myself, and I don't understand how the book couldn't have earned out if the first print run sold out. Can you explain? Should I be worried something fishy is going on?
XXX
First of all, my dear, you should be very happy about the second printing--that means that the performance of your book exceeded expectation (as expectation was established after sell-in).
But to answer your question, no, you shouldn't be worried about fishiness. There are many reasons a book goes back to press, and all of them have something to do with stock availability (while only some have to do with sell-through).
Two things to remember:
1) Publishers only expect (on average) a 60% sell-through (in the US--UK and Commonwealth are smarter about their stocking and tend to not get as many returns, although exactly how much smarter I'm not sure). However, almost 100% of the first printing is shipped out to stores. The other 40% is returned after 2 months or so (or the laydown period).
2) Books always sell more strongly in certain markets than others. If you write a book about cow farming, it is simply not going to sell as strongly in urban areas as it does in rural, even if it becomes a national bestseller. So certain vendors will return in a higher portion than others, depending on your particular book.
So.
You say your second printing was only three weeks after the book came out--to me that says that the book was selling successfully in various accounts, who then proceeded to run out. But they ran out so close to the initial pub date, returns hadn't come in from other accounts yet, meaning there was no available stock to send to the placed that needed it. Your publisher needed to reprint in order to provide stock to the vendors that were selling it strongly.
Another reason your publisher may have to reprint without selling out is a surprise order. This may come from a book club sale--some book clubs buy finished copies instead of printing their own. It may also come from an unusual account. Some of the box stores like Walmart or Costco come in with last-minute very large orders, and your publisher may have already printed without enough run-off to accommodate these large orders.
This means that a second--or even a third, or even a fourth--printing doesn't necessarily indicate that the first printing sold out. What's a better indicator of whether your first printing has sold out is how much time has elapsed since your book came out combined with the number of reprints. After two months, accounts that were not selling your book will have returned it, and those returned copies will be recycled to accounts that are selling. So if you go back to press after that two-month mark, for example, that's probably a very good indicator that your first printing is gonesville (in a good way).
Does this help?
During a conversation the other day, a friend said he'd like to read more of my work. He's never purchased one of my books, and announced that he would search online sites to find the cheapest used copy. Can't quite describe how it made me feel. I don't mind people buying used books. I buy used books when I cannot afford the new edition, or it is not available. But I was immensely surprised. My top selling book, at full retail, costs less than a fast-food lunch. The exchange set my thoughts to churning. About writing. About the talent and skill it requires to be a mass market author. About the efforts and creativity involved in presenting a book that causes most readers to want the story to continue. And about that particular friend. Perhaps his comment was ignorance. I wondered how many people realize that a written product is someone's livelihood. When I write a book, and it begins to sell, I receive modest royalties for each new copy sold. The more the book is discounted by a seller, the smaller my royalty. In fact, some discount stores sell the book so cheaply, I receive no royalty at all. That is okay. It's part of a book contract. But royalties are my bread and butter. They allow me to pay bills, stay warm in the winter, buy hats to shade me from summer sun, and occasionally give away copies to fans during holidays or special events. Royalties help me take care of abandoned cats. Royalties help me help others. Without royalties, I could not write books, and I certainly would never be able to bring back popular characters. When people cannot afford my books, I always recommend they ask their library to purchase them. Libraries exist for the patron, and what the patron wants to read is what the library is obligated to buy. And I receive royalties, albeit very small, for each copy a library adds to their collection. It is a simple food chain.
I've thought a lot about this. I would never ask a person to sell me their goods and services at such a discount that they weren't breaking even. I wonder if people consider this. Whether books or music, the same is true. Most artists (author or musician) have day jobs, or have had day jobs. We aren't in the top ten (which is an artificial place created by the publisher/book store industry, not actual popularity, but that's another story). We don't support ourselves entirely off our product royalty. And we don't guest on Oprah. But we are part of the wheel that keeps art alive. We create the stuff that people toss in their carry-on to make flights and travel more enjoyable. We bring you thrills and mysteries, suspenses and dramas, in a tiny package you can take anywhere. Without the small royalty from each item sold new, we are out of business.
