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Old 11-25-2009, 09:50 AM   #6
DMcCunney
New York Editor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan View Post
Of course, that means a royalty structure that pays the author more when they have more sales, as opposed to the publisher pocketing the difference...
Which might be meaningful if more books actually accrued royalties.

Standard practice when contracting with a publisher is to receive an advance against royalties. The author will receive actual royalties after the book has sold enough copies to cover the advance.

Guess what? Most books don't accrue actual royalties, because they don't sell enough copies to cover the intitial advance. In publishing terms, they never "earn out". And when an agent negotiates a contract with a publisher, that's what they want. They want as high an advance as they can get. (After all, the agent gets a percentage, and if the author makes more money up front, so do they.)

Books that do earn out accrue royalties, and publishers issue quarterly royalties statements and checks (or are supposed to, but failure to do that is violation of contract and a different issue.)
______
Dennis

Last edited by DMcCunney; 11-25-2009 at 05:05 PM.
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