Bestsellers

[drew]

Okay, how do they work, I'm sure some of you know.

Is it total sales ever?
Is it total sales in a time frame?

How many of SRD's have been bestsellers?

(and dammit, why aren't they ALL?)

[High Lord Tolkien]

If I can add a few questions to drew's:
*When* does an author get royalties?
I know there are several different ways they get paid.
Lets assume it's an established author.

There's an initial payment.
The book gets published.
Then......what?
The author gets a % of every book sold.
But sold *when*?

At the time the wholesalers buy them in bulk or at the cash register when I buy the book?
I assume it has to be at the wholesellers level.
Otherwise there's no way to track it.
Books can sit for years.
And there's no way to hold a bookstore accountable.

Just wondering.

[matrixman]

Hellooo, calling Variol Farseer! I think he could tackle your questions. He seems more knowledgeable than most about the publishing industry.

[The Laughing Man]

With hindsight it can be hypothesized that SRD has had different audiences at different points of his career: a very wide, traditional sf readership up to and including Dhalgren, which sold nearly a million copies in the USA alone; and a narrower, perhaps more intellectual, campus-based readership thereafter. There is no doubt that by the 1980s his fiction (and criticism) had become less accessible, and the real debate about his career must be whether or not he gained more than he lost with his adoption of a denser style towards the later 1970s. At this point his fiction also began to include more passages of obviously polemical intent, some of whose thrust, especially in their icons of abasement, did not carry conviction for all readers. But, though admirers of SRD's earlier work tend to be heavily polarized in their views of his later work, he by no means disappeared from public notice. The first two volumes of the Nevérÿon series sold around quarter of a million each. Lower sales on subsequent editions may have been partly due to resistance in the publishing and book-distribution worlds to his increasingly and explicitly controversial texts.

Lester del Rey
www.nndb.com/people/391/000026313/

[I'm Murrin]

Esmer, the quote you posted is about Samuel R Delany.

[dlbpharmd]

[The Laughing Man]

it is? golly gee.