Next time you read a book, I hope it changes you, entertains you, brings out emotions you need to experience. I hope you realize the only way that authors can create another book for your enjoyment is through royalty compensation. And, if you really want a surprise, shop at the comparison sites. Most of the time you will discover brand new copies of what you are looking for are available, along with a free shipping coupon, for less than the used book (which never has a free shipping coupon).
Got me a letter.
Dear Moonrat,
I'm a newly published author receiving an inaugural royalty statement, and I was hoping you could help me understand it (I'm too sheepish to ask my busy agent). Everyone knows we want out books to earn out, but until now, I thought "earning out" meant making a profit for my publisher. But my royalty statement made me think otherwise. Let's say hypothetically my advance was $10,000. If my royalty statement says I've earned $7,000 toward that back so far, is it possible I've made a profit for my publisher?
Thanks,
XXX
Ooo, earning out is SO interesting. Mathses!! What we all thought we were getting away from by writing. It's nice to flex those brain muscles sometimes, isn't it? [Streeeetch.]
So the answer to your question, my dear, is yes, it IS possible you've made a profit for your publisher--although neither you nor I will ever know. The truth is, some of the hugest bestsellers only cost their publishers money, and some tiny sellers--even some that never earn out their advances--turn a net profit. So... this is a bit of a mathematical mess. Or you might call it mystique. But I'll start by fleshing out those two ideas (earn out and profit) separately, so maybe you can make an educated guess about how happy your publisher is with you.
Earn OutThe important thing to remember about earn out is that it is related only to the advance you were paid vis a vis the numbers of copies you sell. This is the more straightforward of the two concepts. Alas.
So in almost every publishing contract, the author is offered an advance--that's short for "advance against royalties." Basically, your publisher is *loaning* you the specified sum of money under the stated assumption that the royalties your book will earn will eventually pay the publisher back.
But remember a couple things:
1) You won't see any additional money until your royalties (or rights sales) have paid back the publisher, so don't sit around specifically waiting for a royalty check to come immediately upon publication
2) In most cases, especially if you have an agent and/or the situation was competitive, the publisher offered you the absolute most they could see safely earning out (and in some cases, they threw caution to the wind and went above that). This means that many advances never earn out. And while yes, earning out your advance is a great target--it shows your publisher the investment in your book was worthwhile--don't kick yourself too hard if you don't earn out right away.
3) The advance is a loan in the sense only that you pay yourself back with royalties; no one can ever actually bill you for the balance, unless you did something in breach of your contract (for example, never delivered your manuscript).
4) Everyone is on the same sliding scale here--if your advance was relatively high, you have to sell relatively more books to earn out. A bestselling thriller and a tiny paperback collection of haiku may equally likely earn out or not earn out.
Ok, so think of royalties as YOUR profit. Is this pretty clear? Let me know if there are any questions.
Profit for PublisherThis is a little more complicated, because the math is soft and mystical like a fluffy down pillow.
For a publisher, there are two kinds of profit:
1) Gross (the retail cash value of the books we sell)
2) Net (the dollar value we make after all the costs--production, overhead, marketing, etc--have been deducted)
We use either number when it suits us better.
In a vacuum, if *hypothetically* your book earned out immediately and not a penny was spent on marketing, you would know, safely, that you had made your publisher a profit. Everyone else can only guess.
How do I know this? Your royalties on a hardcover are almost certainly 10% (ex
STATUS: Interestingly enough, I’ve got more film interest for one of my clients. This will be the fourth of fifth deal we’ve done in this year alone. Go film!
What’s playing on the iPod right now? HOLDING BACK THE YEARS by Simply Red
Just this month I received a royalty statement that only had the following info on it:
Total copies in print
Copies printed during period
Copies shipped during period
Total copies paid during the reporting period [note: because royalties are based on net—not retail price—which is sometimes true for smaller independent houses)
Total copies returned during the reporting period
Net amount earned during period.
That’s it. That’s all that is on the statement.
So right off, we have some legwork we are going to have to do in order to review this statement. Lots of info missing.
Not to mention, I’m going to have to create a whole separate excel spreadsheet so I can track earn-out. On this royalty statement, the advance paid isn’t listed. So it’s going to be up to the agency to track it so we know when the title has earned out because that info isn’t on the statement.
Also a problem? All sales are lumped together in “total copies paid during the reporting period.” That means there is no break-down of format (as in hardcover, trade paperback, electronic). We didn’t grant translation, audio, or other rights so that won’t be an issue (as we’ll sell separately) but I want to know how many of those sales are eBooks. This statement won’t remotely tell me that. And let’s not even get started about high discount, special sales, export, etc.
Do you see what else is missing? No mention of reserves held. Now maybe this publisher isn’t holding any but I won’t know that unless I ask. Some publishers do hold a reserve but don’t list that info on the statement. If that’s the case, we’ll have to make a note to always ask separately.
And the list goes on. For me, less is not more.
STATUS: Mondays are usual frantic but today was quiet. I’ll take it. I’ve got two submissions that need to go out by Friday.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? THE CHAIN by Fleetwood Mac
I began with Random House’s statement because it has a lot of detail, but even RH doesn’t have sales by accounts on their statements.
So what is that? It’s the breakdown of sales for your book via the different accounts such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, Indies, book fairs (such as Scholastic) etc.
And the answer is no, royalty statements do not contain that information. However, I’ve certainly requested that information when tracking sales for a certain titles. Editors have also volunteered giving that information when a title is doing particular well and we want to chart where the majority of the sales are coming from. Or, equally important, getting on an account who hasn’t bought in for a title—especially when that book is doing well and it’s in their best interest to carry the title.
As hard as it is to believe (especially looking back now), it took Hyperion more than a year to get Borders to seriously buy-in Ally Carter’s YA novel I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have To Kill You. I know, in retrospect, seems pretty short-sighted of them to take so long. But Borders only had so much room for new YA titles and so Hyperion had to hound them about how good the sales numbers were to make them pay attention to this debut title.
Obviously now they are staunch supporters of the Gallagher Girls series but the break-down showed us what we needed to do.
We actually also use the breakdowns to see which Independent bookstores are really supporting the series and guess where Ally went on her book tour? A very good use of the breakdowns I’d say.
STATUS: Statements and more statements.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? POOR UNFORTUNATE SOULS by Little Mermaid soundtrack.
When talking about royalty statement, first off you need to know that not all statements from different houses are created equal.
Today I’m going to begin by talking about the Random House Statements. They are my favorite. The statements are at least four pages long (sometimes longer depending on formats sold) and always contain all the information I need to evaluate if the statement is accurate.
Now this is not to suggest that every other publishing house has terrible statements. That’s not true. They just sometimes don’t contain all the info needed and then we have to request the extra info we need. All the houses, in general, are great at giving you the reconciliation to print info on request—but you have to request it. With RH, it’s all there.
Love that. (Tomorrow I’ll explain reconciliation to print, what it means, and why it’s important to have it when evaluating the accuracy of royalty statements.)
But for now, back to the Random House statement.
Page 1:
For RH, this is the royalty summary sheet and also highlights the ending royalty period. Then the page looks something like this (depending on what rights were sold to the publisher and how many formats have been exploited—by format I mean hardcover, paperback, audio etc.)
There would be four columns for the formats listed:
Current Copies, Current Earnings, Cumulative Copies, Cumulative Earnings
Hardcover
Trade paperback
Mass market
Audio
Electronic book
Then of course the above columns would be filled with numbers. The rest of the remaining sheets in the statement are to show detail for this summary sheet so you can see sales broken down by the individual ISBN numbers for the various formats.
