So yesterday (well, technically the day before yesterday, since it’s after midnight) I got my first ever royalty statement.

*le gasp!*

But before you break out the streamers and cake, I have to tell you that a royalty statement is not the same thing as a royalty check. Everyone gets royalty statements twice a year, whether they’ve earned out their advance or not. The only thing is that now when people ask me how the book is doing, I can tell them how it was doing through June, which was only six weeks out from release date. If you want to know how the book’s doing right now, I won’t know until April when the next statement comes.

My statement only represented a six week window (though usually it would show six months), but if we assumed that those numbers were representative of how sales will go forever, it would still take me two years to earn out my advance. (And they are probably not representative of forever.) So, I’ve still got a ways to go before breaking out that cake. (But I might as well bake it now and save it until then, because it will totally keep, RIGHT? Or will it be reminiscent of that time I found out I’d been eating rancid butter and that’s why everything tasted so weird?)

(Parenthetical P.S. I *didn’t* just tell you about the time I was eating rancid butter over a period of SEVERAL DAYS without realizing it, even though it tasted really bad. Only, like, someone really dumb would do that.)

So, um, yeah, that’s about all I have to say about royalty statements, other than that my royalties on ebooks are way higher than on hardbacks, even though the list price is the same. That is, I get my royalty percentages from the $17.99 cover price, for both hardback and ebooks, regardless of what price the book is actually sold at. So, go ebooks!

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