Royalty frequency
Brian Clegg
Monday, 12 March 2007 16:50 UTC
I honestly didn’t start this forum with the intention of it being a moaning shop about the mechanics of being an author, and I will make sure there are more positive topics in future, but I do want to see what others think of a trend in book publishing that I think is very dangerous.
When I started writing books, the norm was for royalties to be paid twice a year. Accounting was semi-manual and took a long time, so this made sense.
Now, of course, accounting and stock control is mostly fully automated, so it should be entirely possible to do monthly reporting and accounts. So what have some publishers done? Moved to ANNUAL accounting. Just think about this. It means for a book that sells in January 2007, I might not get paid until March/April 2008, and I only get paid once a year.
I think when publishers staff accept that they should get their salaries once a year, up to 15 months in arrears with no interest on the money their employer has sat on, then this might be acceptable. But somehow I can’t see it coming!
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Replies
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Brian—you are dead right. One thing that shocked and saddened me when I was first exposed to the horrors of the book biz was how woefully inefficient and incompetent it can be… No names, no pack drill.
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The Macmillan Science list accounts twice a year, fyi, to offset some of the issues thrown up by the ‘no advance’ approach you go into on your other topic strand.
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Sara –
I wasn’t knocking (or even referring to) Macmillan Science. But some other publishers – the academic publisher Routledge, for example – have in recent years moved from the traditional twice yearly accounting to annual.It’s hard not to see this as ripping off the author, when it happens at the same time as technology is making it easier to do fairer and more frequent accounting.
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Being a cynic, I’d suggest that the reason for annual (rather than semi-annual or monthly) royalty payments is that the publisher can hang on to the interest accrued by your royalty before they pay you, and this interest is compounded the longer they can get away with delaying payment to you. You might want to ask them about this…
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