How are the yak butter and the penguin omelettes this year?

I heard the polar bears got half and the kangaroos the rest, so no humans were able to report.

I know I'm going to be hearing them from vanity presses and self-publishing enthusiasts for years.

As a parenthetical note, is it childish of me to think that "adult
books division of the Walt Disney company" was an infelicitous choice
of words? Maybe its an age thing, but I remember when "adult books"
unambiguously meant SMUT. One would think they might have rephrased to avoid that.

One of the things highlighted by l'affaire Jayson Blair was that the mighty New York Times does not use fact checkers - it's entirely up to the individual reporters to get their facts straight.

I spit on your 15%.

Jane Yolen

Then I moved to the DC area, and discovered the Washington Post:
better than the NYT and with comics. It was no contest. I leaped and
never looked back.

I admit, I do peruse the Times online, mainly to see what the
"local" news is. They even mention my home town every once in a while.

Those Tibetan preyer mills have been working overtime, eh?

They wouldn't have needed to spend a penny to check this fact. The
New York Times Company has its own book publishing arm, so all they
needed to do was talk to the person in charge of their book operations,
located on the premises of the newspapers headquarters.

Comics are a plus. (Mutt & Jeff still around?) Anyway, why does
anybody still take the NYT seriously? aren't they the ones who
published Judith Whatshername's rahrah BS support for going to war in
Iraq?

As for this new re-invention attempt, the fact that they're talking
about a fifty-fifty split on profits raises enough danger signs to know
it's neither a power grab nor brave new initiative, but most likely
some sort of borderline legal scam.

I recommend Nick Davies _Flat Earth News_ for anybody still
harbouring illusions about the press. It's an insider account from a
veteran British journalist/editor that amongst other things exposes how
much this sort of thing happens.

How is not offering advances and not allowing bookstores to return
books any different when it's HarperCollins and not PublishAmerica?

I'm not seeing how an author who already can command an obscenely
large advance would agree to a contract under the terms of this new
imprint anyway. So it's the authors getting smaller advances, or not
yet selling at all, who are likely to be published there.

Which makes this look like another way of paying low-end writers
less, rather than of spending less on high-end writers as the article
tries to imply.

#7, Carrie V.: Yes, reserves against returns are confusing, and open
to abuse, but the basic principle seems fair: publishers shouldn't have
to pay royalties on sold books which then, through the miracle of
returnability, become magically unsold. So publishers hold back
royalties for a little while to make sure that shipped copies are actually sold copies.

Well, yes. Which is an excellent defense of the current system of
just paying a percentage of list price, regardless of the discount at
which the consumer purchased it.

Not sure I should be holding my breath on that...

... but there is one difference: accounting. In the early English
publishing industry, publishers didn't have the in-house expertise of
Twentieth Century Fox in creatively ensuring that there will be no (or
at least minimal) profits to share.* (Remember who owns Harper
Collins.) Neither did publishers have the industry "tradition" that
allows the publisher to hold money for 270 days with no penalty before
giving the author her miserly share; at least in theory, they paid up
every month. The six-month-plus-ninety-days-to-pay royalty cycle only
came into being around the time of the great battle between Sarjeant
and Macauley over extending the copyright term... in the 1830s.

"New." "Improved." And no surprise at all. [insert chorus here]

* Additional, disturbing note: A source inside the Newscorp empire
has indicated to me a preference for WFH for the new program.
Clarification today (or, rather, unclarification) made it murky whether
that means "contracts offered will assert WFH" or "we intend to acquire
works under a WFH basis." The difference is subtle linguistically, but
radical in practice and legally.

Want to observe revolutionary change in the way publishing is done?
Stop observing the publishing industry, and ignore related business
areas too, for a decade or so. Then come back, and if you're lucky
there will have been a revolution, but not of the kind you predicted if
you were so foolish as to predict what would happen ahead of time.

"...I am prepared to offer £50 for the name and address of a
literary agent who is capable of getting the better of a publisher. I
am widely acquainted with publishers and literary agents, and though I
have often met publishers who have got the better of literary agents, I
have never yet met a literary agent who has come out on top of a
publisher. Such a literary agent is badly wanted. I have been looking
for him for years.
I know a number of authors who would join me in enriching that literary
agent. The publishers are always talking about him. I seldom go into a
publisher's office but that literary agent has just left (gorged with
illicit gold). It irritates me that I cannot run across him. If i were
a publisher, he would have been in prison ere now. Briefly, the manner
in which certain prominent publishers, even clever ones, talk about
literary agents is silly." - Arnold Bennett, 1908

WFH = work for hire?

50% of *profits*? And who defines which expenses are written off before those profits?

I do detect a strong whiff of that ol' Internet snake oil about this
project -- that by selling mostly on the 'net, and selling a lot
directly to consumers, that magically things will be easier.

On the other hand, Miller is a major, incredibly respected figure,
and he presumably wouldn't jump ship from being the president of
Hyperion to reporting to Jane Friedman unless there was something solid
here.

I don't think this is either a wondrous new paradigm for all
publishing or a sneaky trick to steal from authors -- and I've seen
people saying both things.

On balance, it sounds like Miller thinks that he can publish a
certain kind of book (short, mostly nonfiction hardcovers at about $20)
in a certain kind of way (little in-store co-op, mostly on-line
promotions, unreturnable, possibly bundled with e- and audio versions)
strongly, and he wants to give it a try.

I hear the NYT makes excellent bird cage liner, so in that regard I'm sure someone has respect for the rag.

On another topic, I sure would like to see the Tibetan kangaroos. I
understand the thundering herds of wild kangas romping across the
Himalayas is a thrilling sight to behold, second only to the polar
bears racing across the Antarctic wastes. The Tibetan preyer wheels add
their deep thrum to the scene, presaging the onslaught of carnivorous
yaks. The nightly drama is played out for the milling throngs of
tourists with their digital cameras and their McDonald's coffees in
hand.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/01/free-download-of-nei.html

I found their approach useless for the way I read electronic books,
and I read quite a few. The text needs to be formatted to fit the
device I have, which means it needs to be formatted at my end, not by
the publisher. Plain text works. HTML works. RTF works. There are other
formats that I can convert to something usable. PDF works but is too
painful to fight with to be worth the bother.

In next month's thrilling episode: in an attempt to focus on his
group's core competencies and cut overheads Mr. Miller outsources
everyone below his own level to PublishAmerica. After all, as we all
know, strong management is vital to running a successful business --
everything else is just peripheral fuss and bother that can be
dispensed with.

You're right, though; anything with Liv Ullman is much better. I
loved her duet with the kanga prince ("Purple Kangaroo in the Rain") --
of course, it was really Marni Nixon singing.

I hear Peter Jackson's up for making the latest version though, and he promises to film it entirely on location in Tibet.

Andrew Wheeler, 31,

I have to agree with your assessment: it's a press release saying that
he intends to target a really specific niche with a pre-existing
audience with extruded non-ficition product, branded and marketed a
specific way at a set price.

It's almost as though he's woken up to the direct sales model that
the webcomics/cartoonist types** are exploiting. Briefly: self-financed
printing/manufacturing of pre-ordered objects for a dedicated fanbase,
with limited to no distribution through Ingrahm/B&T, leaving the
vast majority of cash inflow untouched by parasites middlemen.

In the case of Mr. Miller, authors are the superfluous
middlemen in the cash flow diagram, mucking up the nice clean equation
with messy reserves against returns and royalties that fluctuate all
over the place. It's no accident that C.E.Peit is talking about
work-for-hire clauses: that would be the ultimate solution for
maximizing the amount of coin that lands in his pockets.

*sux, btw. No filter for articles only appearing in the last x number of days.

**e.g. The Foglio's Girl Genius, The Gallagher's Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, & Alpha-Shade.

Which I guess makes me a very atypical author, as I have never
received any royalties on any of my books, ever. There. I admitted it
in public.

And what does "published by arrangement with the author" mean anyway?

As a mere reader and book-buying consumer I don't usually peruse the
copyright pages of every book I open, thus hadn't noticed this (trend?)
before, and only spotted it in a new book from a friend of an
online-acquaintance author, and then started noticing it in other
titles.

