Is your Royalty Statement Fake News? Part 1

Mine is.  Or, at least it looks like it is.  There is an old adage in business, "If a financial report is too long and too complicated, it could be that someone is trying to hide something."  I don't know if anyone is hiding anything, but my royalty statements are very long, complicated, and difficult to understand. For example, below is an illustration of one type of entry where they subtracted $3,750 in royalties with no explanation, other than "adjustment."  (Just imagine the CEO of a publishing company getting a pay check with a deduction of $3,750 with no explanation.) :

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Description	Unit Sales	Net Income	Royalty Rate	Royalty
Algebra Book
Adjustments		($25,000)	15%	($3,750)

​This happens over 10 times on the statement. There are so many entries like this that I don't know where to start asking questions. But I know something is wrong precisely because there is no explanation. They know where this entry comes from, but they are not sharing it with me.  Why not? 

My experience tells me there are three things that keep us from getting the information we need, in order to know if our royalty statements are correct.

• First, our editors don't understand the statements either. It seems like the  publishers put a number of layers between us and the people who actually understand the royalty statements. And its hard to find those people.  In the meantime, it waste lots of time talking to our editors about it.  I think the editors do want to help, but they are not supported in this by their companies.
• Second, they are not in a hurry to answer our questions. I have a friend who is doing an audit on an authors royalty statement and when she asks for specific documents or information, it sometimes takes months for them to get back to her.  I think they are hoping it will all go away if they can just stall as long as possible.
• Third, and probably most important, the publishers no longer see the value in us, the content creators.. They think that software is going to solve the problems in developmental math. They are wrong, but it is going to be years before they realize it.  In the meantime, we are not valuable to them, so they have no incentive to make our royalty statements accurate, or to answer our questions quickly.

If you would like to join the group of authors concerned about their royalty statements, email me at pat@mathtv.com.
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At XYZ Textbooks we do things differently. Every author gets an easy to read royalty statement.  We pay royalties on the full price of our eBooks.  And every author gets a list of schools using their book.  An author can ask for year-to-date sales and income at any time during the year, and they can ask for a list of the schools using their book at any time.  Every publisher has that information.