Richard Lynch wrote:
I've got a pretty good idea what your advance was, and what your royalties are.
I suspect that your estimate of the advances paid by Apress/friends of Ed is inflated. Royalties are no secret: Apress publishes its standard contract on the web for prospective authors to see. The basic rate is 10% of the net income received by the publisher. Since heavy discounting is prevalent in the publishing industry, this means the author ends up with less than 5% of the book's cover price. So on a book with a cover price of $40, the author gets less than $2. You need to sell a very large number of books to make a reasonable return on the time invested.
I'm sticking to my statement that, surprisingly, you've probably made more than some rock "stars" with bad contract who had only one hit song.
I have no doubt that a lot of musicians end up with a very poor deal. So do many authors. The point is that the pirate site in question seems to take particular pleasure in defying the big movie and recording companies. Those companies are profitable enough to sustain the loss of royalties, and big-name artists do get a large enough advance to enjoy a high-octane lifestyle. However, piracy hits the individual author or musician disproportionately.
I'm under no illusion that the 2,000+ downloads of my book would have turned into legitimate sales if illegal copies weren't available. But writing about PHP is a highly competitive niche market. Any loss of sales is unwelcome.
David Powers -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
