madgeniusclub

by Sarah Hoyt

I often talk about how I was influenced by Heinlein.  What I don’t mention is that the only books of his that could even vaguely be considered juveniles which I could find translated into Portuguese in the early seventies (which doesn’t mean that the others weren’t translated, only that I could no longer find them.  Portuguese book business has always worked on no-back-list, so barring finding the book used you were simply out of luck) were The Door Into Summer and Have Spacesuit Will Travel.  (This last one, of course, hit straight home because in many ways my family resembled Kip’s.  In many ways, too, I WAS Peewee.)

I read the juveniles after I got married.  My husband had about half of them, and I tracked the others down, used, one at a time, till my mid thirties.  (The days before Amazon were dark, oh, children of mine.)

But the thing is that before Heinlein I had another very strong influence on my formation and character.  Those of you who are from Europe, nod as you go along – Enid Blyton.

Yes, I know what is said of Ms. Blyton.  I don’t know if they call her sexist, but I’ve heard her accused of being racist and/or hating gypsies.  (Did she?  Well, I didn’t see it that way.  In Circus of adventure the gypsy girl is a central and sympathetic character.  BUT even if she had a condescending attitude to gypsies, it’s not race prejudice as such.  Part of it has a reason, at least if you go back far enough in Britain.  When sheep-culture [I can’t remember the Latin term.  Oviculture?] began in England, the enclosing and merging of lands led to a lot of marginal tenant families being dispossessed of the land they had farmed for generations.  Any number of them became “counterfeit gypsies.”  It was a way of avoiding the work house.  They dressed colorfully, moved from place to place, engaged in minor acts of pilfering.  “Gipsy” became the British word for “Homeless” or “Transient.”  The encampment of gypsies in Jane Austen’s Emma was almost certainly of this nature.  In that sense, it had nothing to do with race, and it was more akin to a young woman being afraid to cross a homeless camp – for that matter, probably not entirely unfounded.  Just because someone is discriminated against, it doesn’t make them angels.  My guess is that is the background of Blyton’s recoil from gypsies, if any.)

She’s also been accused of class prejudice.  Look, I wouldn’t know.  I did not grow up in a classless society, so at the ages I read her – four to ten or so – I would have been blind to it, at any rate.  It was just part of instruction on “How to behave properly.”

And right there, I must point out these things might be far more evident in the early childhood books.  I’ve heard of Noddy.  A friend of mine had one book.  But I never actually read any of those books.  The ones that helped form me were Famous Five and the Adventure books.  (I discovered the boarding school ones much later and read them, but by that time I was beyond “forming” at that level.)

What do I mean formed me?

Well, Enid Blyton who might or might not have hated Heinlein on sight, shared with him one important characteristic.  It is something that goes well beyond being a good writer, something almost of an alchemic nature, which is difficult to pin down.

They create in you a sense of morals – their morals – and a desire to follow them so that the author’s characters [or more often, bluntly, the author] would approve of you.

Admired, loved, important writers completely lack this.  (I could be wrong on this, being, again, well past the age of being formed, but from what I saw of how these influenced my younger son, J. K. Rowling completely lacks this, but Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series has it in spades.)

From Ms. Blyton I got un-Portuguese and frankly un-feminine senses of fair play and nobless oblige.  (Now, not totally un-Portuguese because the Northern region I come from was heavily influenced by England.  However, certain things that Blyton managed to instill with me, such as not taking advantage of personal connections and trying to get ahead purely on merit, or keeping a stiff upper lip and not displaying emotions, are outright counterproductive in Portuguese society.)

I’m not going to speculate on what creates that effect.  That’s a subject for another column.  I suspect it’s some combination of a strong personality, a strong voice, attractive stories AND the courage to give your opinion loud and clear.  (Agatha Christie seems to have this effect on some people, but not most, possibly due to her rather more quiet personality.)

I can tell you Enid Blyton had that effect, though, because hers were the first books I evangelized, and I saw her attitudes push into everyone to whom I gave the books.

Yes, I know what I said above about the attitudes being counterproductive in Portugal – but all the same they gave me a way to arrange my inner universe.  And they dovetailed rather well with the attitudes I picked up from Heinlein, btw.  So, of course, when I had children, I wanted to influence them to be more like me, so I could understand them (And verse the vice of course )

Heinlein books were easy to come by, and by then I had hold of the juveniles.  Enid Blyton, on the other hand…  The year before we had Robert, with the vague idea that a miracle might happen and we might eventually reproduce (well, we’d been trying for five years, in our twenties) I stopped by a bookstore in England to look for the books.  And recoiled.