*thus far, they've all been imprints of THE BERKELEY PUBLISHING
GROUP, and the Ace books have actually been copyright by (authors)
while the new Penguin mysteries have been (c)pub.

Pat @ 41, you are my hero of the day. I wish my finances were better
organized so I could step up also. I know I haven't gotten any
royalties on my last couple of novels.

cf Charlie's comment; Miller is now 51, and may be looking to make a
retirement pile on the Chainsaw Al (Dunlop) model -- or even on the
not-so-different standard U.S. executive model (how many hundreds of
millions did the former chief of Home Depot get when he was squeezed
out of the mess he'd made?). Hollywood at least has to fake up numbers;
the modern executive just gets his off the top, even if there is no top.

I heard this on PRI's business program this evening, and it sounded
a bit strange even without being able to go over it again (my \next/
commuter car \will/ have a TiVo (and a pony, and get 60mpg...)),
especially since they didn't explain how they were going to get
bookstores to take non-returnable books.

Are the Tibetan preyers allied with the Slayer?

I would have to haul out my contracts to check my advances. For
novels, I get around $10,000. (Not trying to duck this. I just make it
a point to think as little as possible about money, a subject that
inspired Samuel Johnson to say something that's often repeated because
it's gloriously ludicrous. I'll be doing a post on my blog with as many
hard figures as I can find around April 15, when my taxes are done.)
(For the record, Emma's advances are larger than mine, and I'm
perfectly happy being a kept man.)

Seriously. "Adult"? Smut. "Mature"? Smut. "Not intended for
children"? Smut. And so on. How can I briefly describe a book that has
too much violence and gore for the average 10-year-old, or one that
deals with deep questions of ethics that would bore most 14-year-olds
silly, but which doesn't contain graphic sexual material?

[/grump]

Because "grown-up" carries the overtones of talking to children, I would have no problem describing, say, Ulysses as a "book for grown-ups" but would feel dirty describing Deep Throat as a "movie for grown-ups" (except in a meta-description like this one).

http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3044

And see this: The money to be made writing porn.

Yeah, it's the share of profits that looks dodgy. It's not unknown--wasn't that a feature of the deal on The Lord of the Rings--but
Hollywood Accounting and the music industry have given such things a
bad reputation. What works when you can have a personal relationship
with the guy in charge doesn't seem so reliable with the corporate
MBA-style of management.

You'd've thought she'd want to be in touch with them anyway. Her contract says they have the right of first refusal if she writes a book

Granted they work in a dicey neighborhood :)

AND the moment at which the royalty rises varies dramatically from
publisher to publisher. Varies also depending upon both author and
editor's assumptions about the viability of the book.

AND major publishers--like Putnams and Harper to my certain
knowledge--lower the advance for sales to major cut rate outlets
(B&N, Amazon, Wal-Mart etc) if the rate of sale to these places is
below 50% of the cover price.

Authors and their agents (if they have them) fight these fights
every day. If they do not have to do this at Tor, it is to Tor's
credit, and its editors.

Jane

I certainly hope not. Remember that, when the current bunch moved
into the White House, it was said that, this time, grownups would be in
charge.

While many (almost all?) webcomics do indeed self-finance the
printed versions of their work to sell directly to their fans, I don't
think it's by choice. Especially if they've been doing it for a while.
Both Penny Arcade and MegaTokyo signed up with major publishers, and
Girl Genius *is* available through Ingram and B&T even though it's
small press.

While many (almost all?) webcomics do indeed self-finance the
printed versions of their work to sell directly to their fans, I don't
think it's by choice. Especially if they've been doing it for a while.
Both Penny Arcade and MegaTokyo signed up with major publishers, and
Girl Genius *is* available through Ingram and B&T even though it's
small press.

Thank you for clarifying my comment. You are absolutely right about the publishing deals you mentioned.

