Royalties: Getting Paid

So you’re going to publish a book. Great! So what can you expect to be paid for publishing a book? No one goes into writing books for charity. This is a business, and writers have bills to pay. 

The standard royalty rate for both large and small publishers is 10 percent for the first 5,000 books, 12.5 percent for the second 5,000 books, and 15 percent thereafter. Paperback royalties are commonly paid at 7 percent. The publishing industry is still figuring out how to pay royalties on electronic publications. These can be as low as 5 percent and as high as 25 percent.

If you have an agent, they will negotiate the royalities for you. However, some publishers are looking at tweaking the model towards profit sharing (and by sharing, that means you get half of the profits). If you think you can sell many books, this might be a better route.

When you get your first royalty check, you may notice that the publisher has withheld a certain amount as a “reserve” (35 percent is common). This is to cover potential book returns from retailers. You’ll get the withheld sum with your next payment, assuming the books actually sold.

You only get paid once when a new book copy is sold. You may notice on Amazon that there is a large secondary market for used books: you get no royalties on those, as they’ve already sold once – and you’ve already been paid for those. Hooray for recycling! But boo for not getting paid.

To further complicate things, royalties aren’t calculated on the retail price (say, $30), but rather on the wholesale price, which is about 60 percent of retail. Thus for a $30 book paid at a 10 percent royalty, you won’t be paid $3, but rather $1.80. Subtract 15 percent of that if you have an agent. You’ll get paid even less for an electronic book, as it has a lower base price. Don’t be surprised if your royalty check is less than you hoped.

Publishers usually pay royalties twice per year – though some, including many university presses, only pay once per year, usually in the first quarter of the following year. It may be a challenge to keep yourself afloat financially if you have to wait so long to get paid. And given the shrinking size of advances, it’s getting tougher to make a go of it as a full-time writer. So don’t quit your day job.

A question for you: even if you never made money writing, would you still write? If all your writing did was earn just a basic minimum to cover your writing and promotional costs and you broke even, then that’s a victory in itself. This is the new “normal” for writers. No one said writing books would be easy or even lucrative.

So why publish a book if there isn’t much money in it? 

- Because your spirit calls out to write, regardless if you get paid or not. 

- Because your story can contribute to your community. 

- Because you have a story to tell.

- Because it can advance your career. Books lend credibility and subject matter expertise. 

- Because you can explore a topic in more than just a thousand words, unlike a magazine or newspaper article. You can go far deeper into a question that interests you. 

- Because you can answer a challenging societal question through your writing. 

- Because you’ve been holding onto a story and wondering if you could ever do it. Now’s your chance to prove that you can. 

Given how little authors make these days, and that most books only sell a few thousand copies, where’s the money to support authors? It isn’t in book sales, but in speaking engagements, where you get paid to speak.

Now that music downloads, Pandora and Spotify have effectively killed CD sales, how do you think rock bands make a living? It isn’t from selling CDs, obviously. Rather, they make their money going on tour and selling tickets for their concerts. The music and publishing industries offer some parallels. Most writers can’t charge tickets to speak at libraries and bookstores (with the exception of David Sedaris); however, you can get hired to deliver a presentation by a trade group. I’ve gotten better over time in asking groups if there is an honoraria – my time is worth something, as is yours. (BTW, the minimum to be considered a “professional” speaker – one who does public speaking for a living – is $2,500 per speech, plus expenses.) 

Garrett Peck

www.garrettpeck.com

Redefining Success

I’ve collected royalty checks so far this year from my two publishers, The History Press and Rutgers University Press. So how am I doing financially? Without getting into details, let me say I’ve got a ways to go to make a living as a writer.

This is an incredibly difficult time to be a writer. The publication market has been retrenching for years, and the Great Recession accelerated trends that have led to consumers canceling their magazine and newspaper subscriptions and buying fewer books – even while the number of titles greatly increased, thanks to self-publishing. And consumers have gotten used to free content and are increasingly reluctant to pay.

So what does it mean to be a successful writer? Maybe we should redefine success. Even getting published, period, is a success in its own right. If you can find 1,000 customers to buy your book, then you’ve done well and deserve a pat on the back. But the hundreds of thousands of book sales that you’re hoping for probably isn’t a realistic goal. Few books sell that many copies.

For the longest time, I’ve had the goal (and still have the dream) of one day making my living as a writer. But I had a sharp reality check when I received my first royalty check in March 2010 for $120. Nope, I'm nowhere close to quitting my day job. 

I do earn some money from my writing – books, the occasional freelance article or speaking gig – all of which I plow back into my next project. This income is balanced by many costs: my website, a graphic designer for maps, acquiring images, hosting publication parties, and major research costs (my writing is research-intense, as I write nonfiction). I basically break even on writing. It’s a hobby that pays a little, not a lot. 

But hey, there are a lot more expensive hobbies out there, like owning a boat or a horse. Those hobbies are money pits. Mine at least is cost-neutral. 

At the Gaithersburg Book Festival this year, held on May 19, 2012, I gave a talk to about twenty-five people, and proudly sold out of books. As I was finishing my talk, we suddenly heard a loud cheer from hundreds of people in the tent next door. I learned later that the hubbub was for author and "bloggess" Jenny Lawson. 