There were books with those titles, right enough.  But they were not the books I’d read.  There were televisions, and computer games.  But what was more, the kids did not sound RIGHT.  It was a short excursion and I didn’t have the time to really read them, but I walked away shaking my head.  The books had been re-written, which I thought I understood.  But I had no intention of exposing my kids to this.  I didn’t know if whatever they’d done left the alchemy intact.

Fortuitously, years later, when Robert turned three, a friend of mine – hi Charles! – worked at a used bookstore.  When someone came in wishing to trade a large box of Enid Blyton, the books didn’t even go on the shelf.  I got a phone call, and rushed down.

These were the real deal, the books from my childhood.  I passed them on to the child, and again, the alchemy worked.

Now, you’re saying “But Sarah, they had to modernize the books.  How could kids read them otherwise?  Children are not sophisticated.  They have to read about kids like them, in environments like theirs.”

Really?  REALLY?  You’re REALLY REALLY REALLY going to tell me that?  And you expect me to believe it?  (Presses fingers on either side of the bridge of her nose, closes eyes and shakes her head.)  What kind of children do you people have?  More importantly, what kind of namby pamby expectations do you have of your children?

Throughout history children were raised on stories of lands long before their own and far more alien to them than England between the wars would be for children today.  Even fairytales should be incomprehensible to American children a hundred years ago.  Were they?  No.  Children will accept the parameters of a story, and then build from that.  Doing that is no different than learning the rules of Harry Potter and enjoying the books.  I mean, kids, you do know that your children aren’t learning broom flight and magic, right?

Is the setting of Enid Blyton’s adventure tales odd to modern children?  I should hope so.  It was outright alien to me.  No one in Portugal (different culture, remember?) would dream of letting their kids go and camp anywhere before their eighteenth or twentieth birthday.  And even then, they would not let girls do so.  There were also all sorts of idiosyncracies.  They had no TV for instance. …  But kids are adaptable.  I knew I was reading about a different land, a different time, and I went along with it, captured by the characters and accepting the premisses of the world.

People who insist that Blyton or Heinlein or for that matter Agatha Christie must be modernized for “the younger generation” have been sold a bill of goods.  Young people who won’t read Heinlein because “I grew up with computers, and his characters don’t have them, so they’re irrelevant” of course also can’t handle mythological tales, or stories of the middle ages.  Or perhaps they’ve just been sold a bill of goods by the adults in their lives.  Or perhaps… and this is the scary part, they’re so convinced of the rightness of the consensus reality these days, so absolutely sure that our prejudices, our beliefs, our thoughts about things are the right ones, that they don’t want to think society might have been organized differently once upon a time.

This is different – if you ask – from the type of strong moral (or immoral) code that can influence other people.  For one, it’s more fragile.  I can’t imagine anyone like Heinlein or Blyton refusing to read about other lands/people because “they aren’t like me.”  They would probably judge the inhabitants of those worlds, fictional or not, according to their own lights (multiculturalism being a weak poison at the time) but they wouldn’t put their hands over their ears and refuse to hear about it.  In fact, this attitude of “modernizing” books betrays a LACK of cultural confidence, and a lack of belief that this is what we should pass on to our children.  It’s as though we’re (and here I’m talking society as a whole.  Just like I am at home in the lowest greasy spoon and the highest gourmet restaurant, I can encompass literature from all eras, and my kids can as well) afraid our kids will find out things were organized differently once upon a time, will investigate why and will come to believe (oh, horrors!) those old norms.

In fact, the “updating” of books is another way of enforcing that consensus reality that the gatekeepers have been working so hard at.  It’s a way of making sure that you hear nothing that makes you question “how things are done.”

It is in a way the same impulse that led to the endless revisions of history in 1984.  “We have always been at war with Eurasia” means you shouldn’t consider that perhaps there is a specific reason for that war, and that maybe that war is wrong.  “We have always had computers” and “it’s always been wrong to look down on gypsies” and “Women and men have always been equal” means you don’t think too hard about the way we live, and don’t consider HOW you could live.

You see what I mean about how that betrays a lack of cultural confidence?  How what it shows is that people are afraid their kids will meet unexpurgated books that push thoughts that are no part of our “politically correct” reality?  (Did you know that term comes from Maoism?  It was supposed to denote something that was obviously wrong, but was “politically correct” – i.e. true to the ideology of Maoism.)

“Oh, come, Sarah,” you said.  “Aren’t you getting al bent out of shape because some idiots gave The Famous Five computers?  I mean, it’s not like they’re defacing Caesar’s Campaigns in Gaul!  Perhaps kids like reading about other kids with computer games.”

