Friday, March 23, 2007

Suspicious goings on

How did I get my figures yesterday. Let us say that 5,000 books are sold at £10 each, and the author gets a 10% royalty, this brings us back to £5,000, of which the agent may also get 10%, equivalent to £500. In reality, of course, if it’s a paperback, it will be sold for less than this figure – maybe £5.99 or so – and now, I understand, writers are sometimes having to accept a percentage based, not on the recommended retail price, but on the figure received by the publisher, although they may get a higher percentage than 10%. I don’t think the ending of the Net Book Agreement did us any favours. As for buying on the Internet, I suspect that many books which are sold as ‘almost brand new’ and discounted are recycled review copies provided by radio stations and newspapers. Bad news for us authors, who get no royalty on 2nd hand books.

I dropped M off at the station this morning and, as I was up late, had a shower and washed my hair on my return. I managed to catch the continuing story of Jack Rosenthal, playwright which I missed first time around. I had to make a choice, then, of listening to this interesting and amusing biography in play form, or to twenty stories read out on Radio Southern Counties, including Irene’s, Anne’s and my own, in roughly the same slot. You can still find mine, if you go to my website, (http://freespace.virgin.net/jackie.luben).

M was on his way to a restaurant in Covent Garden, one of his regular customers. They had problems with their extract fan – too noisy, or not extracting enough – I don’t know the details. In order to go by train today and not have to worry about parking, he arranged to meet the proprietor after the close of the restaurant on Wednesday night, and left home at about 11.15 p.m. They then both toured round different bits of the motorway, each unable to work out where the other one was supposed to be, until ending up somewhere near Slough. M swapped the faulty extract fan for a different one, to be installed today, during the course of which the police arrived to find out what they were doing at midnight on a motorway bridge. I woke up when he got home, and haven’t quite returned to normality.

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