So the next page or pages will have six columns:
Market, Royalty Rate or external market, royalty per Unit or net receipts, current copies, cumulative copies, cumulative earnings.
Then of course all these columns would be filled it with numbers.
But the next page is my favorite at RH—the Print Summary (this is all the reconciliation to print info that’s so necessary to review statements). Three columns for all this info.
Description, Current Copies, Cumulative Copies
Shipments
Returns
Reserves released
Reserves held
No Charge
Total reportable sales
Printings
Returns to stock
Scrapped from stock
Adjustments
Internal Summarization
Inventory
Total Shipments
Then we have the Sales Summary by Market with four columns:
Market, Gross Copies, Return copies, Net copies
US
Canada
Export
Spcl disct
No Charge
Total
Then we have Rate of Movement by Month with three columns
Month, Shipments, Returns
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
As agents, we stay on top of print runs done, how many copies in print, what is Bookscan reporting. Does the info we have match up to what the statement is telling us? If not, we are going to have a lot of questions.
In order to grab the columns, I was looking at a statement where only North American rights were sold to the publisher. (In other words, translation was not given to the publisher and the agency kept them to sell separately.) If the publisher has World rights, then that detail will also show on the royalty statement.
That’s all I’ve got time for today. More tomorrow!
STATUS: Cross-eyed from reviewing statements all day.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? OUT OF AFRICA by John Barry
So I have to admit that it’s been a while since I did some nuts and bolts type blog entries. Personally, I find them a little tedious as I LIVE the nuts and bolts of publishing every day. But I don’t want to forget that a good majority of my blog readers have not been published yet and may actually be endlessly fascinated by some nuts and bolts blog entries.
Either that or I’ll bore y’all to tears. Both are equally possible.
Since I’ve been yammering away about royalty statements all week, let’s dig in to this topic. I’ll have to start off a little light because it’s just now occurring to me that this might make a couple of interesting posts and I’m typing this from home (rather than from work where I would actually be looking at a royalty statement).
Obviously I can’t share specifics about any given statement (as that is client confidential) but I can certainly tell you about what is generally on royalty statements (or is missing) and what information agents end up digging for.
So flex your fingers and kick off your shoes; we are diving back into some Agenting 101 entries that I’ll need to bookmark on the sidebar.
Because it’s a little late in the day (and I really need to finish up a client manuscript read), let’s start with something simple.
The accounting period.
This is a lovely and archaic system that publishing houses have in place despite all our digital technology. I imagine that at one time, this sort of accounting period made sense. In today’s world, it’s a relic and I wish it was like a dinosaur and would become extinct.
The traditional NYC Publishing houses do reporting in 6-month increments. For ease of explaining, imagine a royalty period that begins January 1, 2009 and ends on June 30, 2009.
Six months.
Then the publishing houses, and this cracks me up, get four months (oh you read that right—4 months) to generate and mail that royalty statement (with a check if monies are owed). Why four months is necessary in this day and age is rather a mystery. Or maybe not a mystery. Publishing houses want to hold on to your money for as long as possible. (As an aside, I love Holt Uncensored and Pat Holt’s idea of revolutionizing the royalty system by making online royalty accounting available for authors). Brilliant—but then there would be no reason for taking four months to mail you the statements.
But I digress. So if you have a royalty accounting period that ends on June 30, 2009, the author is going to have a royalty reporting period of April/October (October for the June-ending statement and April for the December-ending statement).
All information on the statement will be for sales (in all formats) from that six-month period. So when you get the statement, you're already months behind in knowing current numbers.
Got that?
What do you guys think of this? A new Twilight-esque cover gets Emily Bronte onto the UK bestseller list. (via Sarah Weinman)
Click here to see a truly perfect photo Maud Newton took on her walk home. For any of those spoilsports who keep shouting that reading is dead.
Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden talks about ebooks and the future of publishing (focusing on sff). Much of what he says is stuff you guys have already read 1,500 times, since we're internet babies here. But I'd like to highlight a particular statement of his:
io9: Does it make a difference to you if an author has an online reputation? Does that go into your decisions to acquire books?
PNH: Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.
So cheers to everybody here, since you're here because you're working on developing an online platform.
Here, MJ Rose presents her idea for revolutionizing how authors get paid, vis a vis how much (time and money) authors are expected to spend on their own promotion. Her major points are that authors not have to "earn out" the upfront money publishers pay as an advance but then which authors are expected to spend on their own promotion--wouldn't it be more honest if promotional money fell into a different category, something that didn't need to be earned out? (Back to my idea for marketing agreements instead of/alongside advances.) Also, she suggests that royalty percentages be higher if authors are expected to be their own advocates.
Yeah, I work in a house, and yeah, I don't imagine in the mainstream publishing industry much like this is going to change soon, but--yeah, I agree with you, MJ.
That's it for now. Thoughts?
I was talking to a client recently about royalties, and with her statement somewhere between the publisher’s office and mine she was wondering what she could reasonably expect that statement (and hopefully check) to look like. This is a common question not just among first-time authors, but from many of my more established clients as well, and I hate to say it but my answer is always the same. I have no idea. Sure, like the author, I always have hopes and make guesses based on what information the publisher has given me in terms of numbers and sub-rights sales, but since I’m rarely right I tend not to share those hunches with my clients.
The truth is that there is no way to really know what a royalty statement looks like until it arrives and I suspect this is true of most businesses. I remember talking to a friend who owns a retail shop and he was telling me how helpful computer inventories have been for his store. Even though he’s the one behind the counter 90% of the time he’s always amazed by which products are really his biggest sellers and which aren’t. I think this is the case with any business. We all have blinders on when it comes to a product we are really excited about, and until we see the actual facts and figures before us it’s difficult to separate our feelings from what’s really working and what isn’t.
What’s difficult for me is that all too frequently the author, upon receiving that very first statement, is disappointed. I don’t think it’s the numbers, because frequently the number of copies sold is very good, but it’s the check. There are a lot of things that take away from that first royalty check and certainly that can diminish the monetary numbers pretty quickly.
First, and I think most frequently forgotten, is the deduction for advance payments. I know we’ve discussed this before, but as a reminder an advance is not what you are being paid for the book, it is an advance against all future earnings (your royalties). In other words, the bigger the advance check(s), the bigger the deductions from your royalties. Let’s play this simple. Let’s say you received a $5,000 advance*** for your book. Before you earn any royalty money that advance needs to be earned out at your royalty rate, so if your book is selling for $10 and your royalty rate is 7.5%, you are earning roughly 75 cents a book. Which means you need to earn out $5,000 at 75 cents per book. If my calculations are correct you need to sell roughly 6,666 copies before your royalty earnings start to kick in.
However, those earnings might not appear in check form just yet because we also have reserves to consider. Reserves are those monies (or is that money) held back by the publisher in anticipation of any potential returns from bookstores. Remember, one of the biggest problems in this business is that books are returnable. Unlike other retail stores who buy and commit to a product, bookstores have the luxury of returning books for credit if they don’t sell, and authors only make money on books that actually sell to readers, not bookstores. Typically you can expect your publisher to hold back roughly 20% of the number of copies “sold” (that really means the number of copies sent to bookstores) in reserves from your first check. With each statement you receive, the percentage held in reserves should diminish until eventually the publisher is no longer holding anything. So, if your book “sold” 10,000 copies to bookstores, roughly 2,000 are held in reserves. That means that if you are earning a royalty rate of 7.5% on a $10 book, your potential income for this statement has been cut by $15,000, leaving you roughly with $7,500. Remember that $5,000 advance? You’ll need to subtract that too, which means now your check is reading about $2,500 and not the $15,000 you were hoping for based on the numbers your editor reported to you.
