Some time ago, when I read about the shooting in Ottawa’s parliament, it reminded me of a trip my husband and I took to that city a few years ago. When most people think of Eastern Canada’s major cities, cosmopolitan Montreal and culturally diverse Toronto come to mind. Rarely do they think of Ottawa, Canada’s capital. But it has many charms, as interesting a place to visit as the country’s more popular destinations. Dignified with old world qualities, Ottawa is a handsome, stately place that also has a dual personality. It resides across the river from Hull, Quebec, its sister city, highlighting Canada’s bilingual nature of English and French. For me, a Canadian by birth, I’m grateful to have that heritage. (more…)
I’m grieving the loss of dictionaries, thick, massive volumes that I used to get lost in. I would open a page and find hundreds of words, all of them demanding my attention, each a miniature world to explore. But now I’ve become a victim of on-line lexicons because they are handier than putting aside my laptop computer and marching into the other room to unload the Oxford from a bookshelf where it resides. 
I’m thinking this morning of when my husband and I returned from a couple of nights in Calistoga, a charming town in California’s Napa Valley. Yes, it has its share of upwardly mobile types who go there to visit the many wineries. But there also are others who need to be replenished by the pastoral setting and many opportunities to take walks in the surrounding hills. I need that uplift today. 
For everybody except those hiding under a rock, it’s impossible to avoid AI these days. 
I’m grateful to Al Sirois, a fellow Regal House author, for sharing with us his writing journey. 
Since my late 20s, I’ve recorded my dreams every morning, curious about the wonderful dramas that unfold each night in the subterranean depths. During a trip we took a while back to Osoyoos, B.C., I got a better understanding of dreams and the role they play in our lives. 
I recall returning home a while back after spending time at a recently built rental home on the Oxnard, California, beach. It had a wonderful view overlooking the harbor and ocean. You might think I would miss the incredible views and location, as well as the house, brimming with technological toys. But I didn’t. It was a relief to return to our simple Richmond abode, built in the 1940s. 
As a young woman in the 50s growing up in Canada, I was intrigued by hockey and football. Baseball didn’t exist for me then. It hadn’t entered Canadian consciousness, and it would take some years before it did. But I didn’t feel deprived. Hockey and football had much to offer at that time, including handsome, vigorous guys. 
Being part of an on-line writing group for several years provided me with many benefits. But the positives also produced a few negatives.Huge thanks to Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop for this excellent piece on “How, What and When Book Authors Get Paid”
September 2, 2024
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I’m reposting this newsletter that I sent out over a year ago in case some of my newer readers missed it. I continue to get questions on the royalty system, both in traditional publishing, and in the newer forms from independent presses to hybrid to self-publishing. I hope this math lesson helps a little to clarify matters.
I’ve learned over the years that many readers, fans and beginning writers think that published authors get rich really fast especially if they produce a number of books. I thought this might be a perfect opportunity for a little reality check in the form of a math lesson. Now that I’ve looked closely at these numbers, I admit to feeling some sympathy for publishers.
Most traditional office workers are paid twice a month and if they’re lucky, they have benefits like health insurance. Writers publishing with traditional publishers are paid twice a year, April 1st and October 1st. (Amazon pays you monthly if you self-publish or if you publish with one of their book divisions.) Needless to say, you have no obvious job benefits although working for yourself from home has advantages (and challenges) as many workers discovered during the pandemic.
My memoir DAUGHTER OF SPIES, Wartime Secrets, Family Lies was published by a small award-winning, women-owned independent press. Always before, I have published with one of what we call in the “biz,” the big 5. Names you’d recognize like Random House, Viking, Henry Holt, Macmillan and so on. Those publishers give you an advance and then pay you a royalty based on the list price. If the book costs $20 and you’re getting 10%, you’re receiving $2.00 per copy sold. In the end with high discounts to booksellers and freight pass through clauses (don’t ask!) and various other tweaks, many of the copies don’t deliver that kind of royalty to the author but we’ll leave that aside for now. One more note. The advance is an interest free loan that doesn’t need to be returned if you don’t “earn out.” (See this link for a post by Lincoln Michel on calculating when your book will earn out.) Every time you sell a book, that royalty is deducted from the advance. If you negotiated a $5000 advance and you’re getting $2.00 a copy, you’ll first need to sell 2500 copies in order to earn out and see any more income from the book.
An independent press rarely pays you an advance which means you start earning money from the first book sold although you still get your royalty checks twice a year. In addition, independent presses usually pay you based on the net price of the book, not the price listed on the jacket. Therein lies a tale. And here comes the math lesson.
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It costs the publisher $3.48 to print the $17.95 trade paperback book. If the customer is ordering the book through Amazon or at an independent bookseller, those outlets get their copies through a distributor. The distributor passes the book on to the bookseller at a 51% discount ($9.17) because the bookseller needs to buy it at a discount in order to sell it for a profit. The distributor charges a distribution fee of $2.29 a book so the net to the publisher when shipping through the distributor is $3.40 ($9.17 -3.48 -2.29 = $3.40) of which the author receives a percentage, anywhere from 10 to 25% or $.34 to $.85 a book.
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I always encourage my readers to order directly from the publishing house website because this is how the numbers work then. It still costs the publisher $3.48 to print the book, but without the distribution fee, shipping and handling per copy comes to $.82 per unit. So, the net to the publisher in this case is $13.65 (17.95 – 3.48 -.82 = $13.65 net.) Royalty to the author depending on the rate she negotiated in her contract runs from $1.63 to $3.41. Big difference! But we are all impatient these days and are hooked on Amazon’s swift delivery times so many more readers go that route rather than directly to the publisher’s website. And I’m always happy when readers order through an independent bookseller because I certainly want to keep them in business. Independent bookstores, run by people who really know and love books, represent a vital resource for any community. However unfortunately, buying a book from them doesn’t necessarily result in a better payment to the author.
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There are other ways to go these days from self-publishing to hybrid publishing where the author puts up most of the front money and gets paid back when the book sells. I’ve never signed with a hybrid publisher and I’ve only self-published two of my out-of-print novels and one short “kindle” single. Unless you publish regularly (by that I mean at least once a year if not more) and in a niche like self-help or genre fiction as two examples, it’s very hard to get yourself heard above the noise. To put it baldly, it is estimated based on the ISBN numbers sold by Bowker, that 2000 books are published EVERY DAY in the United States. As this article details, the sales of most books are shockingly small and still shrinking. The marketplace is saturated. Consumers are turning to media for their entertainment.
This comment by Courtney Maum, the author and educator, really struck home for me. “Publishers print books. Authors publish them.” How successfully books move in the marketplace now depends almost entirely on the author as publishers have cut their profit margins by reducing their marketing and publicity departments in order to focus their resources on the best-selling authors who bring in the most guaranteed sales.
As E.B. White said, “I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”
But if you’re a writer, you’re never not writing. You have a place you can go which nobody can take away from you, a world you’re creating that only you can visit. I wouldn’t give that up for anything. Whether you publish or not, whether you make any money from the words you throw down on the page is beside the point when you’re lost in the story. And every six months, that envelope arrives and if you’re lucky, a check falls out.
I’ll give E.B. White the final word.
“The whole duty of a writer is to please himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Let him start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living.”
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts,and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.
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