Ah.  But see, when you go in to “modernize” something it’s very easy to change the other stuff too – on purpose or not.  Look, I’ve tried to revise a mystery that I wrote in the early eighties, and had it fall apart in my hand.  It was impossible for that book to happen in a world in which you could google things.  Modernizing something from the early twentieth century?  You’re going to have to change essential parts.  You’re just going to have to. And, of course, while you’re modernizing, you’re going to “correct” the attitudes of the characters.

No?

Okay, let me tell you a story.  My older son, during one of our walks, brought up a book I couldn’t remember.  He said something about a tree and “it was one of the books I read when I was little.”  Well, he read EVERYTHING when he was little – kind of like a pulping machine will swallow everything – so I forgot about it.

Only he didn’t.  Turns out that box of books had a few Enid Blytons I’d never read.  Robert, in attempting to prove to me he’d not gone nuts and that there was a story out there that sounded like what he’d told me, went looking through the internet.

He found it.  It’s The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton.  And then he found the paragraph on Wikipedia, talking about the “modernized” versions.

In modern reprints, the names of some of the characters have been changed. Jo has been changed to Joe, the more common spelling for males, and Bessie is now Beth, the former name having fallen out of usage as a nickname for Elizabeth. Fanny and Dick, whose names now carry unfortunate connotations, have been renamed Frannie and Rick. The character of Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, and no longer practises corporal punishment but instead reprimands her students by shouting at them.

I’ve never seen my son so shocked.  Not the names, though changing the names is a goodly piece of nonsense.  Again, children are not completely stupid, and it doesn’t hurt them to know that the slang terms weren’t always the same as they are now.  On the contrary it gives them an idea of change and of time altering things.  (Which of course will make them question the justness of our own versions of things.)  But note that the character who practiced corporal punishment has been changed too, because G-d forbid our precious little sprouts would guess that once upon a time, and still throughout most of the world, corporal punishment is the norm in child rearing, and that generation upon generation have been raised that way without turning out any more dysfunctional than our own children?

If the precious moralists and revisionists HAD to do that and felt their own inherent superiority enough to do that – what else did they DO?  What else is changed in those books?

I bet you EVERYTHING.  Every attitude, every way of looking at the world.  EVERYTHING that made those books powerful moral influences.  If anything of that feeling remains, it is now in the service of the currently fashionable ideas – ideas like the ridiculous animism/new-primitive worship of the Earth (quite distinct from trying to keep a functional ecology), ideas like “we can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, even if they’re bad” ideas like “political correctness.”

My son said “WHY do that?  Why keep the book, the shell of the book and change everything?  That’s horrifying.  Wouldn’t it be more honest to burn them and ban them?  How dare they take the words of someone who is dead and can’t defend him/herself and make them into something OTHER?”

I agree with him.  If you’re that diffident about your current ideas and attitudes that you don’t want children exposed to older ones, be honest about your insecurity and bigotry.  Burn the books.  Ban them.  Yes, it will make you feel like a thug, a bully and a coward, but that just means you’re seeing yourself clearly.  If that’s what you want to be, BE that.

But don’t hollow out a person’s ideas and thoughts and attitudes, fill them with your own consensus reality, and then sell it under that person’s name.

That’s repulsive.  Grave robbers have better morals.

Hi guys, this is Sarah Hoyt speaking — Kris Rusch is having issues with malware attacks on her sites, and I find her post important enough to echo it here and over at Mad Genius Club.

The Business Rusch: Royalty Statement Update 2012
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about the fact that my e-book royalties from a couple of my traditional publishers looked wrong. Significantly wrong. After I posted that blog, dozens of writers contacted me with similar information. More disturbingly, some of these writers had evidence that their paper book royalties were also significantly wrong.

Writers contacted their writers’ organizations. Agents got the news. Everyone in the industry, it seemed, read those blogs, and many of the writers/agents/organizations vowed to do something. And some of them did.

I hoped to do an update within a few weeks after the initial post. I thought my update would come no later than summer of 2011.

I had no idea the update would take a year, and what I can tell you is—

Bupkis. Nada. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.

That doesn’t mean that nothing happened. I personally spoke to the heads of two different writers’ organizations who promised to look into this. I spoke to half a dozen attorneys active in the publishing field who were, as I mentioned in those posts, unsurprised. I spoke to a lot of agents, via e-mail and in person, and I spoke to even more writers.

The writers have kept me informed.  It seems, from the information I’m still getting, that nothing has changed. The publishers that last year used a formula to calculate e-book royalties (rather than report actual sales) still use the formula to calculate e-book royalties this year.

