Dear Barbara, I've been checking my statistics and now I have proof that there are other people besides you reading (or at least viewing) this page. And I even got email today from someone, but she asked not to be "posted anywhere" so I won't mention her name. (You know who you are; thank you for writing!) So I think this will be my last entry with you in the hot-seat so to speak, with your name at the top. Hope that's OK with you.
So Georg does the world music show once a month at the Duke college radio station. Yesterday a guy sat in on his show, who's writing an article about world music (or college radio, or world music on college radio, or something like that). It turns out that the guy is an author who's published four or five novels plus short stories in various anthologies. And it turns out that Georg has read a couple of his novels. And they hit it off and had a good time talking, both on the air and off. Pretty cool huh?
The depressing part is, at some point in the off-air conversation the guy mentioned that his former publisher had tried to cheat him by claiming more returns on his book than they had supposedly printed in the first place. And the really depressing part is that, in the course of telling this story, he mentioned that he had never received a single royalty check from any of his books. Apparently he does earn some money from a story in a cyberpunk anthology that did well. But from the full-length books, the ones with his name on the cover? Not one cent.
If someone like that, a successful author with multiple books to his credit, can't earn anything from his fiction, what hope is there for an amateur like me, working in a small genre like this? I've tried to maintain low expectations about this project, not get my hopes up, so there'd be less chance of disappointment. I never harbored any illusions about fame and fortune. I'm no Brian Williams or Alexandra Genetti, and I don't expect the kind of recognition they (deservedly) enjoy. I know Tarot will never enable me to quit my day job. When people congratulate me on the money I'll be making, I always laugh. But heck, I'm hoping to at least earn something. The thought of never getting a single royalty check had honestly not occurred to me.
Perhaps I need to adjust my expectations. Instead of thinking to myself that V/R will be a success if we make enough money to go back to Italy, I should be thinking that V/R will be a success if we cover the advance.
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