How do you know when you're being taken for a sucker?

[B.R.Stateham]

Royalty statement came in for one of my books--the police-procedural series I'm writing. Oddly enough, I get the strongest impression I'm being screwed. When the book came out it was within three months of the first royalty reporting months. It sold X number of books. This second royalty statement comes almost a year to the publishing date later. A year's worth of advertising, book signings, internet ads, discussions, blogging---a year's worth of getting several very good reviews from fans and doing well in both Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Yet it sold exactly the same number of books as it did in the first royalty statement. (meaning, it hardly sold any at all).

Now we all gripe and moan about book sales. That's just part of being a human who has the disease of callling himself a writer. But what if our moaning is legitimate. What if we are being screwed. How in the world could you prove or disprove this without going financially bankrupt? Which, in my case, wouldn't take much at all to do.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

But I have no hard independent evidence on what has been sold.

The publisher I work for offers exact sales numbers as it relates to your royalty statements (it's a non-fiction house, but it shouldn't matter). An author should never need an expensive tracking service to know how many copies moved from the press. You should only need a phone call to your editor/sales manager.

If they can't tell you how many copies you've sold, they shouldn't be able to tell you your royalty.

[B.R.Stateham]

Thanks, Ben. Yeah, we live and learn.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

I wish nothing but the best for you, B.R., so I'd like to point you to this URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

It sums up PublishAmerica. This company is fishy. And you know what they say about "swimming with the fishes."

[B.R.Stateham]

Just heard a disturbing bit of news from a fellow PA author. She can't contact the main office via the phone. If that's not some glitch in the hardware, what does that suggest?

(is it all right if I get sick and barf in the trashcan now?)

[Donna Carrick]

I really hope you get to the bottom of it, B.R. We're all hoping that lots of promotion will help sales, after all.

[Jon Loomis]

This blows, B.R. Sounds very fishy, indeed.

[B.R.Stateham]

In my case there was no such thing as a first run of books. PublishAmerican doesn't work like a traditional publisher does. What's ordered is what's printed. Yes, Amazon stocks about ten copies, as does Barnes&Noble. But there's no bookstore chains receiving copies of my books unless someone orders it.

Yet . . .books are being sold. Rankforest.com graphs my books going up and down all the time. There is an almost daily movement in the graph numbers. But I have no hard independent evidence on what has been sold. And I do not have the resources financially to buy into the tracking services which does keep a hard count on books purchased.

[I. J. Parker]

There's the rub: the returns! Something should be done about that. Let the book stores order more carefully and then be stuck with selling what they ordered. The returns are not only deducted from the author's royalties, but huge amounts of money are retained later by the publisher to cover possible returns.

And yes, I've wondered about the numbers. I can only watch Amazon, but I have watched that closely enough to get a good idea when a book sells one or two copies. Unfortunately, my numbers don't match royalty statements. There is a way to check sales. Publishers and agents subscribe to an agency that counts sales. I know, for example, that my latest (released Aug. 1) had sold 1000 copies by mid September.
That would be a nice number, if it weren't for the fact that sales figures are good for only month or two and then fall off to a mere dribble. There is no more publicity or reviews, and the libraries have the books on their shelves. After that first month, stores return everything they haven't sold to make room for the next month's releases. Let me say again that it's the stores that screw the authors because of the generous return policies that publishers have in place.

[John McFetridge]

The issue in Hollywood was always between the gross and the net revenue - there was never really an attempt to hide the number of tickets sold, just the possible exaggeration of the amount of money spent on marketing and distribution.

My royalty statements are very clear - and rather depressing. The story in the book business is that there's no middle - books either sell more than 100,000 or less than a 1000. John Banville pointed out that before his novel won the Booker it had sold 800 copies.

The question B.R. is what was the print run and how many were ordered by stores and how many were returned?