I might quibble with the "by choice" bit. For webcomics with smaller
audiences, or niche topics, there's little point in sharing revenue
with a publisher who won't be able to market the book effectively to
the corporate book buyers.** I'd have to say the Foglio's are lucky (in
the sense that 30+ years
of hard work is luck) to have been a self-publishing small press before
webcomics were invented. ³ Likewise with Megatokyo & Penny Arcade:
those fellows have such a huge audience that it should be impossible
for a publisher to not make money on them †. Likewise, since they have
such huge audiences, they have a lot of bargaining power, and are able
to get pretty good deals. ‡

As a counter example, the brother Brudlos self-financed, printed and
ship the Alpha-Shade books, but they also both hold down full time
jobs. Or Greg Dean's Real Life Comics, which has languished with only
volume one printed up until recently, when he released a cliff notes type version via Lulu.

I didn't exactly choose the best possible examples, did I?

*thank you!

**though there was the interesting case of Kurt Hassler, who worked as
the graphic novel buyer for Borders, who also co-authored a webcomic
that was subsequently published by Tokyopop.

³ probably not strictly true, but close.

† not that people haven't screwed it up. Megatokyo couldn't keep Studio
Ironcat afloat, and the first guy who the Penny Arcade guys signed on
with took their print rights and fled the country.

‡ interesting news for Penny Arcade: they have a partnership with a
newly formed gaming distribution company to distribute their first
video game "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" which seemingly
will be filled with squamous goodness. Oh, and the company will also be
distributing games hand-picked by the guys.

Despite the fact that I made an arse of myself when I met her at the
Worldcon in Scotland*, I know that Jane is a real human being, and is
allowed to do ordinary person things like post comments on blogs.

In other words, play it cool.

-----

* sorry about that, Jane. I hope you liked the programme binding anyway.

I won't speak for him, but I think he's implying that there's no cosmic conspiracy at HC.

I'm actually a little disappointed. Maybe we can still blame the Illuminati?

I was croggled.

I'll throw out a thank you to all the authors who are reading, even
those I've never personally read, because you give us places to escape
to. I appreciate that immensely.

Side note:

#49 Lee, and #51 RobT...I've had the same thoughts many times, and then
reading RobT's post, I thought, why not "Adult-Level"? Seems clear and
without the connotative baggage.

You done real good!

(The last time I saw a "no royalties-profit sharing" attempt crash
and burn it was in the late 80s with Tundra Publishing, Kevin Eastman's
ill-fated venture. But they also handed out huge -- for comics at the
time -- advances, large enough that many of the creators who got the
advances saw no advantage in actually producing the comics they'd been
paid to make.)

That would mean that "POD will revolutionize Publishing" is
somewhere in the same ball park as "Nanotechnology will create
Self-Replicating ASICs".

or something.

(Literally, of course, "many authors" actually and truly "never earn
royalties," because there are always lots of work-for-hire deals where
authors are paid a fee rather than a royalty. But that's not what the Times article was referring to, and that's why their statement is still an error, even if a minor one.)

Not all major (or minor)
publishers offer rising royalties on hardcovers automatically. It has
to be asked for, one has to have had an agent or not be a first time
author or be a favored and well known writer.

AND the moment at
which the royalty rises varies dramatically from publisher to
publisher. Varies also depending upon both author and editor's
assumptions about the viability of the book.

AND
major publishers--like Putnams and Harper to my certain
knowledge--lower the advance for sales to major cut rate outlets
(B&N, Amazon, Wal-Mart etc) if the rate of sale to these places is
below 50% of the cover price.

Authors and their agents (if they have them) fight these
fights every day. If they do not have to do this at Tor, it is to Tor's
credit, and its editors.

Sometimes I want to clone myself and open up shop as an agent. If I did, you'd be a client I'd try to recruit.

This has led to the paradox that I have been paid money for poetry,
but not for a full-length monograph. In both cases, though, I retained
the copyright. In recent times, I've had to hand over copyright in
exchange for the mere fact of publication (plus copies of the journal).

I had a squee moment like rams's about five years ago on a usenet
newsgroup (is that a redundant phrase?) when I realized that the person
posting as Diane Duane might well be that Diane Duane. I very
tentatively asked, in a textual representation of a nervous,
Piglet-like voice, whether this was in fact the case, murmuring
something about really really liking the Young Wizards
trilogy very very much; and she assured me that it was, and that, by
the way, it was no longer a trilogy. So I ran off in a fan-struck haze
to find books four through six.