Lawson had blogged for several years and developed a large following that led to her first book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. It rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. According to the book festival staff, she has a crazed following. A staff person told me that one woman came up to her seven times to ask if Lawson had arrived yet (hello, stalker!). When she showed up at the book festival, she had a police escort. She couldn’t just walk around the festival like any other private citizen.

So be careful what you wish for. If success means having stalkers and maintaining police protection, I’d say no thank you and stick with my 25 rational fans. One of the nice things about being a writer is that few people ever know what you look like. You can hide in plain sight. I wouldn’t trade places with Brad Pitt for any money.

Garrett Peck

www.garrettpeck.com

Where Does Washington Get Our Water?

We sadly had to strike the final chapter in the book The Potomac River because of size constraints, so I've posted it here on my blog instead. It’s a fascinating look at where the Washington, DC area gets its water – and how we deal with wastewater. 

Having fresh, safe tap water pumped into your home is one of the great achievements of modern life – something that we easily take for granted. We no longer have to rely on backyard pumps for drinking water, nor do we have to use an outhouse or a chamber pot when nature calls. You turn the dishwasher, shower or tap on, or flush the toilet, and the water magically appears.

But it really isn’t magic at all. Rather, our tap water is based on complex infrastructure that is largely buried underground and administered by municipal agents. Washington, D.C. is slightly unusual in that our primary municipal water supplier is a division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers known as Washington Aqueduct.

The Washington area gets an average of thirty-nine inches of rain per year. This may rise with global warming, as the mid-Atlantic is projected to become rainier. Though the river’s flow varies greatly by season, the average flow is seven billion gallons of water per day. About 400 million gallons are removed daily from the Potomac, providing 80 percent of the water for more than five million people in the Washington metropolitan area. This is largely surface water drawn from the river, rather than pumped from a well, and serves our bathing and car washes, dishwashers, fire hydrants, lawns, swimming pools, toilets and washing machines. Of this, about 370 million gallons are returned to the river after treatment at Blue Plains.

People who lived in early Washington got their water primarily from wells. There was no water distribution or sewage system. Congress recognized the problem after a fire broke out in the U.S. Capitol on Christmas Eve in 1851, causing heavy damage to the building. Firefighters had too little water to put the fire out.

On March 3, 1853, Congress assigned the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a water distribution system for the District, a job the corps has had ever since. Montgomery Meigs was tasked with building the Washington Aqueduct and appropriated $100,000 for the project (it eventually ballooned to $2 million).

Montgomery Meigs built the Washington Aqueduct that provides 

drinking water for the Washington, D.C. area. Library of Congress. 

Meigs designed a system that runs by gravity. He built the Washington Aqueduct Dam, just above Great Falls, as the intake so water could run downhill without pumps. Water flows ten miles under MacArthur Boulevard and over the Cabin John Bridge – designed by Meigs for the aqueduct – to Dalecarlia Reservoir. Meigs built both Dalecarlia and Georgetown reservoirs to remove sediment from the water. 

The Washington Aqueduct Dam stretches all the way across the Potomac River just above Great Falls. Visitors can stand atop the intake, a large, flat concrete structure near the Great Falls Visitors Center. Garrett Peck

The Washington Aqueduct Dam from the Virginia side. Garrett Peck 

Washington Aqueduct built graceful Union Arch, better known as the Cabin John Bridge, to carry drinking water tens miles from Great Falls to Washington, D.C. Library of Congress. 

Washington Aqueduct serves as a water wholesaler, treating 170 million gallons of water per day, then selling the water to distributors in Arlington, Falls Church and Washington. In the 1950s it opened an auxiliary intake at Little Falls. It is a demand-based system, withdrawing less water in winter and more in summer.

The aqueduct brings water to the Dalecarlia reservoir, where there is a fork in the pipe: 40 percent of the water continues to the Georgetown Reservoir for sediment removal and then on to McMillan Reservoir, while 60 percent is chemically treated at Dalecarlia Water Treatment Plant for Virginia customers. “The two different water treatment facilities reflects the growth of the system over 150 years,” remarked Tom Jacobus, Washington Aqueduct’s general manager. Arlington and Falls Church are served by pipes along Chain and Key bridges.

For District residents, water from Georgetown Reservoir is piped via the underground City Tunnel to the McMillan Water Treatment Plant, just above Howard University, where it is chemically treated. McMillan installed the Slow Sand Filtration Plant in 1905 as the latest in water filtration, giant catacombs that used sand rather than chemicals to purify the water. Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. designed the twenty-five acre grounds that are an architectural wonder. It operated until 1985 when an upgraded filtration plant was built adjacent.

Washington Aqueduct uses chloramine, a compound of chlorine and ammonia, to chemically treat water. This improves the taste of the water. However, every year for six weeks in spring, chlorine replaces the chloramine, giving our drinking water that familiar swimming pool odor. This is done to kill germs that have built up in the system.