I just got one such royalty statement in April from one of those companies and my e-book sales from them for six months were a laughable ten per novel. My worst selling e-books, with awful covers, have sold more than that. Significantly more.

To this day, writers continue to notify their writers’ organizations, and if those organizations are doing anything, no one has bothered to tell me. Not that they have to. I’m only a member of one writers’ organizations, and I know for fact that one is doing nothing.

But the heads of the organizations I spoke to haven’t kept me apprised. I see nothing in the industry news about writers’ organizations approaching/auditing/dealing with the problems with royalty statements.  Sometimes these things take place behind the scenes, and I understand that. So, if your organization is taking action, please do let me know so that I can update the folks here.

The attorneys I spoke to are handling cases, but most of those cases are individual cases. An attorney represents a single writer with a complaint about royalties. Several of those cases got settled out of court. Others are still pending or are “in review.” I keep hearing noises about class actions, but so far, I haven’t seen any of them, nor has anyone notified me.

The agents disappointed me the most. Dean personally called an agent friend of ours whose agency handles two of the biggest stars in the writing firmament. That agent (having previously read my blog) promised the agency was aware of the problem and  was “handling it.”

Two weeks later, I got an e-mail from a writer with that agency asking me if I knew about the new e-book addendum to all of her contracts that the agency had sent out. The agency had sent the addendum with a “sign immediately” letter. I hadn’t heard any of this. I asked to see the letter and the addendum.

This writer was disturbed that the addendum was generic. It had arrived on her desk—get this—without her name or the name of the book typed in. She was supposed to fill out the contract number, the book’s title, her name, and all that pertinent information.

I had her send me her original contracts, which she did. The addendum destroyed her excellent e-book rights in that contract, substituting better terms for the publisher.  Said publisher handled both of that agency’s bright writing stars.

So I contacted other friends with that agency. They had all received the addendum. Most had just signed the addendum without comparing it to the original contract, trusting their agent who was (after all) supposed to protect them.

Wrong-o. The agency, it turned out, had made a deal with the publisher. The publisher would correct the royalties for the big names if agency sent out the addendum to every contract it had negotiated with that contract. The publisher and the agency both knew that not all writers would sign the addendum, but the publisher (and probably the agency) also knew that a good percentage of the writers would sign without reading it.

In other words, the publisher took the money it was originally paying to small fish and paid it to the big fish—with the small fish’s permission.

Yes, I’m furious about this, but not at the publisher. I’m mad at the authors who signed, but mostly, I’m mad at the agency that made this deal. This agency had a chance to make a good decision for all of its clients. Instead, it opted to make a good deal for only its big names.

Do I know for a fact that this is what happened? Yeah, I do. Can I prove it? No. Which is why I won’t tell you the name of the agency, nor the name of the bestsellers involved. (Who, I’m sure, have no idea what was done in their names.)

On a business level what the agency did makes sense. The agency pocketed millions in future commissions without costing itself a dime on the other side, since most of the writers who signed the addendum probably hadn’t earned out their advances, and probably never would.

On an ethical level it pisses me off. You’ll note that my language about agents has gotten harsher over the past year, and this single incident had something to do with it. Other incidents later added fuel to the fire, but they’re not relevant here. I’ll deal with them in a future post.

Yes, there are good agents in the world. Some work for unethical agencies. Some work for themselves. I still work with an agent who is also a lawyer, and is probably more ethical than I am.

But there are yahoos in the agenting business who make the slimy used car salesmen from 1970s films look like action heroes. But, as I said, that’s a future post.

I have a lot of information from writers, most of which is in private correspondence, none of which I can share, that leads me to believe that this particular agency isn’t the only one that used my blog on royalty statements to benefit their bestsellers and hurt their midlist writers. But again, I can’t prove it.

So I’m sad to report that nothing has changed from last  year on the royalty statement front.

Except…

The reason I was so excited about the Department of Justice lawsuit against the five publishers wasn’t because of the anti-trust issues (which do exist on a variety of levels in publishing, in my opinion), but because the DOJ accountants will dig, and dig, and dig into the records of these traditional publishers, particularly one company named in the suit that’s got truly egregious business practices.

Those practices will change, if only because the DOJ’s forensic accountants will request information that the current accounting systems in most publishing houses do not track. The accounting system in all five of these houses will get overhauled, and brought into the 21st century, and that will benefit writers. It will be an accidental benefit, but it will occur.

The audits alone will unearth a lot of problems. I know that some writers were skeptical that the auditors would look for problems in the royalty statements, but all that shows is a  lack of understanding of how forensic accounting works. In the weeks since the DOJ suit, I’ve contacted several accountants, including two forensic accountants, and they all agree that every pebble, every grain of sand, will be inspected because the best way to hide funds in an accounting audit is to move them to a part of the accounting system not being audited.

