On Royalties and Advances

Since I’m in the business of paying royalties, not collecting them, I’ll refrain from a lot of comment on the whole royalty advance issue and whether there’s any rhyme or reason to it all. The discussion is interesting though, and a few folks are collecting their thoughts on the matter.  Bookends, LLC attempt to answer the age-old question, “what’s the story with earning out royalties?”.  The Sunday NYT book review section recently published an essay “About that book advance…“, which brought this thorough author perspective response from Mike Shatzkin. Finally, Evan Schnittman of OUP comments from the publisher side of the tracks.