[Chairman_December_19th_Society]

Post your short news items, issues of interest, links, and so on. All who advance the Cause are welcome.

LET'S ROLL!!!

[Chairman_December_19th_Society]

Good morning, everyone!

[prairiebreeze]

Good morning. The 9-11 hearings are continuing. Richard Clarke is on for Thursday I just heard. He gets twice the time of others in Bush administration according to Brit Hume.

Rumsfeld and Powell are testifying today.

Prairie --pass the Zantac

[Molly Pitcher]

GI John's New ad Deb Orin

John F Who?? WSJ....Brendan Miniter

Europe sobers up Ralph Peters

Death of a terror kingpin NY Post

Dick's tall tale John Podhoretz

[oldngray]

'morning Mr Chairman... you have FReepmail!

Good morning also to all you wonderful people.

[Peach]

Benton County, Oregon has announced they will stop issuing licenses for ALL wedding licenses until they sort out the gay marriage matter!!!

http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/1103585/posts?page=1

[TBarnett34]

Mornin' everybody..heading out to class with a pain in my neck and no voice. It's gonna be a long day :(

[kayak]

Hope your back is better today, Chair! Are you at work today?

We don't tell you often enough how much we appreciate your efforts in starting the thread each day. THANK YOU!

[Jemian]

Dolly, yes, going without electricity is very common for us. I cannot remember a 24 hour period without at least one outage of varying length. For that matter, I cannot remember a 24 hour period without some rain, too.

It is uncommon for the outage to last 12 hours or to be long periods without (8 - 12 hours) several days in a row. It isn't good for us because we depend on electricity so much and it isn't good for at all for air conditions, refridgerators and computers.

TB, you have very admirable goals. I'm sorry for your parent's divorce. It usually impacts the children the worst. I am gratified to see that you have applied the lessons of it to your life and can see things to do and not to do. Three world series rings tell me that when you set a goal, you know steps to take to reach and that you can work with others. That is quite an accomplishment. Many don't learn those lessons until much later if ever.

And turning 20 on May 9 means that you are less than a month older than LionsDaughter.

I have another question for you, if you don't mind.

[nicollo]

Hello, ATRW! Thought I'd bounce in a moment and vent about something I noticed in the news today...

The com(post) today claims that Hillary Clinton's book sold 2.8 million copies. Assuming it's true, although I am certain it is not, here's how the numbers would play out:

$28.00 SRP
(11.20) less 40% retailer discount
16.80 Publisher's gross per book
$1.68 Author 10% royalty per book

$1.68 x 2,800,000 = $4,704,000 royalties due the Hitlery.

We're talking BEST CASE scenario, and even with this fantasy number of 2.8 million, there ain't no way they'll sell the other 2 million copies needed to justify the $8 million advance.

They only way the advance can be met, even by these oh-so-generous numbers would be if Hitlery is getting a 20%+ royalty, which would be, shall we say, highly unusual.

If -- if -- 2.8 million books were shipped, there still needs to be some accounting for returns, which typically reach 40% of sales. So chalk off 40% right away. I'd bet that this book had an unusually high number of returns. Retailers were happy to give it great space at the launch, if only for the foot traffic it generated in the stores. And they did it risk free, for what they don't sell the publishers have to eat.

Next, the book is typically sold at 30-50% off SRP. So, with the unusual discounting it has gotten, the publisher's gross per book is likely much lower than the $16.80 I used to calculate it as a normal deal. My guess is their gross sales numbers are around twelve bucks and they've gotten half the books sold back as returns.

Now, a book advance is just that -- it is an advance against sales. If the sales don't justify the advance the author owes the difference -- under a normal deal, that is.

Whatever money Simon & Schuster has made off the book will have to go towards building a new warehouse to store all the unsold and returned copies...