So when an organization like the DOJ audits, they get a blanket warrant to look at all of the accounting, not just the files in question. Yes, that’s a massive task. Yes, it will take years. But the change is gonna come.

From the outside.

Those of you in Europe might be seeing some of that change as well, since similar lawsuits are going on in Europe.

I do know that several writers from European countries, New Zealand, and Australia have written to me about similar problems in their royalty statements. The unifying factor in those statements is the companies involved.  Again, you’d recognize the names because they’ve been in the news lately…dealing with lawsuits.

Ironically for me, those two blog posts benefitted me greatly. I had been struggling to get my rights back from one publisher (who is the biggest problem publisher), and the week I posted the blog, I got contacted by my former editor there, who told me that my rights would come back to me ASAP. Because, the former editor told me (as a friend), things had changed since Thursday (the day I post my blog), and I would get everything I needed.

In other words, let’s get the troublemaker out of the house now. Fine with me.

Later, I discovered some problems with a former agency. I pointed out the problems in a letter, and those problems got solved immediately. I have several friends who’ve been dealing with similar things from that agency, and they can’t even get a return e-mail. I know that the quick response I got is because of this blog.

I also know that many writers used the blog posts from last year to negotiate more accountability from their publishers for future royalties. That’s a real plus. Whether or not it happens is another matter because I noted something else in this round of royalty statements.

Actually, that’s not fair. My agent caught it first. I need to give credit where credit is due, and since so many folks believe I bash agents, let me say again that my current agent is quite good, quite sharp, and quite ethical.

My agent noticed that the royalty statements from one of my publishers were basket accounted on the statement itself. Which is odd, considering there is no clause in any of the contracts I have with that company that allows for basket accounting.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with basket accounting, this is what it means:

A writer signs a contract with Publisher A for three books. The contract is a three-book contract. One contract, three books. Got that?

Okay, a contract with a basket-accounting clause allows the publisher to put all three books in the same accounting “basket” as if the books are one entity. So let’s say that book one does poorly, book two does better, and book three blows out of the water.

If book three earns royalties, those royalties go toward paying off the advances on books one and two.

Like this:

Advance for book one: $10,000

Advance for book two: $10,000

Advance for book three: $10,000

Book one only earned back $5,000 toward its advance. Book two only earned $6,000 toward its advance.

Book three earned $12,000—paying off its advance, with a $2,000 profit.

In a standard contract without basket accounting, the writer would have received the $2,000 as a royalty payment.

But with basket accounting, the writer receives nothing. That accounting looks like this:

Advance on contract 1: $30,000

Earnings on contract 1: $23,000

Amount still owed before the advance earns out: $7,000

Instead of getting $2,000, the writer looks at the contract and realizes she still has $7,000 before earning out.

Without basket accounting, she would have to earn $5,000 to earn out Book 1, and $4,000 to earn out Book 2, but Book 3 would be paying her cold hard cash.

Got the difference?

Now, let’s go back to my royalty statement. It covered three books. All three books had three different one-book contracts, signed years apart. You can’t have basket accounting without a basket (or more than one book), but I checked to see if sneaky lawyers had inserted a clause that I missed which allowed the publisher to basket account any books with that publisher that the publisher chose.

Nope.

I got a royalty statement with all of my advances basket accounted because…well, because. The royalty statement doesn’t follow the contract(s) at all.

Accounting error? No. These books had be added separately. Accounting program error (meaning once my name was added, did the program automatically basket account)? Maybe.

But I’ve suspected for nearly three years now that this company (not one of the big traditional publishers, but a smaller [still large] company) has been having serious financial problems. The company has played all kinds of games with my checks, with payments, with fulfilling promises that cost money.

This is just another one of those problems.

My agent caught it because he reads royalty statements. He mentioned it when he forwarded the statements. I would have caught it as well because I read royalty statements. Every single one. And I compare them to the previous statement. And often, I compare them to the contract.

Is this “error” a function of the modern publishing environment? No, not like e-book royalties, which we’ll get back to in a moment. I’m sure publishers have played this kind of trick since time immemorial. Royalty statements are fascinating for what they don’t say rather than for what they say.

For example, on this particular (messed up) royalty statement, e-books are listed as one item, without any identification. The e-books should be listed separately (according to ISBN) because Amazon has its own edition, as does Apple, as does B&N. Just like publishers must track the hardcover, trade paper, and mass market editions under different ISBNs, they should track e-books the same way.

