I have pondered whether to blog about this or not... but I've decided to do it, in the end. Our book "The Middle Ages Unlocked" has been out for a week now... and it has already been pirated, as the epub or mobi version. Yes, really.

Gillian told me about this just this morning, and I have since wasted some time reading up on ebook piracy, getting some information from our publisher, and other related stuff. I have also sent off a notice to the cloud service thingie that hosts the download link, duly informing them about the infringement. And now I'll do my best to forget about this until it requires further effort from my side and move on. (Well, after this blog post, that is.)

I am, let me whine for a bit here, please, not at all happy about this. Gillian Polack and I have spent many, many hours working on the book, reading, researching, writing and refining. (I actually logged the hours. I have not checked yet how many they were. I am not planning to - it scares me too much.) We have spent a lot of time looking for a publisher willing to take on this exciting-but-also-slightly-daunting Beast of a book. Neither Gillian nor I are going to get rich off this (as is usual for authors).

Neither Gillian nor I expect to get rich off this book. What we do expect, though, is to be treated fairly - and that does not include somebody taking the hard work that we and our publishing house Amberley put into the book and placing it online, for free. That makes me sad, and a bit angry, and also a little depressed.

Yesterday, the postie came and delivered this:


Copies of The Middle Ages Unlocked! And right in time so I can send out pre-orders for the release date, which is June 15, or Monday! (If you order one right now, I'll send it out as soon as possible, though with the Deutsche Post on strike, I cannot promise that you will have it on Monday.) The second box from the top in the stack, by the way, was the best box - it contained this:


The piece of paper is the best kind of invoice there is - an invoice marked "These title(s) are being sent with the compliments of the Publisher".

Opening such a box? That is a priceless, precious moment.

The topic of getting paid for books, and how much you get as an author, and how much you make if you sell books came up again in one of my conversations this weekend - need I mention that I talked about the Beast a lot?

The conversation, however, reminded me that this is something not everybody knows, and probably a good thing to blog about.

Anyone who has ever heard something about authors and royalties knows that you will not get rich by writing.* From the cover price of the book, about 2-15% end up in the author's bank account.** So where does the rest go?

A good chunk of the money is consumed by the actual printing of the physical book and related costs - storage, transport, shipping, logistics involved with that. Then there's the people working in the publishing house who have to pay for their lives as well. About half the cover price is deducted for booksellers (which can include authors, if they choose to sell their own book as well). And that's it.

Since book prices are more or less fixed***, that means you can decide where your book-buying money goes to, with no difference (or very little of it) to your own bank account.  The publishing house and the author get a fixed amount for every book sold, but then there's the seller's profit, which is about 30-50% of the cover price.

Your choice of where you get the book decides who gets this money. Want to support a certain publishing house because you just love everything they turn out? Order your books directly from them - it means they get their profit plus the bookseller's profit. You have a favourite bookstore, online or brick-and-mortar? Buy your books there. (Since price differences are rather small, buying books not in the Big River Store, but from other companies, is a rather pain-free way to curb the monopoly of Amazon, too.) Your most beloved authors are selling books themselves? If you buy directly from them, they will get their royalties plus the bookseller's profit (which is usually a multiple of the royalties). I can't say how things will work out for the Beast yet, but for Kleidung im Mittelalter, I get about six times as much money if I sell it myself than if the publishing house or a bookshop sells it (and I'm getting a good royalty rate for this, so it will probably be an even bigger difference for the Beast).

So if you are ever wondering where to buy a book in the future, now you know that your decision will actually make a difference to the bookshop, publisher, or author. The most important thing, though, is that the book gets out there at all - to be read, enjoyed, talked about, and used in all the many possible ways that a book can be used. (Including as a doorstop or plant press, if necessary.)



*The very few exceptions to this are what proves this rule.
** If you google stuff, there are quite a few web sites that will tell you a standard royalty rate is 10-15%. This, however, is not true for all genres or types of books and all circumstances; if you are not writing a novel, things may be very different.
*** Book prices are completely fixed in Germany and Austria - books printed by publishing houses here have a price that you must ask when selling said book, or else. Prices are more fluid where this system does not apply, but a newly released book will sell for more or less a similar price wherever you buy it.

This has been a rather full week, and I'm really, really looking forward to the weekend now!

