Peter Cooper

Questions for Apress authors (or Apress themselves)

At the start of January 2008, I received my statement from Apress for the sales of Beginning Ruby. I even published it for all to see here. I had some questions to ask, so dropped the publicist (the always excellent and responsive Julie Miller) at Apress a line. She quickly redirected me to someone else to whom I asked:

I have a couple of questions on things I don’t think I understand fully.
1) My advance was $6000. My 1st period royalties were $4206.64, 2nd period were $2709.59, and 3rd period $1494.90. In the second period, the advance was made back, but the entire remaining $916.22 was held back in reserve. I know it is standard to hold back a reserve, but the contract states that “the reserve held in that specific accounting period will not exceed 25 percent of the product of Your royalty rate times the sales for the Work in that specific period.” But $916.22 of the $2709.59 royalties in that period is 33.8%. How is this being calculated?
2) In period 3, I’ve made royalties of $1494.90 of which $683.78 were taken and added to the reserve. This is 45.7%. How is this calculated? I imagine it’s related to question 1
3) After the above reserves are taken, I have $811.13 gross payable. However, there has been a 30% withholding. As far as I understand it, the reason I filled out a W-8BEN form was to demonstrate that tax does not need to be withheld for me as I have no tax presence in the US. Could you clarify this for me?

I sent this on January 3 but got no response. I followed up on January 20, with no response. I followed up on February 6, and got an auto-responder notifying me the person was in the annual company meeting (so I wasn’t being filtered away as spam, at least), but still no human response.

I wrote to Gary Cornell, the always inspirational founder of Apress (great interview with him here), on February 22 to ask what was up, but it turns out he’s now retired, so he promised to pass my enquiry on, and he did. On February 25, I got a mail from Paul Manning, the president of Apress who said he’d sort things out. On March 3rd, I e-mailed him again as I still hadn’t heard anything, and he said he’d sort it out again since he was in the office with the person who was meant to respond. But now.. it’s March 7 and I’m bored of e-mailing Apress over and over.

I’m a pretty patient person, which is why I haven’t lost my cool, but I don’t expect it to take six or more e-mails spanning more than two months before I get a response to three simple questions (especially considering I met all of my deadlines when writing the book in the first place ;-)) It’s all about community and connection on the Web though, so I’m hoping other Apress authors can answer these questions (or at least suggest some answers - it’s all good!)

So, fine Apress authors, why is Apress taking so much money as a reserve, when the contract stipulates 25% in each “period,” and why is 30% being withheld? The puzzle rumbles on..

For those that are following this or might have the same questions, someone from Apress unconnected to this has followed up with me and gives the impression it might be that even though you have X sales on the statement, the reserve percentages are calculated only on the number of books that are un-returnable / fully confirmed rather than the full figure. This might be a good reason why the reserve percentages are higher than expected.

I’ve been getting bounced emails from everyone at Apress for the last month or so

Watching eagerly for any other responses, Pete.

The reason, it seems, is because reserves are calculated not just against current sales and royalties, but also against the advance (which is then deducted from royalties.) I already had an idea of this and it doesn’t answer why the reserves are being taken in periods where those royalties weren’t earned (i.e. $684 being added to the reserve in the period where $1494.90 royalties were earned - 45% of the take). But.. publishing is an arcane business after all.