The publisher that made the “error” with my books had no identifying number, and only one line for e-books. Does that mean that this figure included all e-books, from the Amazon edition to the B&N edition to the Apple edition? Or is this publisher, which has trouble getting its books on various sites (go figure), is only tracking Amazon? From the numbers, it would seem so. Because the numbers are somewhat lower than books in the same series that I have on Amazon, but nowhere near the numbers of the books in the same series if you add in Apple and B&N.

I can’t track this because the royalty statement has given me no way to track it. I would have to run an audit on the company. I’m not sure I want to do that because it would take my time, and I’m moving forward.

That’s the dilemma for writers. Do we take on our publishers individually? Because—for the most part—our agents aren’t doing it. The big agencies, the ones who actually have the clout and the numbers to defend their clients, are doing what they can for their big clients and leaving the rest in the dust.

Writers’ organizations seem to be silent on this. And honestly, it’s tough for an organization to take on a massive audit. It’s tough financially and it’s tough politically. I know one writer who headed a writer’s organization a few decades ago. She spearheaded an audit of major publishers, and it cost her her writing career. Not many heads of organizations have the stomach for that.

As for intellectual property attorneys (or any attorney for that matter), very few handle class actions. Most handle cases individually for individual clients. I know of several writers who’ve gone to attorneys and have gotten settlements from publishers. The problem here is that these settlements only benefit one writer, who often must sign a confidentiality agreement so he can’t even talk about what benefit he got from that agreement.

One company that I know of has revamped its royalty statements. They appear to be clearer. The original novel that I have with that company isn’t selling real well as an e-book, and that makes complete sense since the e-book costs damn near $20. (Ridiculous.) The other books that I have with that company, collaborations and tie-ins, seem to be accurately reported, although I have no way to know. I do appreciate that this company has now separated out every single e-book venue into its own category (B&N, Amazon, Apple) via ISBN, and I can actually see the sales breakdown.

So that’s a positive (I think). Some of the smaller companies have accurate statements as well—or at least, statements that match or improve upon the sales figures I’m seeing on indie projects.

This is all a long answer to a very simple question: What’s happened on the royalty statement front in the past year?

A lot less than I had hoped.

So here’s what you traditionally published writers can do. Track your royalty statements. Compare them to your contracts. Make sure the companies are reporting what they should be reporting.

If you’re combining indie and traditional, like I am, make sure the numbers are in the same ballpark. Make sure your traditional Amazon numbers are around the same numbers you get for your indie titles. If they aren’t, look at one thing first: Price. I expect sales to be much lower on that ridiculous $20 e-book. If your e-books through your traditional publisher are $15 or more, then sales will be down. If the e-books from your traditional publisher are priced around $10 or less, then they should be somewhat close in sales to your indie titles. (Or, if traditional publishers are doing the promotion they claim to do, the sales should be better.)

What to do if they’re not close at all? I have no idea. I still think there’s a benefit to contacting your writers’ organizations. Maybe if the organization keeps getting reports of badly done royalty statements, someone will take action.

If you want to hire an attorney or an auditor, remember doing that will cost both time and money. If you’re a bestseller, you might want to consider it. If you’re a midlist writer, it’s probably not worth the time and effort you’ll put in.

But do yourself a favor. Read those royalty statements. If you think they’re bad, then don’t sign a new contract with that publisher. Go somewhere else with your next book.

I wish I could give you better advice. I wish the big agencies actually tried to use their clout for good instead of their own personal profits. I wish the writers’ organizations had done something.

As usual, it’s up to individual writers.

Don’t let anyone screw you. You might not be able to fight the bad accounting on past books, but make sure you don’t allow it to happen on future books.

That means that you negotiate good contracts, you make sure your royalty statements match those contracts, and you don’t sign with a company that puts out royalty statements that don’t reflect your book deal.

I’m quite happy that I walked away from the publisher I mentioned above years ago. I did so because I didn’t like the treatment I got from the financial and production side. The editor was—as editors often are—great. Everything else at the company sucked.

The royalty statement was just confirmation of a good decision for me.

I hope you make good decisions going forward.

Remember: read your royalty statements.

Good luck.

I need to thank everyone who commented, e-mailed, donated, and called because of last week’s post. When I wrote it, all I meant to do was discuss how we all go through tough times and how we, as writers, need to recognize when we’ve hit a wall. It seems I hit a nerve. I forget sometimes that most writers work in a complete vacuum, with no writer friends, no one except family, who much as they care, don’t always understand.

So if you haven’t read last week’s post, take a peek. More importantly, look at the comments for great advice and some wonderful sharing. I appreciate them—and how much they expanded, added, and improved what I had to say. Thanks for that, everyone.

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“The Business Rusch: “Royalty Statement Update 2012,” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

*Sarah Hoyt Editorial Note: Right now I can’t get to any of her sites, to pick up the paypal link, but she does have one, and if you consistently read her, you should tip.  You also can’t read last week’s post, but once the hacking gets solved you should.  It meant a lot to me.

by Sarah Hoyt

In Terry Pratchett’s books, Lady Sybil Ramkin Vimes’ family motto is “What is ours, we keep.”

I’m sure it started out the way most things in Pratchett’s books started out.  The Ramkins are an old family, who intimidated their way everywhere and who conquered a lot of places and took a lot of wealth.  At least that has been the view of them throughout most of the books.  Sybil herself is a good egg, devoted to saving dragons, but the Ramkins are, by and large, one of the rapacious noble clans.

And then in the last book, something happened.  The “What is mine I keep” was turned on its head, in a way, which brought me to the realization that property, hereditary or not, is a double edged sword.  As is ownership: of things, of self, of talents, of career, of EVERYTHING.

Two things.  This is not a political article – mostly – but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that yesterday was Victims of Communism Day.  Or that if you haven’t read The Black Book of Communism, you should.

The second thing I’d like to mention, it that I sort of already knew all this, instinctively and through my toenails, as I seem to know most of this stuff.  I just didn’t put it together in moral terms, till recently.

I grew up in the seventies and eighties with the communists and assorted stripes of collectivist taking the moral high ground.  After all, the rest of us were for things being unfair.  We wanted people to have more stuff than others.  And even if people got there naturally, well, it was wrong, because not everyone has the same capabilities.  Even if you got what you have by chiseling stuff off the rock, with your bare hands, well, not everyone has the same tough hands you have, you know, and why aren’t you more compassionate?

Even people who were strong anti-communists – and paid for it in career – seemed to bow to the communists and take a sort of moral back seat to them, and say “I know they mean well, it just doesn’t work.”  This still goes on.  In a lecture, yesterday, my kid was shown anti-communist films from the seventies, and his classmates laughed, because, you know, communists aren’t evil.  They’re well intentioned, after all.  (Read the Black Book Of Communism.  DO.)

I said this is not a political column.  It’s not.  At the same time this stuff is so ingrained and has become such part of our society that it’s hard to get at the basis of morality and – eventuality – the basis of managing a writing career, without going through it.

For instance, the idea of “equality” we have is mostly Marxist.  The equality before US law is not an equality of results.  But we assume that equality of results is desired.  We assume that if someone has more than others, this was somehow acquired by immoral means.  We talk about “Giving more to the community” and “Having more than our fair share.”  All of it is nonsense in real world terms.  It can only be talked about in terms that concede that Marxism is moral.

Part of this is because Marxism slots, perhaps fatally, with a part of the monkey brain.  In a small hominid band, if someone is taking more food than the others, he IS hogging it; he is greedy; and he is stealing from others.

In our society in which “resources” are what you make of them… not so much.  In our society where what you create is what matters for life, not so much.  In the chaotic system of a global economy, not so much.

And we come back to “what is mine, I keep.”

Look, I know some people are born with more than others.  They’re born with more talent, more intelligence, more ability, more tenacity.  Some are born with more things, too, but that’s nowhere as important in the long run.  However, some people are born with more than others.  Most of us realize that round about kindergarten.  It is immediately followed by ourselves or others realizing “it isn’t fair.”

“Fair” works in kindergarten, which is much like a small hominid band.  (Or a band of small hominids.  Eh.)  There are limited resources, and if you take too many graham crackers you are being greedy and your crackers will be redistributed.  This works, because the teacher, who is in charge of the class, makes you do it.

There is no teacher in charge of life.  I know, I know, but it’s true.  NO TEACHER.  This being the case, there is no “fairness” in life.  There is no “honor” in life.  There is no “equality” in life.

Heinlein and Shakespeare have both been there before me, but the truth is you could take all of reality and distill it down to the last atom.  And you’d not find an ounce of fairness.  Not an atom of justice.  Not a hint of equality.

These qualities exist only in the mind of man.

Does that mean then that there is no morality?  That the life of man devolves to nature, red in tooth and claw?  How can I claim that’s good?

I don’t.  There is morality.  Morality starts with the individual.  Over time we’ve found that the only thing that distinguishes us from animals is to devise ways of getting along – ways of jostling together – and we’ve discovered – sometimes against our best instincts – that some ways of living together are better than the others.  Those societies where it doesn’t start with the individual always end the same way, whether you call them absolute monarchy, communism or enlightened oligopoly.  Always.  It’s always the mass graves and the small group of rulers, who preside over an increasingly more impoverished society.  It’s always the famines and the purges.  And I’ll explain why, in a moment.

