Unexpected Envelopes

[hrj]

It's always a delight to get one of those little glassine-windowed envelopes that has the unmistakable look of a royalty check. (Not quite as delightful as getting one of those envelopes that has the unmistakable look of a contract, but I don't happen to have any submissions out at the moment.) It seems the Sword & Sorceress series is now appearing in Italian translation. I guess I'll have to try to track down a copy for my collection. (The check only lists volume 12 at the moment.)

Comments

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Grin. Next contract, make sure they have a clause that you have to get a copy in each language. I have copies of our books in Polish, Korean, Russian, and Italian now. ;-) It's cool.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

If it were an "all mine" book, I'm sure I would, but this is a collection of short stories, so anything more than the original one free copy for each author would get unmanageable. I've gotten copies of the German S&S volumes I have stories in (via Other Change of Hobbit). I've run across listings of an Italian edition of the "Chronicles of the Holy Grail" anthology I have a story in, but haven't yet tracked down a copy. (Never got any additional royalties for that one either. I gently queried the editor about it when I first ran across the listing because the wording of the contract seems to imply that foreign language editions are distinct from what the original payment covered. I think the query was too gentle because he dodged it. There may also be a higher trigger point for disbursements than there is for the various MZB publications.)

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Our contracts are slippery, too -- we get a high percentage of the fee that our publisher gets for the rights to publish the book in translation, and then nothing else until it reaches some weird number of copies sold in that language.

True enough, I wasn't thinking short stories, I was thinking "our" books, for which we paid the various contributors out of our advances rather than a royalty. So far, they've made more than we have on the most recent one, I think.