3rd Annual Royalties Reveal

I suspect that I have an inner accountant somewhere that has been repressed.  I don't even know what accountants do beyond balancing a checkbook, but there is something in me that takes great delight in organizing things quantitatively.  Actually "great delight" is probably too strong.  It's more like I can't help but do it.  My running and crossfit workouts are meticulously cataloged (currently on wodstack.com).  I keep a list of the books I've read (reported annually here).  I've been compiling details about my family tree (you can view it here).  Perhaps it's not an inner accountant, but more along the lines of Freud's anal retentiveness.  It's funny, though, because I'm not that way about everything.  There are some things that I'm very laid back and easy going about.  Like...  uh...  well, I'm sure there are some things.

But since entering the publishing market, tracking sales figures is one of the things that I'm compelled to do.  And I'm sure there is a different disorder in the DSM-V that explains my penchant for writing personal blog posts.  It is the conjunction of these two mental maladies that has resulted in my now 3rd annual posting in May that reports on the sales of my books.  (find last year's here, and the prior year's here).  This year it is double the fun, since I now have two books to report on.

The newest book is the Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity which I edited (with Alan Padgett), and was published on Wiley-Blackwell last summer.  There is this game that academic publishers play with the libraries which want the latest research and books that will last, so Blackwell only published it in hardback for now and set the list price at $199.  Of course there are various discounts, and the electronic version is cheaper.  All told, by the end of 2012 they had a net sales (not gross, because there are some vendors that return previously sold copies) of 222 books for an average sale price of 72.5 GBP (all the accounting is done in pounds, since Wiley-Blackwell is based in England).  My co-editor and I split 10% of this.  In addition, though, we got a one-time settlement for the rights to have it published in the Blackwell Reference Online collection.  They pay you once for libraries to allow unlimited access (or something like that).  The hope is that in another year they'll publish the paperback version so that normal people might buy it.

My other book is Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction which was co-authored with Chad Meister and published by Routledge in 2010.  So we're up to the third calendar year for reporting on it.  Routledge is basically a textbook publisher, and so the sales of this book are primarily for college and university courses.  Accordingly, the sales of it always jump in August and January, in preparation for the new semester.  It is not easy to find out where it is being used as a textbook.  A Google search turned up a large class at the University of Colorado-Boulder where it is a required text.  And Amazon will now show sales by region, which lets me guess that it has been used at some school in Florida and another in Washington State.  Electronic sales (mostly Kindle, I assume) were up to 56 this year.  Total sales in 2012 were 515, down just slightly from 2011's 523.  It looks like about 1/3 of those were sold through Amazon.  Sales seem to be leveling off here.  We were hoping for more in the crossover market to normal people for this book, but again the pricing of it keeps it out of their reach.  We had negotiated into the contract that our royalty rate would rise from 10 to 14% if there were ever more than 3000 copies sold in a year.  It appears that the publisher agreed to that because they saw no chance of it actually happening.

All told, I was responsible for 737 books being purchased in 2012.  That doesn't exactly put me into upper echelon of published authors, or even of academic authors, or even of academic authors with an arboreal last name. My share of the royalties amounted to a little less than 4% of my income from my real job.  Not exactly a lucrative second job.  I suspect that working on these books is more than 4% of the time that I spend on my real job.  But it is enough to help fund the Stump family vacation this summer.  Much of the rest of my summer will be spent on book #3.  The manuscript isn't due until 2014, but I've already got the column in the spreadsheet where I'll track its sales.  

Good News, Bad News (professionally speaking)

I inherited a bunch of corny jokes from my father, and I'm trying to be faithful and pass them on to the next generation.  Among them are a set of good news - bad news jokes.  I think my dad's favorite was:

The first mate goes below deck on one of those galley ships where slaves have to row with long oars to make the boat move.  He announces to the slaves, "I have good news and bad news; which do you want to hear first?"  They say, "Give us the good news."  So the first mate says, "The good news is that we're having steak for supper!"  Everyone cheers until one guy says, "Well what's the bad news?"  The first mate says, "After supper the captain wants to go water skiing."

