Hi Kenneth.
PublishAmerica Feb. 2010 Royalty Statement; See Important Notice At Bottom
Royalty statement period: August 1, 2009 through January 31, 2010
Your book sold no copies during this past sales period.
Books you bought yourself at a discount don't count in PA land.
Author: Kenneth Kirsch
Title: Demon Alcohol and the Monstermen
ISBN: 1606720759
Retail Discount 0%
Returned Books 0
Quantity 0
Royalty % 8
Sales Price $0.00
Total Amount of Royalties Payable: $0.00
Normally when Borders or B & N or Amazon buys a books, they pay from 40 to 60% of the cover price, resell at the cover price, and keep the difference. PA discounts ranges from nothing to very little. In any case, you're not showing any books, so the discount PA would have offered may not be shown.
Almost all legitimate publishers pay the author royalties as a percentage of cover price, not the price the bookstore pays. Bookstores often negotiate lower prices for books they pay by the crate, and this guarantees the author always gets a fair share. Your 8% is really more like 4% when compared to most publishers. However PA offers crummy discounts, so it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Frequently Asked Royalty Statement Questions:
What Is Sales Price: this is the net amount that PublishAmerica received for your book; your royalty is based on this amount, as per Par. 3 of your contract.
What Happened To Books Sold Last Month: all books bought directly from PublishAmerica are included in this statement; books sold through vendors, incl. Amazon, may not yet be included. PA pays royalties on sales proceeds that it has received. Vendors, however, have up to 90 days or longer to pay PA. Thus, PA may not have received payments yet for books sold by some retailers and online vendors. PA will include royalties for those sales on the next royalty statement. Additionally, some vendors have reneged on their payment obligations. PA will account for those sales after payments are received.
This is probably not true. Most PA books are special ordered, and the customer pays in advance, the book is printed, and the customer gets it.
What Are My Royalty Cut-off Dates: January 31 and July 31; we forward our semi-annual statements at the end of February and August.
Books sold after January 31 are not included in the February check.
Where Are The Royalties On Copies Of My Own Book That I Bought: authors are not paid royalties on books that they purchase themselves, per your contract, unless we ran a special promotion that indicated otherwise.
This is semi-normal, because you get a discount on your own books. On the other hand, commercial publishers sell their books in bookstores, not to the authors, so the number of copies the author buys for his friends will be insignificant.
Who Do I Contact For Questions About My Statement: email your query to
[email protected]; we will make every attempt to fully answer your question within seven business days.
They never answer their e-mail.
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
In this statement, PublishAmerica has accounted for all sales proceeds of your book which it has received during the last royalty period (August 1, 2009 to January 31, 2010). This includes all sales made directly by PublishAmerica during that period because PublishAmerica is paid for those sales up front. Some sales made by retailers and online vendors are not included on this statement. Vendors often have up to 90 days or longer to pay for copies of PublishAmerica's books. To the extent PublishAmerica has not received payments for books sold by retailers and online vendors during the last royalty period, those sales are not accounted for on the enclosed statement. PublishAmerica will include royalties for those sales on the next royalty statement after the proceeds are received.
Additionally, some vendors have reneged on their payment obligations. Therefore some authors may find excluded from their royalty statement sales that they had expected to find included, e.g. sales from bookstore events that they attended, or other bookstore related sales. PublishAmerica has initiated court proceedings to recover these payments. PublishAmerica will account for the missing sales after the missing payments are received.
To understand this, you really have to follow the PA lawsuit. PA decided their printer and distributor, Lightning Source International, was cheating them. Bookstores don't deal with PA; they deal with Ingrams, LSI's parent company. PA decided Ingrams was printing out new copies of books that had already sold, and was returning them.
When a bookstore buys a book, they pay Ingrams, who forwards it to LSI, who prints it, and sends it to Ingrams to be packed with the non-print-on-demand books. Ingrams then subtracts the cost of the actual printing plus $2, and sends the balance to PA.
When PA is itself the bookstore, they pay Ingrams the printing fee, get a box of books from Ingrams, repackage them, send them to the shopper, and collect the money from the shopper.
So PA stopped paying Ingrams. Ingrams then confiscated some of the money that bookstores had sent to it for PA books. PA then stopped paying royalties to its writers, and sued LSI.
Personally, I think PA is wrong. Tons of small presses use LSI as their printer and distributor. The only way PA could be right would be if LSI's books don't match PA's books. And PA has a terrible reputation when it comes to bookkeeping.