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Originally Posted by simonroyle
The 'Hardy Boys' books were all done through a 'book packager'. That said I think the amounts that he is paying are an insult to anyone who can write. How transparent are the "royalties". Note that they are net. There's a lot that can be thrown into "cost".
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The Hardy Boys books were only one of scores of series put out by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. They produced Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and countless others. They paid a flat fee to the actual author of any given book for all rights, and published those books under house names. There never was a Victor Appleton or a Carolyn Keene. Most of those authors were paid very little, which explains the quality of a lot of Stratemeyer's series; it's easy to see that the books were pumped out wholesale, to fit formulae, in a matter of weeks or at most months. The same author might be writing for numerous different series to pay the bills.
Boys' books of the first few decades of the 20th century are a hobby of mine (talk about obscure, eh?). I'm working on a comprehensive listing of such books, with authors, publishers, and so on, and even quite incomplete, it has reached over 1,000 titles. Not all Stratemeyer, of course; there were competitors. But no matter how you slice up the origins, that's a lot of books. A few of the books were published under their actual authors' names (most notably 'Hap' Arnold) but the overwhelming majority were produced, and owned, by packagers.
A lot of modern romance publishers do the same thing. An author submits a book that fits a strict set of guidelines (and I mean "strict" as in "lovers' quarrel between pages 75 and 80"), the publisher pays a flat fee for all rights, and it's published under a house name (there's a reason why you don't see romance novels by Joe Snodgrass).