I am still quite prone to squee moments, mind you. It's just harder
to tell online, when I have time to turn my squeemishness into
something vaguely literate.

Arrrrgh--of course I meant royalties, not advances drop in big companies when they sell to the Big Chains.

Fingers--meet brain. Brain--meet fingers. I had so hoped they knew one another but obviously not.

Jane

Many academic authors never earn royalties, period. I have earned
zero royalties on academic publishing (I have been paid in copies -- as
little as one copy of a journal in which an article appeared.)

When I was a kid my dad showed me one of his royalty checks...it was for something like 7 dollars.

He told me recently that the way he gets paid for his writing is
that the dean says "oh, I see you wrote another book" and gives him a
raise.

Me too; I was teasing.

You rang?

The immense diversity once offered by the ID system was an important
mechanism for making smart kids from non-bookstore-shopping families
into habitual book buyers. That's gone now, in the name of big-box
retailer efficiency. It's a huge loss. Meanwhile, the idiots of SFWA
worry about some kid in Estonia "pirating" their e-texts.

Boy, the SFWA just doesn't seem to get much love. Is it really that
bad? The whole Burt/Doctorow bruhaha is all I know about the internal
politics of the group, but it certainly doesn't paint a pretty picture.

Jim @94, the SFWA situation is much worse than you can possibly
imagine. Luckily there's an election going on right now, so in two
weeks or thereabouts we'll know whether to send a burial detail or a
"get well" card.

Serge, #75: "Mature" (or, as sometimes seen, "intended for mature audiences") = smut.

In which case, perhaps American Intellectual would work.

...

"Adult-level" works for me without the connotations. I'm sure for
someone younger than I, "adult book" doesn't have the same meaning it
once did. Why would you want to read a book when porn is available on
video?

::sputter::

It does indeed sound a bit like Mickey Mouse intellectualism...

Why would you want to read a book when porn is available on video?

Video packs a wallop, but the written stuff has its own particular
pleasures. Particularly when read out loud to a listener. I don't know
if today's young porn fans have the dedication to bother with the
classic texts, though. Kids today, sigh.

At this point I don't recall if that led me to read The Forever War or the other way 'round.

That's hurt my folk's used bookstore, because we they don't get as
many people walking over from the supermarket to look for books as they
used to when there were lots of different titles.

That and the link (I think it was somewhere around here) to the guy
who is making more money (by large factors) with his porn, than which
his non-porn.

Instead of selling 144 different current titles, your average
144-slot supermarket rack now offers just two or three dozen different
titles.

And at least 2/3 of those are long series or house titles ("Star Wars" or sharecropper series). The diversity is very low.

It's a shame. I had started reading sf in the library, but
discovering the local non-chain drug and sundry store was what really
got me going. Ace doubles and other paperbacks on two revolving wire
racks, only a block and a half from my house. Mid-20th century
paperbacks ... mmmmmmmmm ...

Well, I did take an oath.

Mary Dell #87: That doesn't always work, alas. I've had colleagues publish and perish.

Absolutely--that's happened to friends of mine, too, and certainly
would have happened to me, if I hadn't washed out early. Dad's an
unusual creature.

That sounds like the title of a sitcom of the 1950s.

*And two daughters, and two additional sons.

And some of us contemplate monasticism (or would were we not happily
married) at the sight of effusions of this kind: "For the men who know
this true fact, I believe they are holding on to their manhood by,
thinking they are the dictators in today’s society."

He certainly sounds it. Some of us hold on by our fingernails.

Yeah--I always dreamed of having a career like his* and then
discovered, once I was grown up, that hardly anybody has a career like
that. I imagine that children of bestselling authors get a similarly
skewed view of the writing life. Oh, his name is Bob, which is a good
sitcom-dad name.

*50+ years teaching (so far); endowed chair, etc.

Serge: #113: Having Three Sons would give him the canonical name Fred.

