THE CAREER NOVELIST
for a gradual release of moneys withheld. In the U.S., the matter
must be settled on a case-by-case basis. Generally, at the end of the
first complete six-month period of sales it is sometimes not unrea-
sonable to accept a sizable reserve (keeping in mind that average
return rates run around 50 percent).
Even then, however, there are cases when a high reserve is not
justified. Not long ago I received the first six-month statement for
an author whose first novel seems to be a big success for Warner
Books. The novel had gone back to press several times, and had
appeared on genre best-seller lists. Sure enough, the Warner state-
ment showed a healthy total of copies shipped. Sales were assumed
to be good, too, and attached to the statement was a check for sev-
eral thousand dollars. Not bad. The reserve, however, worked out to
a whopping 55 percent. I felt this was too high. The novel's "rate"
was strong, and therefore its "sell-through" was likely to be extra
high (see Chapter 10). I called the royalty department and argued
with them. They agreed to drop their reserve to a more realistic
level, and a few days later I received a check that doubled the
author's royalty payment.
This kind of haggling goes on all the time. In fact, as publishers
have become more conscious of their bottom lines, reserve levels
have increased. Over the last year I found myself challenging as
many royalty statements as I had over the previous fourteen.
Royalty statements are not scientific. Be alert.
One nonfiction author became suspicious of her royalty state-
ments when she began receiving two of them for the same book
each period. The duplication was especially weird since each state-
ment showed different results! After attempts to get information
from her publisher, HarperCollins, proved fruitless she and her
agent sued, supported by the AAR, the Authors Guild and the
American Book Producers Association (a packager's group).
High-powered auditors were brought in to scrutinize the
HarperCollins records. Their findings were astonishing. Not only
were the company's reporting procedures antiquated, large chunks
of sub-rights income were not being credited to authors at all. The
problem was not that the publisher was dishonest, but that it was
sometimes quite difficult to properly assign all the different sums