From my father: No matter where you go, no matter what you do, no matter what troubles you may encounter in your life-- there are nine hundred million people in China who really don't give a shit. So you might as well be happy.
Also: Always accelerate into turns.
And I'm not sure this originated with me, but I slipped it in a novel anyway: "In this world, you have to be oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant. I've spent years being smart. I highly recommend pleasant."
And a few others over here.
I sincerely doubt Bowie holds Nazi views any longer, if he ever did
at the time. He's been married to Iman for 16 years now, has a daughter
with her, and donated $10G to the NAACP for the defense of the Jena Six.
30, without resorting to reference. Which any real type user would do, but I wanted to see how I'd do without it.
Yep, the royalty percentages are lousy on tie-ins, but you make it
up on volume. Really. Tie-in works usually do twice the business of
originals.
Patrick, the numbers even up at about 36% of the printed books not
selling. But your point is well taken. If the Curtis Plan was a royalty
of two thirds of standard instead of a half, it would be break even at
75-80% sell through, which sounds about right.
All right, I have to actually show the work in math class. I always hated this part...
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...
#18: Well, there was that one time we held Tacticon at the same hotel as an evangelical convention.
Bah. You clearly missed the Millennium PhilCon (WorldCon 2001) and one of the more notorious cases of mistaken identity in fandom.
And speaking of revisionism: "Build it fast, build it cheap, or build it strong" isn't so much from IT as R&D in general, to wit: you can only define two of the following three in advance: time, cost, or results. If you can define all three, it ain't R&D.
Of course, your end user wants it free, perfect, and now.
Cut to: Darkseid, gazing at the return of the sun, hands behind his back. His face inscrutable, but knowing that his time will come again.
My earliest public event memories are the Fischer/Spassky matches and the '72 Winter Olympics at the age of three.
My earliest political memory was Nixon's resignation, at the age of 5 and 5 months.
And my earliest comic book was Batman #251, "The Joker's Five Way Revenge" by Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams, and edited by Julie Schwartz. Also at the age of three.
Jim-- your dad BUILT a TV?
Nearly 750 comments. We need a new open thread, Ms. Shoemaker.
So Jesus Christ walks into a bar...
There are two married women. Both their husbands are accused of being present at a particularly wanton and disgraceful stag party. Both husbands deny it. One wife accepts this denial at face value, dismisses the story, and goes on with her life. The other wife goes into a frenzy of fact-checking, affidavit-gathering, and timeline construction, in order to demonstrate once and for all that her husband couldn’t possibly have been at that party. Which woman has faith in her husband?
The follow-up question, of course, is: Which woman is right?
Not the best analogy here. Try this instead:
There are two married women. Both their husbands claim that they saved the life of a stranger on 9/11. One wife accepts this claim at face value, smiles happily that she found such a good man, and goes on with her life. The other wife goes into a frenzy of fact-checking, affidavit-gathering, timeline construction, and invention of ever more outlandish theories, in order to demonstrate once and for all that her husband had to have saved a person's life, and that he should be lauded for it. Which woman has faith in her husband?
#246: Xopher, stroking someone else's just isn't as good as having one of your own to stroke.
...and we rapidly descend into a discussion of Hugo envy. Mr. Scalzi, would you care to comment?
Congrats to Patrick.
#19: I've been at this gig so long that no one even remembers I'm eligible.
Why, Miss Teresa, are you lusting after Patrick's Ultra-Man-sized phallic object?
Good to hear he made the appointment. So how did he like Buffy #3?
Since Patrick hasn't posted here about his actually making any appointments, I'm going to go all Jim Macdonald on him.
First, the link to one of many sites connecting poor dental health to numerous disorders including heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and systemic inflammation.
Second, the link to the article on the last guy I know who didn't have regular dental checkups. You may recognize the article, as it ran on Making Light just over a month ago.
Make the appointment. I don't want to have to make an appointment for you. Of either kind.
The House and Senate should impeach Fox. Right now. On general principles. Specifically, to show Bush that he can't just place anybody he wants in the office without Congressional approval.
Alex and friends and family have been sitting shiva the past few nights.
Patrick, Teresa: So where is Judith's office going to be?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 9 |
| 2007 | 18 |
| 2006 | 58 |
| 2005 | 29 |
| 2004 | 10 |
| 2003 | 19 |
| 2002 | 3 |
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