Section 1—John Kennedy Toole’s Sad Story

In 1963, 25-year-old John Kennedy Toole submitted to Simon & Schuster a manuscript in hopes of it being published. He spent the next 2 years revising the manuscript in response to editorial criticism. Simon & Schuster ultimately rejected the manuscript. The revisions and rejection took their toll, and in 1969, Mr. Toole committed suicide. His mother then became determined to have the manuscript published, believing it would prove her son’s talent. Over a 5-year period, she sent the manuscript to 7 publishers; all rejected it. “Each time it came back I died a little,” she said. Thanks to his mother’s untiring efforts, Mr. Toole’s manuscript finally was published (in 1980). In 1981, the book (A Confederacy of Dunces) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies, in 18 languages. The published version is Mr. Toole’s first draft with minimal copy-editing, and no significant revisions!¹ So 8 book publishers, including Simon & Schuster, rejected a manuscript whose quality ultimately was awarded a Pulitzer Prize!

So I say:

1. Don't let a publisher's editor(s) do to you what they did to John Kennedy Toole! Write a quality manuscript; then stick to your guns and don't let editors ruin it!
2. Several websites sell editorial services. Some of those services can result in a major overhaul of an author's manuscript. If I were you, I would be very careful in selecting such services, for they are apt to result in a John-Kennedy-Toole-type outcome (even without the suicide!).
3. This case shows that sometimes the "experts" (be they editors, literary agents, MDs, or ...) are not so expert. Two MDs' negligence killed my mother! If you have written a quality book, then you just have to keep looking (as Mr. Toole's mother did) until you stumble across one who can recognize quality when he or she sees it.
4. To those who may be contemplating suicide, I suggest that you look at your situation this way: Once you're dead, you have no chance of accomplishing something significant, but as long as you're alive, you have a chance. All it took was for the right person to read John Kennedy Toole's manuscript. That person was Walker Percy (the 9th person to evaluate the manuscript!), who got the manuscript published. If Mr. Toole had just persevered, he eventually might have found Mr. Percy or someone else who recognized his manuscript's quality. I prefer some chance, even if it's slim, to no chance at all!

Section 2—Publishers’ Royalties

Case 1: Ethics International Press (EIP)—It specializes in scholarly books for the academic market. Re an author’s royalties, it says:

• Copies sold (in all formats) at 10% of Net Revenues
• Royalties are calculated as a percentage of the money we receive – not as a percentage of the list price of a book. These amounts will vary depending on sales channel. We receive the majority of revenues sold from our website, but other channels will deduct up to 50% of the price, and Amazon, more than 50%. The royalty is calculated on these net sale amounts we receive.

Example (by Bill Bailey): Suppose a book sells for $100. The book's seller takes 50% ($50); so EIP presumably gets $50. It then pays the book’s author $5, which is 10% of the $50 that EIP receives. So of the book’s $100 sales price, the author gets $5, and others get $95!!! And if Amazon sells the book, then the author gets less than $5 of every $100 of revenue that his book generates. Suppose 1,000 of his books sell at a sales price of $100 per book. Those sales generate a total of $100,000 of revenue. Of those $100,000, the author gets $5,000; others get $95,000.

A written dissertation is a requirement to get a PhD degree. If X gets a PhD, a $5,000 royalty isn't such a bad deal, for X had to write the dissertation to get his PhD degree; so no extra effort was needed to write the "book" (it being X's dissertation). But for someone who writes a book not for a degree but merely to earn money from it, the aforesaid $5,000 return on $100,000 of revenue is paltry!

Note

¹Wikipedia