Contradicting you, just to be polite: An actor named Fred played a father named Steve.

As a wise Sicilian once said: "Never go in against Serge when an old TV show is on the line."

I've never watched a single episode of Father Knows Best (even
though I had the lunch box). I really tried, I did. I'd start with the
opening montage, and the opening scene, and then...either I blacked out
or I got up and changed the channel. I'm not sure which. I was so
young.

My Three Sons..the same thing happened. Dobie Gillis? Ditto.

About the only shows on at the time that I could actually watch were the Mouseketeers and things like Bewitched.

I'm a bad, bad child of the 60s, I know. At least I watched Star Trek, religiously!

(Best title while simultaneously being the worst screenplay? "For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky")

Bad Ginger, bad, bad!

I'll confess to even watching The Donna Reed Show. How sick is that? But I also watched stuff like The Naked City.

(Best title while simultaneously being the worst screenplay? "For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky")

You have to remember that in the 60's it was considered de rigueur
to copy anything that Harlan Ellison did. Of course, he always did it
better. So, since he used long, poetic titles like "The Beast that
Shouted Love at the Heart of the World", everybody else did too. This
resulted in titles like "When the Vertical World Becomes Horizontal",
"We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line", "For
Every Aspect of the World There is a Gift", "The Man Doors Said Hello
To", and “I See A Man Sitting On a Chair, And the Chair Is Biting His
Leg”.*

* Actually, I made up one of those. Can you guess which one? Extra credit for naming the authors of the other titles.

"bow chicka bowwow" is a classic?

As for Ellisonian titles, can anybody guess, without googling, th author of Th Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World?

Lbh'er evtug nobhg gur frpbaq naq ynfg, ohg abg nobhg gur sbhegu bar: gung'f ol "Wnzrf Gvcgerr, We." nxn Nyvpr Furyqba.

Serge @ 126

Um ... I already gave that away in 122.

This is, of course, nonsense on stilts, most particularly the
imputation that writers like Delany or Tiptree were so lacking in
inspiration that they had to "copy" Harlan sodding Ellison.

I walked up on a rather raucous conversation at work once. It turns
out that "bow chicka bowwow" had come up in conversation and half the
people standing there didn't know what it was, so they'd had to
explain. I made the mistake of saying the conversation reminded me of
the day I casually dropped "use a safeword" into a joke at my parents'
house, and ended up having to explain what a safeword was. To my
mother. On Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, no one standing there knew what a safeword was, and I had to explain to them too. Ouch.

Plus, titles of stories don't always come from their authors.
Editors (or, in the case of screenplays, others) often change the title
the author came up with. Just ask the author of "Prometheus Passes the
Torch," "Vine and Fig Tree--," "The Patterns of Possibility," and
"Shadow of Death" (a.k.a. "While the Evil Days Come Not.")

ow. ow. ow!

Everything is ruined forever.

Hee! Though it makes a wonderful train-wreck of a story, the
situation wasn't that terrible. I explained, she said, "Oh, okay," and
we moved on. One of the reasons my mother is quite wonderful. She's
pretty good at being a grownup.

Yes, of course it's nonsense on stilts. Sorry, I clearly should have
put a smiley at the end of that post. There was in fact a time when a
lot of fans were convinced that Harlan Ellison was nigh unto God; I was
(clumsily) trying to lampoon that time, as it rather annoyed me then,
and still does in retrospect.

*Or, for those unfamiliar with Frère Lapin, "how you say no when no means yes." Succinct, but not as witty.

"Yrg Gurer Or Yvtug," "'Vs Guvf Tbrf Ba--'" (somehow the dash
survived the title change), "Ryfrjura," and "Zrguhfrynu'f Puvyqera."
All early stories by Eboreg N. Urvayrva. Chosen because they were
examples I had near to hand.

PNH @128: Well, AFAIK/IIRC the early Tiptree was rather unsure about
the whole business of writing SF and worth of "his" own inspiration,
very impressionable and counting Ellison among his heroes. But I agree
it hardly went as far as that particular title.