Of course this isn’t necessarily everything when it comes to both earnings and deductions, however it’s the bulk of what you’ll see on the statement, and these two things make the biggest impact on that royalty check.
***please note that the numbers here don’t accurately reflect actual publishing numbers. They are used simply because they are easy for me to calculate.
Jessica
STATUS: I’m working on two different contracts this afternoon. So necessary, so time consuming, and always delightful when it concludes.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? P.Y.T. (PRETTY YOUNG THING) by Michael Jackson
(of course!)
It’s no longer okay for Publishers to say to me in a negotiation: “we have a policy that we won’t do that.”
Especially when I’m talking about royalty structures and for this rant, the royalty structure for a trade paperback.
Just to be clear, there are three main types of print formats for books. There is hardcover--which is of a certain size and has a hard cover covered by a dusk jacket. There is trade paperback—which is usually the same size as a hardcover but with, funny enough, a soft cover and no jacket. Then there is mass market—which is the smaller soft cover usually associated with “pocket” size (although some of them are tomes that wouldn’t fit in a back pocket or otherwise).
Today I want to rant about trade paperback royalty structures. For twenty years, the “standard” royalty percentage authors earn from trade pb sales from publishing houses has been 7.5% flat.
Why is that? Why is the trade paperback royalty lower than the mass market version where “standard” starts at 8% and usually escalates to 10% (typically around 150,000 copies)?
Trade pb has a higher price point for point-of-sale so that’s not the reason. Yes, it’s more expensive to print than a mass but it’s not as expensive as a hardcover. And why is there no escalation?
Especially now when publishing is rapidly changing and there is a movement away from doing hardcover publication and doing original trade paperbacks instead—even for debut literary authors.
So why in the world are we stuck with an outdated royalty structure that doesn’t match how publishing is currently operating today?
And it’s not enough to tell me, “well, we’ve never done an escalation for a trade paperback royalty. It’s just not done here at our house.”
Just because it hasn’t been done in the past doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it in the here and now. Publishing is not the same as it was 20 years ago so why are the royalty structures?
Very good question I think.
I’m out. TGIF!
What's the story with earning out/royalties?
I have often heard that only 1 in 5 novels earns out its advance. I've always wondered about this figure, because if publishers were paying too much for 80% of their books, they should presumably know that and start offering lower advances across the board. But, at the same time, I read that "very, very few books make much on royalties" (this is from your Contracts 101: More on Advances post), so I wonder if maybe it's true after all that most books either don't earn out or earn 50 cents over the advance.
What's going on here? Are publishers overpaying for their books? Or is the answer that the publisher can make a profit even if the author doesn't earn out his advance, so the fact that the *author* makes no royalties doesn't mean the *publisher* is doing poorly? What should an author realistically expect (or hope for), on average, on the royalties front?
I have heard all sorts of crazy figures when it comes to the number of books that earn out. The truth, though, is that I’ve never, in all my years of publishing, actually seen any facts. That means that I can’t tell you for sure what the statistics are on books that earn out. I haven’t even gone through the titles I’ve sold over the years to determine how those figures might compare. I do know that a good number of our books are earning or have earned royalties at some point, even if some of those books haven’t made much over $100 or so. At least they earn something, right?
While we’ve all seen million-dollar deals posted and wonder how those books will ever earn out, I think the truth is that most of the time, for most of the books, publishers are fairly conservative with their money and I’m sure many of my published readers will agree that “overpaying” hardly seems to be the problem. I think the real problem is that every single book is a risk. If a publisher is buying a book by an established author they already have sales figures to look at and can base estimates on those—estimates of how many books will sell and how much a book will earn. With debut authors, however, and there are a lot of debut authors every year, those estimates are really more of a guessing game based on how other similar books have done in the market and the publisher’s enthusiasm for the project. Sometimes those estimates are just plain wrong and other times the market changes so dramatically (think our recent recession) from the time a book is sold to the time it is published that outside forces change the estimated success of the book.
