There’s still more to the saga of my book The Healthy Prostate, which the publisher refuses to designate as out-of-print, despite the fact that it has been selling less than 20 copies a year for several years now.
I received another call from the editor, who told me her boss had told her I could buy my way out of the contract. That is, if I paid them a little over $4,000, they would put the book out-of-print. That would release me from my contractual obligation to refrain from writing a competing book, and allow me to accept writing jobs on this subject.
How did the publisher come up with the $4,000 fee? That happened to be the amount that my author account was in the red.
The publisher had given me an advance against royalties when the contract was signed many years ago. This is a common practice. Let’s say your advance is $20,000 and your royalty will be $1 a book. In a sense, they are paying you in advance for the first 20,000 copies sold. Your account with the publisher begins at negative $20,000, and every time a book is sold $1 is added to the account. When 20,000 copies are sold, your account balance will be zero, and for every book sold after that you will receive $1 in royalties.
Unfortunately my prostate book never earned back its advance, a common occurrence in publishing. Most books do not earn back their advances; most are money losers. A relatively small percentage of books are profitable, and a very few are mega-profitable.
My book needed to sell a little over 4,000 additional copies before it would earn back its advance and zero out my author account. Since there was no chance this would happen, the publisher wanted me to pay the difference.
It wasn’t personal, just bottom-line business. But this incident shows why it pays to scrutinize the Competing Works clause in your book publishing contract very carefully.
