Man, that's unlucky.

Sorry to hear of their plight.

Without going into the specifics of this skirmish, allow me to just state generally that, in my humble opinion, number manipulation seems to go hand-in-hand with royalty payments.

Book publishing and record labels are two industries that historically have extreme difficulty in accurately recording their sales numbers.

I wish the authors well in their battle.

DB

My friend Hank Thomas had the right idea when he first published his award-winning bio of his grandfather, Walter Johnson: He self-published ("Phenom Press") the damn thing through several printings and didn't have to worry about getting dicked by his publisher.

I hope things get settled appropriately but ...

I do kinda love the idea of the publisher going into court and showing that, although they had in fact sold X copies of The Book, after adjusting for the 2008-10 bookselling environment and the limited literary range of the authors, this is below replacement level sales and the authors are lucky the publisher isn't asking them for money.

When a publishing house is struggling with finances, the last people to get paid are the authors. It's messed up and completely unfair, but there it is. I hope the guys get all the money they deserve in the end.

When a publishing house is struggling with finances, the last people to get paid are the authors.

Similar things are true in a lot of industries, and it's often occurred to me that the reason for that is almost certainly is that the authors (and freelancers, etc) are the people who are least likely to be be able to pay for a good lawyer. There's also the amount of debt to be considered -- when they're selling off the furniture to pay the bills, the bank's much more likely to get paid than the guy you owe $600 for ad copy.

Yeah, but that is because nobody bought the book.

Yeah, but that is because nobody bought the book.

Well, Amazon sales rank's sub-100k for the paperback, so figure 5-10 copies a week. Kindle's at 44k, so, again, 5-10 a week. Probably a book like that does better at Xmas time and the start of the baseball season. Easily looking at 2k titles a year for a 3-year-old reference work.

Trouble for them is their publisher's involved in history/military/reference, a sector that is flat-out getting killed by the economy. [They sell to libraries, libraries don't have money anymore.]

Best plan is to do a revised edition, sell it through LSI+CreateSpace, and then their own kindle version at a $10 list price, so they can make 70% of cover.

I was responding to post #7

I once cowrote a book about text adventures.

AWESOME. Details, pls.

How long would it take you to beat Zork right now?

When a publishing house is struggling with finances, the last people to get paid are the authors.

Similar things are true in a lot of industries, and it's often occurred to me that the reason for that is almost certainly is that the authors (and freelancers, etc) are the people who are least likely to be be able to pay for a good lawyer.

That's part of it. The other part is that the authors have less leverage than anybody else. If you don't pay the utility bill, they turn off the lights. If you don't pay the printers, they stop the presses and you have nothing to sell. You don't pay the staff, they quit. You don't pay the authors, well... you get lots of nasty letters.

You don't pay the authors, well...

In theory, if you don't pay the authors shouldn't you lose the right to actually sell their book?

In theory, if you don't pay the authors shouldn't you lose the right to actually sell their book?

That depends, but assuming for the sake of argument that it's true "in theory," it doesn't mean anything unless the author takes legal action to stop you. Which is still a much more distant threat than any of the others I named.

In theory, if you don't pay the authors shouldn't you lose the right to actually sell their book?

I presume that, in practice, the publisher not selling their book really doesn't help the authors much.

DB

EDIT: Never mind ...

The publishers generally care about early sales, so the right to sell a book that's a couple years old is something they're willing to gamble with, since most books' sales decline pretty steeply pretty quickly, whether they're starting high or low.

Hello, Sailor.

Similar things are true in a lot of industries, and it's often occurred to me that the reason for that is almost certainly is that the authors (and freelancers, etc) are the people who are least likely to be be able to pay for a good lawyer. There's also the amount of debt to be considered -- when they're selling off the furniture to pay the bills, the bank's much more likely to get paid than the guy you owe $600 for ad copy.

While these are certainly factors, i think it's more that they don't need the authors to bring in day to day revenue.. Once a book has been published paying the author doesn't help it sell better. Obviously it's preferable to pay authors so you can get their future books to publish, and so other authors will want to publish with you. But when your back is against the wall you only spend money on things that directly bring in more money.

I was once in the software business, and our company was very small at first, and our distributers treated us similarly. They'd delay our payments because we didn't matter much. When we got bigger, and started coming out with bigger selling products, we started getting paid in a more timely fashion.

If I'm right, I would bet that publishers under financial stress are much less likely to delay payments on already published books to authors who have important new books coming out soon, than to authors who don't..