{"id":19508,"date":"2013-03-20T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T05:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19508"},"modified":"2013-03-19T12:11:18","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T17:11:18","slug":"qotd-the-mad-mad-mad-world-of-author-royalty-calculation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/03\/20\/qotd-the-mad-mad-mad-world-of-author-royalty-calculation\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The mad, mad, mad world of author royalty calculation"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Author\/publisher contracts specify royalty rates in the craziest way imaginable. This is because they consist of archaeological strata of legal boilerplate, accumulated over decades and haggled over by publishers&#8217; lawyers and authors&#8217; agents. Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, &#8220;if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And so we have constant re-use of legal boilerplate that&#8217;s decades old. &#8220;For sales under 10,000 copies, a royalty of 10% will be assigned based on the undiscounted suggested retail price. From 10,001 to 15,000 copies, a royalty of 12% will be allocated &#8230; from 15,001 up, a royalty of 15% will be allocated &#8230; for copies sold at less than 40% discount off SRP, the full royalty will be paid; for copies sold at discount of 41-50% 80% of royalties due will be paid: from 51%-65% 50% of royalties will be paid: above 65% 40% of royalties will be paid.&#8221; You can think of it as a stack of IF () THEN () ELSE () statements switched off the number of copies sold and the discount the wholesaler extorted for taking them off the publisher&#8217;s hands.<\/p>\n<p>Charles Stross, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antipope.org\/charlie\/blog-static\/2013\/03\/things-publishers-cant-do.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Things publishers can&#8217;t do (yet)&#8221;, <em>Charlie&#8217;s Diary<\/em><\/a>, 2013-03-19<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Author\/publisher contracts specify royalty rates in the craziest way imaginable. This is because they consist of archaeological strata of legal boilerplate, accumulated over decades and haggled over by publishers&#8217; lawyers and authors&#8217; agents. Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, &#8220;if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,28,41],"tags":[529],"class_list":["post-19508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-media","category-quotations","tag-lawyers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-54E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19509,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19508\/revisions\/19509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}