AKICIF: Does anybody know of a Firefox extension (or perhaps just a
bookmarklet?) for easy ROT13ing? I found Leetkey, but that completely
messed up use of function keys on my keyboard.

"Bow chicka bowwow" is a verbal rendering of the sound of the music
from a particular type of porno. It's generally said (among my circle
at least) with a slightly sung inflection to make it sound more like
the music in question. It becomes a shorthand reference to porno in
general.

I think it is most often used to make a joke where you are pointing
out a potentially sexual connotation of something, but you're also
mocking yourself for noticing the sexual connotation because it is
particularly slender or cheap.

(And the funny thing about me trying to explain is that I've never seen the type of porno that has this kind of music.)

*Apologies for leaving off the rest of your name - because it is a
link, I can't copy and paste, and I'm trying to post quickly so I don't
have time to sort out how to get the proper characters. I'll do better
next time, I promise.

Why not?

(If it's because Stuff Happens when you click on a link, it might
help to consider that selecting text usually doesn't involve clicking on the text in question so much as slightly to one side of it.)

Persistently?

I remember when I first set up Leetkey, it did weird things to my
keyboard, but after I closed and re-started Firefox it behaved itself.

To my knowledge, http://www.rot13.com/ doesn't have bookmarklet or
Firefox extension functionality. It's just a really simple web page
form into which you can past text for Rot13 transformation.

My trouble was that I could type in "Jan" and "jr." and was trying
to only cut and paste "Vaněk". I should have thought of that trick.
(It's been a very long week, here. Is it Friday yet?)

Imagine a 70's guitar riff, kind of a funky

little ditty, but at the same time, cheesy,

because it's a sibling of disco. It requires

the use of a whammy bar on the guitar so that

you can strum the strings and then bend them

all at once. A minimalized version might be

one or two strings and finger bending to get

the "wow" effect.

If you were to try and verbalize it, it

might sound something like

"bow chicka bow wow".

It became the seque soundtrack inserted

between scenes in cheesy porn videos.

It's become sort of a cultural thing. I've

heard stand up comics have stand up routines

using 'bow chicka bow wow'. It can be used

in conversation to imply sexual connotations

to otherwise non-sexual text. Or to twist

someone's previous comment and turn it into

something sexual. (if you ever read a

fortune cookie, you can do something similar

by appending the phrase "in bed"

to the end of the fortune.)

My favorite use of the phrase was in a

"Red vs Blue" video. I googled around and

couldn't find the whole episode, but

I did find a clip of it

here.

Warning: Red vs Blue can become addictive.

I'm pretty sure the canonical sound is done with a wah-wah pedal
rather than a whammy bar, modulating timbre rather than pitch. See
about 1:28 in this demo, or this mp3.

Not that strings don't get bent, mind, but the wah is the signature.

Ah, you're probably right. That would make it more 70-ish. I don't
have a wah-wah pedal, so I'm not as familiar with the tone. I'd
probably spend a weekend trying to do "bow chicka bow wow" on my
gibson, wondering why I can't get the right sound.

I don't have a talkbox, either, or a drum kit, or... oh, poo. irons, fire, multitudeness.

Cash in hand, on a semi-predictable timetable, and simplified accounting.

To my eyes, that looks distressingly close to ink-stained
wretchedness; the idea that it's OK to accept less money for the
privilege of being paid on time is somehow offensive. Not to mention
that it's an upfront statement that (somebody) thinks it's a dead cinch
your book isn't going to sell well. Speaking as someone whose husband's
technical book earned out its advance in the first quarter, and which
still provides some royalty income, the prospect of accepting only half
that money is, in retrospect, nothing short of demented. I suspect that
this also is not the most effective encouragement for the publishers to
produce a large print run at any stage of the game--there simply isn't
enough incentive. Raising the stakes, on the other hand, should
motivate everyone involved.

I admit that the accounting problems are enough to make even a
seasoned CPA blanch, but I'm not at all sure that Curtis' proposal is
the solution, except perhaps as some sort of Literary Agent Paperwork
Reduction Act.

I suspect the publishers would just make shorter print runs, and not
take flyers on book club sales (which, I am guessing) get a lower
roayalty because sales are guaranteed in advance, something like the
half-rate).