My favorite is:

A cowboy injured his leg while rustling cattle, and it had to be amputated.  After he had woken up from the surgery the doctor came to him and said, "Well, I've got some good news and some bad news; which do you want to hear first?"  The cowboy thought a second then said, "Give me the bad news, doc."  So the doctor said a bit sheepishly, "OK, I'm afraid that we cut off the wrong leg, so we're going to have to go back into surgery again.  Sorry."  The cowboy said, "Are you serious??  That's awful.  What could possibly be the good news in this?"  The doctor answered, "Well, there's a guy down on the third floor who said that he'd buy your boots."

This weekend for me has been one of good news and bad news in the professional arena.  Which do you want to hear first?  The bad news?  OK.  I found out that I did not get a big grant I had applied for with a couple of other people.  We made it through the first round and were invited to submit a final proposal in October.  We really thought that it was going to go through and propel us into superstardom in the world of philosophy (which isn't really saying that much).  But evidently it was not meant to be.  And unfortunately they didn't even tell us why--just the standard, "There was very strong competition and we wish we could have funded all of the proposals."

So what's the good news, you ask?  I was mailed an advance copy of Dec 26th edition of The Christian Century, and the article I wrote for them awhile back is the cover article.  That was an unexpected surprise. I wrote an article on cosmology and theology for them back during the summer.  The editor and I had some positive emails back and forth, that resulted in his saying, "we'll move toward publication of this."  Then about three weeks ago I received a pdf of the proofs, but still didn't know it was going to be the featured story.

Now, most of you reading this probably aren't familiar with the The Christian Century.  It is a bi-weekly magazine aimed primarily at the Protestant mainline community (United Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopals, and so on).  I like to read it to stay abreast of the wider Christian thinking in the country.  At some point in the two-week cycle my article should be available on their website here.  They say that they make all of the magazine articles available on a rotating basis.  Then after the following edition comes out, I think it will be permanently available.

Now I'm sitting by the phone, waiting for the Tonight Show to tell me when the jet will arrive to pick me up for my interview.

The (not so) Big Business of Academic Publishing

I stopped by the office today and in my mailbox was my royalties check for the 2010 sales of Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction (Routledge, 2010).  Some of you may not be too aware of how all this works, and perhaps you've had a vague notion that we who publish on academic presses secretly have second homes in Tuscany and Swiss bank accounts.  So I'm allowing the internet tendency of disclosing personal information to have partial sway over my being, and I'll give some of the juicy details of this business.

When my co-author and I signed the contract, we each got a low-to-mid three figure advance on the royalties.  That means that they gave us money up front, but it was to be deducted from our later earnings.  Then upon submission of the completed manuscript, we each got another low-to-mid three figure advance on royalties.  When the book was published, we each received one hardback copy and ten paperback copies of the book, plus the offer to buy as many copies as we want at 30% off the list price.  Then, for as long as the book is in print we get 10% (5% each) of the money Routledge receives for paperbacks that are sold (and 7.5% of the money Routledge receives for hardbacks).

The book came out in July of 2010.  And evidently it did better than was expected, because it sold out of the first printing sometime in January.  The first printing was 1200 copies, so we're not exactly talking about a NYT best-seller.  Its primary market is as a textbook, and there were a few schools that adopted it for the spring semester.  At one point during the holidays, it made it up to #34 on Amazon's top 100 books on religion (which was something like #24,000 for its overall best sellers).  The price then was down to about $24 (which is cheaper than I can buy them from the publisher), but currently it's at about $38 on the site.  I could make you a deal on a signed copy if you're interested!

Anyway, my portion of the royalties (after deducting the two advances) for 2010 was in the mid three figures. When you add all of those payments together, I'm up to the very low four figures (not counting decimal points!) in money earned on this project.  I estimate that I have significantly more than1000 hours invested in working on this book, so we're talking less than $1/hour.  Such is the reality of academic publishing.  In a future post I'll explain what drives us to do such things.