I can’t say what an author can realistically expect or hope for from royalties. That depends on what you’re writing, how much of an advance you were paid, and what the market is doing. I think the smart thing for an author to do is worry about selling books and not making royalties, at least at first, and to not expect that the royalties you earn will pay much more than a utility bill or two. It’s always nicer to be surprised with a bigger than expected check than it is with a smaller check.
When you sell your book, ask your agent if she has any idea what you might expect. Knowing the inside workings of a contract can help in making that estimation. Also keep in mind that royalties usually include subsidiary rights sales from foreign rights to book club rights, serial rights, etc., and the more of those your agent or publisher sells on your behalf the higher your “royalty” check will be. There are a lot of variables into how royalties work and how they’re paid out that I haven’t even touched on here, but if you work at writing really good books, know your market, and do some publicity, I would hope that most of you will see some additional money down the line.
Jessica
By: Ben Zimmer,
on 8/2/2007
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Erin McKean, who is OUP’s chief consulting editor for American dictionaries when she’s not busy being “America’s lexicographical sweetheart,” filled in this past Sunday for a vacationing William Safire, devoting the New York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column to a subject that should be familiar to readers of this column: the Oxford English Corpus and the fascinating things that it tells us about our changing language. (more…)
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WHY ARE YOU WORKING??????
Ooooh - this is a great post! Makes total sense. And yes, why are you working? But thanks for the post, anyway.
Second printing. That sounds wonderful.
Is this how it works for both hardback and paperback? I thought that paperbacks had their covers stripped and therefore couldn't be resold. (And why are you working?)
WHY are you working?
Jeez-o-peets, people, some of us do work between Christmas and New Year's. :-/
Great post. I love reading this kind of stuff. Lydia = publishing nerd. But I'm in good company. ;)
Well, if I know moonrat, at least if she is working she's close by a good place to get cookies and/or brownies.
This is a fantastic post. Growing up with an illustrator mom, I witnessed firsthand how the royalties and all this sell-through business could affect how many Christmas presents we received, and now I see that she wasn't just lying about it all. :-) I am going to send this on to her!
I'm working. Why are we reading? We love moonrat's work. Thanks, Simon.
"Jeez-o-peets, people, some of us do work between Christmas and New Year's."
Of course, Lydia. It's just that some of us feel that MoonmouseDear deserves a break.
we love your blog postings, so well add your rss or news feed for them, Thanks and please post us and leave a comment back and well link to you. Thanks Jen college intern online.
hahaha well, to be fair, i didn't look back at the comments all day. and i spent the evening playing internet scrabble. the very definition of vacation ;)
Hooray for internet games and relaxing! :)
Seriously, though, thanks for this post. I didn't know you could go into a 2nd printing w/o selling through, so this is very helpful!
this is a great post!
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Very informative to hear the details.
I knew a lot of that, but had no idea that most accounts gave you only two months of shelf space and then started (finished?) sending back the stock.
Yikes. Two months? But it it's selling, even modestly, they will keep restocking, right? Or no? Is a copy or two a week or a month enough for them to restock?
Mine has luckily stayed in the chains since April, but I'm noticing that some are now out.
(If you go to Borders or BN.com and click to see if a local store has it, you can plug in any zip code, and it will show you a dozen stores or more, and whether each one has it. You can get a really quick feel on a handful of big cities in two minutes.)
Does that mean they will probably never restock?
Two other factors might be in play for the lack of earn out:
How close to the end of the royalty period was the pub date? If it was close (and, really, if it wasn't), I'm betting the publisher put a reserve against returns on the advance to cover the event of returns.
But, yes, second printing, good stuff! They wouldn't have done it if they were expecting major returns on the first printing, so kudos.
I'm sifting through my mail pile in Pleasantville this morning, and I find a letter from Will Hinton at Harper Eos saying that Year's Best SF 13 has just gone into a second printing. It is really great to get a letter from one's publisher that ends "Congratulations on your continued success!", especially in the current publishing environment.
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