Kristine Rusch on publishing royalties, e-book and otherwise

http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/13/the-business-rusch-royalty-statements/

http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/20/the-business-rusch-royalty-statements-update/

This could be bad for publishers. What she's found is that the major publishers who handle her books are consistently under-reporting sales on her royalty statements, both e-book and print editions. I suspect she's right: technology has changed, but publishers have stuck with old methods that estimate sales and those methods are inaccurate. The big tech change is Bookscan, the system that tracks sales of books at the register. In the 80s and before it didn't exist, so there wasn't any way for an author to double-check the sales figures. When it did start, authors didn't have ready access to it's data so they still had no way to audit the publisher's numbers. But now any author can get Bookscan data. It's not a complete check, since Bookscan only covers about 50-70% of book sales. But it does provide one check: it should be physically impossible for the sales reported on a royalty statement (adjusted for reserves) to be less than what Bookscan reports. If an author's royalty statement shows sales less than what Bookscan reports for a title, the royalty statement is simply incorrect.

If authors start checking sales and demanding audits, things could get very sticky for the major publishers.

Development frustrations

One of the most frustrating things: finishing up implementation of a feature, sending it up for build, and then being told that the feature isn't wanted anymore. Ah well, at least they're not making us revert it all back out again, it'll just go unused.

You'd think the business analysts could get things like this straight, figure out what's actually going to be wanted before development starts.

Dow Jones Industrial Average

If you look at the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq indexes, you can see how bad this latest crash was. We're down to the same level as the bottom of the last crash in late 2001 to early 2002. The last time before that that we were at these levels was back in late 1997. That was the point the indexes rose through current levels and stayed above them consistently.

IOW the current crash has wiped out a decade's worth of gains in the market.

That's a scary thought.

LJ being moved to Russia

LJ is being moved to Russia, according to it's owner SUP. Well, at least all the development work. This doesn't suprise me, it's a natural consequence of LJ being bought by SUP which is based in Russia. The Russian portion of LJ is a money-maker. The US portion brings in very little in the way of solid revenue, the majority is based on advertising which isn't doing very well. So from a business standpoint it makes sense for the Russian owner to move things to Russia and concentrate on it's core business, letting the unprofitable American portion languish with minimal investment other than getting any code changes that result from normal development for the Russian market.

The fact is, I expected this. That's why I stopped using LJ for posts and made sure I had a backup of all posts and comments, why I switched to BlogSpot for my journals, and why I started using RSS to aggregate my own feeds of posts without needing to depend on a service. A lot of LJ users are going to learn a hard lesson: when you outsource to someone else, you place yourself at the mercy of their business interests. And for LJ, those business interests no longer include maintaining an expensive service for the benefit of a user base that doesn't want to pay enough to justify keeping them.