Cities have built massive infrastructure to supply water and remove sewage from your home. Much of it is underground, so you rarely see it unless a water main breaks – an increasing occurrence, as most cities are not investing nearly enough to replace their aging infrastructure. Washington Aqueduct indicated that Washingtonians are actually using less water. This is in part because of more water-efficient appliances, but the major reason is that local water authorities are addressing leaks in the water distribution system by upgrading pipes and water mains.

The greater Washington metropolitan area is serviced by three main water authorities: the Fairfax County Water Authority; the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland); and DC Water, formally known as the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (covering the District, Arlington, Alexandria, and parts of Fairfax, Montgomery, and Prince George’s Counties). All three use Potomac River water.

What Happens After I Flush?  

 

DC Water operates the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the sewage treatment plant for much of the Washington metropolitan area established in 1938. It is also the largest advanced wastewater treatment plan in the world. Blue Plains resides in far Southwest, directly across the Potomac from Old Town Alexandria and within a stone’s throw of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. It provides treatment for the District, Dulles International Airport, part of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland, and part of Fairfax and Loudon counties in Virginia. (Alexandria and Arlington process their own sewage.) The 150-acre plant can process 370 million gallons of wastewater a day – and up to a billion gallons in the event of an emergency.

All the solids we eat and nutrients we intake end up in our sewers. My tour guide at Blue Plains, Mark Ramirez, called the facility a “nutrient recovery plant.” Yes, Blue Plains offers weekly guided tours. And yes, primary sewage treatment doesn’t smell very good, though it does improve as you travel through the complex to visit secondary treatment and the follow-on treatment phases that remove biosolids from the water.

A primary treatment tank at Blue Plains helps solids settle from wastewater.  Garrett Peck

Secondary treatment at Blue Plains uses bacteria to consume biologic matter in wastewater. 

Garrett Peck.

Blue Plains is the largest electricity consumer in the District: it takes considerable energy to pump water and aerate the sewage. Some 10,000 tons of trash and 8,000 tons of grit (coffee grounds, egg shells, potholes and sand) are removed annually from the water and sent to landfill.

Human waste contains high levels of nitrogen and other chemicals. If these chemicals are dumped into a river, algae will grow voraciously, consuming all the oxygen and suffocating all other aquatic animal and plant life. When winter arrives, the algae dies, and the river is effectively dead. Thus nitrogen removal is a key component of advanced sewage treatment, and a key goal in helping clean up the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Biosolids, also known as sludge, is the remaining nutrient-rich organic material after wastewater has been treated. Blue Plains produces more than 1,200 tons of biosolids daily, sending this to be spread on farmland and forests as fertilizer and returning the nutrients to the environment.

After the wastewater has been sufficiently treated, a process that takes about a day, the clean water is returned to the Potomac. Blue Plains has several pipes that extend 150 yards into the river where water is discharged. It is apparently a good fishing spot on the Potomac, as the water is warm and high in oxygen. Bald eagles are often seen circling overhead to catch fish.

About seventy-five times each year, rainstorms overwhelm the sewage system in older Washington neighborhoods, causing combined sewer overflows (CSO). Billions of gallons of untreated sewage overflows into the Anacostia, Potomac and Rock Creek, creating an environmental threat to these streams. The Anacostia River bears the brunt of the overflow. DC Water broke ground in 2011 on its multibillion dollar Clean Rivers Project to build two enormous underground holding tunnels that will store runoff during heavy rains until it can be processed at Blue Plains.

Reservoirs

In the 1950s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built reservoirs along the Potomac watershed to prepare for drought. There are a number of dams and reservoirs on the river: the Little Falls Dam, just above the District border; the Washington Aqueduct Dam above Great Falls; and the Bloomington Dam in Garrett County, Maryland. There are also surviving dams from the C&O Canal.

The Bloomington Dam was built starting in 1971 on the North Branch and completed ten years later at a cost of $175 million. It created the seven-mile long Jennings Randolph Reservoir. Its function is not only to store water, but also to control the high acidic runoff from abandoned coalmines in the Allegheny Plateau. Since the acid separates from clean water, the dam has the ability to release water at different depths, ensuring that the proper mix is released downstream. The completion of the Bloomington Dam was a major factor in the cleanup of the Potomac River. The Jennings Randolph Reservoir holds 13.4 billion gallons of water, though the reservoir is gradually filling with sediment because of the dam.

The Jennings Randolph Reservoir on the Allegheny Plateau is the largest reservoir 

on the Potomac and helps reduce acidity from coalmine runoff in the river. 

Garrett Peck.

Little Seneca Dam, built about the same time as Bloomington Dam, created the largest immediate reservoir for the Washington area, the Little Seneca Reservoir. It is not on the Potomac, but rather twenty miles up Seneca Creek near Germantown, Maryland. It holds 3.8 billion gallons of water.

The Little Seneca Reservoir and the Jennings Randolph Reservoir are the main water reserves for the Washington metropolitan area. Together they store more than seventeen billion gallons of water. Few cities have such substantial reserves, which explains why Washington, D.C. has water even during droughts. The Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin administers both reservoirs.

Drink up! 

Garrett Peck

www.garrettpeck.com