Ra-Ra-Royalties!!!!

This morning - this wonderful, glorious, splendiferous morning - I have received royalties. Now, you might think for a writer this is nothing to make a song and dance about - but for me it's a BIG, BIG deal. Royalties have been sadly lacking in my life. I was, I'm sorry to say, sadly misled about royalties.

Having learned everything I knew about royalties - the magic money that allegedly appears "just like that" in your bank account every six months - from a Jilly Cooper novel where the heroine received her royalties in just such a way (yes, I know it was fiction, but I knew no better and I believed it, okay - oh, and I was also under a similar misconception about VAT payments courtesy of a Dick Francis novel but that's another and infinitely more painful story), when I first had a book published I assumed that's what would happen to me. That every March and September for the rest of my writing life some massive amount of money would be deposited in my account. Enough money for me to live a life of idleness, gluttony and hedonistic sloth until the next royalty payment was due.

Oh, those heady, innocent days...

As no-one in authority (here I mean my agent or publisher or anyone else slightly grown-up in the writing world who should have known that I was a total dill-brain) disabused me of this notion, and also because my first novel - Going the Distance - had a titchy advance and sold loads of copies courtesy of the WH Smith Fresh Talent promo thus providing me with a four-figure royalty sum just six months after publication, I was convinced that my Jilly Cooper idea was in fact correct. That for every book sold, you, the author, received 10% of the cover price. That my life of grafting in the pub and panicking about the overdraft was a thing of the past. So, come the next book and next royalty period, I simply expected the same amount to arrive. Hah! March came and went; so did April. Not a sniff of a royalty sausage.


I remember, to my everlasting shame, ringing my agent to enquire where my royalties were. When she said there weren't any I had a temper tantrum. No, I did. Honestly. I roared and screamed and drummed my heels on the floor. What, I enquired loftily, did she expect me to live on?

Oooh - the embarrassment when she explained (way too late in my opinion) how the royalty payment system works... Simply, you have to sell enough books to earn out your advance and then you get percentage royalties (read your contract, poppet) on every copy sold after the publisher has clawed back what you've been paid. Oh, the mortifying shock! The pain of realising that, even once I'd sold enough copies (about 27 billion) to pay back the (tiddly) advance, I'd then receive a small percentage of the cover price of each book. So, after the massive (and non-existent) 27 billion sales I'd get something like .05p per copy if I was very lucky...


And then, it was explained, that if books went into supermarkets the publisher paid to have them on the shelves, ditto the bookselling chains especially if your novel was to have a prominent position like at the top of the escalator or an end-on shelf-display - and don't talk about promos or windows! Just don't! So, those sales cost the publisher dearly, didn't cancel anything off your advance payment debt, and earned you, the author, sod all. But think of the kudos, poppet - the joy of seeing your book on the shelves in all those famous shops...

Bugger the kudos! Kudos didn't butter no parsnips in this house I can tell you. What I wanted - nay - expected - was hard cash. I wanted royalties. And there weren't any. And there never have been. Until today...

Today, much to my incandescent joy and surprise I've been paid loads (well, okay for me it's loads - for other authors it probably isn't) of dosh from Germany. Royalties. Real royalties. For Sommernachts-Zauber. This is the German version of Love Potions, and it came out (fabulous floral cover, by-the-way, which sadly I couldn't paste on here for some reason) in May this year. They paid me an advance of 5,000 Euros for it (which was lovely and made us and the bank manager very happy) last year, and the royalty period was only up to the end of June - and - bless its lovely flowery little cotton socks - it's earned me 7,000 Euros - IN A MONTH!!!!! Which means, I suppose, that to have earned out the advance, it must have sold tons of copies in Germany (although no-one has actually told me this and of course it might be some huge mistake) and right now I don't care because I've got ROYALTIES!!!!


And yes, I am going to sponsor myself and everyone else on the charity walk with lots of it because - well - because I damn well can!!!

P.S. I've just read this through and I know if I read it on some other writer's blog I'd go "smug cow" - so please, please don't think this was written to brag or show-off - I'm so skint and I was just so thrilled and excited!