So we start with the individual and with “What is mine, I keep.”  This means each individual has a right to self defense, to begin with.  And if you say no one is disputing anyone’s right to self defense, you are wrong.  It starts in kindergarten, where these days “fighting” is punished equally, whether you are the aggressor, or not, because “violence never solved anything.”  (All of these teachers are hanging hopefully on the line, to confirm that with the City Fathers of Carthage.)  It goes on to people being charged with using “excessive force” to defend themselves from attack or home invasion.

Not being allowed to defend yourself, means you can’t KEEP what is yours.  Keep both in the sense of own and control.  Which immediately makes you a possession of those in authority to defend you.  And on the other side of that – and not as far as you’d expect – there’s the mass graves.  Because, well, if they can choose to defend you or not, then they can also remove you if you become inconvenient to the “common good” which always has to be judged by someone, after all (remember, life has no teacher overseeing it) and is always judged by those with the capacity to exert force.

Once you grant an individual the right to self-ownership, you can’t go about saying he has to give back to the community, though, or that what he’s doing isn’t fair.  Unless he’s actually actively impairing others’ rights to self-ownership and exertion of their talents (the reason government is a necessary evil) he should be allowed to own himself to the final extent of the law.

What is mine, I keep.  That means I use or not, protect or not, increase or waste.  It is mine.  My body, my talents, my effort, my responsibility, my stuff, and the more tenuous web of feelings granted to me by others and by me to them: my friends, my kids, my husband.  And then the stuff that falls under honor-and-credit.  What others know about me, based on accumulated behavior: my career.  My reputation.  My trustworthiness.  They’re all mine.

What is mine.  I keep.  This is what is known as being a free man.

It is also a crushing responsibility.  You have the right to squander everything that is yours, to the last penny, the last ounce of strength.  It’s your choice.  You use your mind to do it.

What does society owe you then?  Nothing.  Am I saying you should be cast out into outer darkness, where there’s crying and gnashing of teeth?  No.  I’m saying that if you husbanded what is yours, even if you’re broke – I’ve been dead broke three times in my life.  I mean DEAD broke, considering soup kitchen as only way to a meal that day broke – and even if in ultimate analysis it’s not really your fault, you will have an immaterial safety net.  Honor and credit.  Friends.  A community that will come through for you.

But that would be shameful, you say.  Society shouldn’t make you feel ashamed.

Why not?  What business is it of society whether you came to this legitimately or not?  Whose job is it to judge? Who is supposed to make it “fair”?  Do you know every one from whom money will be taken by force (taxes are always enforced by physical force) to help you?  Do you know they’re not as needy as you are?  Or that this taking won’t make them spiral into a situation like yours?  HOW do you know?  WHO are you making into your judge, your “teacher”?  And if you don’t know them personally, if they’re not part of “what is yours” why would you do that?  You’re making yourself property, a chattel.  Even if you think you’ll gain by it, you’re surrendering the right of self-ownership.  And that, in my view, should make you feel more ashamed.

It’s very scary to keep what’s yours. You could lose it all.  It’s also very freeing.  You don’t grant anyone the right to take it from you – or to take you from you.

For years now, writers have been living in a kindergarten class.  Teacher decided on the value of our work.  Teacher decided what was right and what was wrong, what was “worthy of being read” and pushed and promoted, and what was “hack work, not to be published, or to be buried deep in the never-upturned midlist.”

Turns out teacher was wrong, and has squandered most of their credit, their honor, and their money too.  And the new kid in town – ebooks, though mostly Amazon just now – has taken their power and their control, not yet to the same extent, but close to the way they took writers.

And now they’re crying, and it’s not fair, and they want teacher to make it fair.  They’re playing with fire.  A government that can favor them can also shut them up.  But they don’t care.  They want it “fair.”  And they want to make sure only the “worthy” books get read.

Any author who isn’t at least experimenting with indie is a born slave.  I love my one remaining traditional publishing house and have (I think.  I don’t know if she’d agree, but I hope so) a good relationship with the publisher.  BUT it still behooves me to have alternate career paths, to have other ways of getting my words before the public and – bluntly – other ways of making money.

Why?  Because what is mine, I keep.  My talent, my ability, my work, my CONTROL.  What is mine, I keep.  I can destroy it or increase it.  It’s my right.  I’m a free woman.  I grant no one the right to control me, or keep me, or impair me.

(Holds up both middle fingers to every one who thinks that publishing “needs” those who know better to look after it.)  There is no such thing with fairness.  There’s only this:

What is mine, I keep.