But you know what, if I have a book going into multiple printings, I
am losing on that deal. If I'm not earning out my advance, I'm losing
on that deal.

I'm trading half my income for the promise of a more regular
payment? No. That means a fifty percent pay cut. And I don't think it
means a more regular paycheck (unless the publishers get to string me
along, reaping the interest on all those delayed royalties), what will
happen is I get paid a lump when the print run is done, and then I
won't see a penny until the next print run (or next book).

Thanks, but no thanks. My dad saw an unexpected royalty check when
one of his (oop) books was suddenly selling out of Ingrams to India.

FTFY. :-)

Let's take a paperback book with a print run of 100,000 that sells
for $10, for maximum gross sales of one meeeeeelion dollars. I'll use
the royalty plan from my last book, doubling the numbers because it was
a tie-in work:

3% of the retail price of the book, and 2% of the net of all special sales, book clubs, foreign sales, etc.

For the Curtis plan, we'll use 1.5% royalties for every copy printed. That's easy to figure: $15,000, minus any advances.

For a traditional royalty structure, it gets complicated.

You're paid on the number of units sold, so with double the
royalties, you only have to sell half of the books-- in this case,
50,000 copies. Publishing, however, is one of the few businesses in
which "sold" does not mean "sold", because books are merchandised on a
fully returnable basis -- that is, the bookseller may return them to
the publisher for a refund, usually in the form of credit toward the
purchase of other books.

So although your royalty statement may show 50000 copies sold, some
of those copies may well show up unsold (returned) on a future
statement, after booksellers or distributors have shipped back the
stock they couldn’t dispose of. Until it is clear to publishers that
the copies they’ve shipped will not be returned, they hold some or all
of your royalties in reserve.

Because books are sold on a returnable basis, publishers are
entitled by contract to withhold a "reasonable" percentage of an
author’s royalties as a reserve against returns. If a publisher knows
that 50 percent of the copies of every novel in his romance line come
back no matter how good the book, he will hold back at least 50 percent
of the money he collects from bookstores and distributors, knowing he
will eventually have to refund that much. Publishers frequently hold
money in excess of the figure their experience tells them is normal and
reasonable, however. For instance, for the above line of romances, the
publisher may reserve 60 or 75 percent or more. Though they have been
paid for the books sold, they keep the money (which earns interest for
the publisher, of course, not the author) until they see whether the
books are going to come back. Some of them do; some of them don’t.
After a while, publishers are supposed to release some of the reserve
money as it becomes clear that many of the books out there are never
going to come back. But there's no way of telling if or when that will
happen.

Now add in the discounted value of cash, which is to say that cash
that comes in two years from now isn't worth as much as cash you get
today. Think of it as interest in reverse. Your royalty payments will
come in six months after the sale of the books at the earliest; with
longer sales times and the slow release of reserves against returns.
Which means that you'll get paid-- let's say a year after your initial
sales. That can be a discounted value of 5-15% a year, depending on
inflation and whether you have to borrow money to live in the meantime.
Now you're talking about 60,000 in sales just to match the Curtis
royalty-- and there's no way to predict when or if that money will
actually come in.

So, to take one hypothetical sales scenario, your book has a sell
through of 66% over the course of a year, which is respectable. A year
after your book is printed, you get a royalty statement for $20000,
with 50% held in reserve against returns. So that's $10,000, minus 10%
for discounted cash value, for $9000 in money today. After the reserves
are all released four years later, that's about $6500 more in today's
money. Maybe. Change any of those percentages, like sell-through, and
watch the numbers change, and uncertainty is the name of the game here.
If you like a predictable cash flow, the Curtis plan is for you. If you
want to gamble on what you'll get a few years down the line...

(Because, speaking as someone who doesn't write tie-ins, it sounds like you're being raped.)

For technical books on computing and photography we get 15 percent.

3 percent? I can see where a 1.5 percent of total cost might seem
acceptable, at that scale. But giving up 7.5 percent, that's a horse of
a different color.

I think I'm with Charlie Stross, that's disturbing.