If you are looking for something to while away a little time and haven't done so yet, the Free 14 at Maney is still running until Sunday, so if you like conservation, heritage or archaeology journal articles, that might sweeten your weekend a bit.

Me, I'll take care of two or three little things now, and then I will sit in the sun and unwind. The Beast is finally finished, edited, proof-read, proof-read again, our changes carefully considered and sent in, all remaining questions answered and it is off our desks for good. It's been wonderful, nerve-racking, exciting, exhausting, painstaking and demanding work to get this thing finished for print.

Actually, the whole work on the book was wonderful and nerve-racking and demanding, and at times it became hilarious, and at other times it was deeply frustrating. There were times when one of us tried very, very hard to get a point across to the other one, because only one could see the issue and the other couldn't. There were times when we sighed in frustration because the literature was too scarce, or too biased, or doesn't explain something clearly and we couldn't find a better book or article for the topic. There were times when we wished we had about a hundred more pages of leeway to explain things about the cans of worms here and there, things fraught with so many issues from research history and old biases and uncertainities that we could either write "this is a disputed thing" or start to do a few weeks more research and write many more pages (for which we did not have the space). There was much nitpicking about the exact phrasing of this or that so it would be as hard as possible to misunderstand or misinterpret.

It wasn't all sweat and toil and sighs, though. We had a lot of good times and a lot of fun doing all this, and you can bet that there were ample little jokes we made, and there were even a few puns in the draft at some stages.

The Beast has given us three years of collaboration where we managed to solve all these issues of writing, and all the other issues that came up through language differences, time zone shifts, cultural differences and personal preferences. Oh, and the mis-timed illnesses that had a tendency to hit us both at the same time when we could both not afford to let the Beast rest for a few days. So sometimes it was tough going, but we both did persist, and it was an amazing, wonderful ride altogether, and I am very proud that we did persist and never got too mad at each other for too long. 
I'm also very proud of what we wrote, together, standing on the shoulders of giants, merging our expertise and our passions and our voices.

Now, soon, it will be out in the world to be enjoyed by many other people. I'm thrilled about that, and a bit nervous (will people like it? will it be the helpful book we intended it to be?) and very, very happy that we found a lovely publisher who did a lot of work, too, to make the book look as beautiful as possible.

It's finally, finally really done. Finished. On a sunny Friday. I am happy.

Remember how, not many days ago, I happily told you that the Beast was finished? Well, it has returned once again to haunt me (though I am to blame for that myself) - we were offered to have a last look at the second stage proofs, and we decided to do so.

Which means I'm currently reading it again. One last time - though this round, it's just to look out for any little remaining typos and inconsistencies, and reading is not as demanding or as slow as for a full edit.

I hope to be finished by tomorrow evening with all the read-through, leaving the weekend gloriously Beast-free...

There's this German saying "Lila - der letzte Versuch" (purple, the last effort). While I'm on the last effort to make the Beast as nice as possible, the wooden trough here has purple flowers as a last effort to make it useful, since its bottom broke during production... making it a not very good trough, but a very nice flowerpot.

This, my friends, is the last time that the Beast will have kept me from blogging in a timely fashion due to totally eating my brain and whacking me about the head with a deadline... because it's done.

Done, finished, dealt with, packed up nicely and sent away. Of course, there were a gazillion little things we would have liked to change in that last read-through (mostly little glitches in style that slipped past us in the last Big Edit), and of course there were still some typos left (some of them quite amusing, such as a stray paddler trying to sell spices), but we refrained from fiddling with style (and the editor will deal with whatever needs dealing with, much to our joy and relief) and now it's done, done, done.

Which means that in the future, if I totally and utterly forget to blog in the morning, I will not have that wonderful scapegoat anymore. And you know what? I don't mind at all.

Before I toddle off into the weekend, though, here is a fitting link for the springtime that is in full spring at the moment: a brand-new system for beehives to harvest honey easily and without disturbing the bees. Fascinating!

And there's also some news on the Digital VAT issue - the Commission is rethinking the rules. There's hope!

Deadlines, I am convinced, are Eaters of Brains. They especially seem to like those parts of the brain that are supposed to keep track of things already done or still to do - such as doing a blog entry.

Tomorrow, though, is the last day this particular deadline will nibble on my cranial capacity. And since someone recently made me promise to post more pictures on this blog, you are now at least getting a gratuitous cat picture to make up for the very belated blog post: