On Sep 4, 2011, at 7:36 PM, Dennis Redmond wrote:
> In fairness to Verso, the structural problem is that sales of books,
> like all other purchased cultural material, are highly unpredictable.
> As a rule, one out of ten books, films, movies, TV shows, and
> videogames will hit the jackpot, and the rest either barely break even
> or lose money. So the few winners end up subsidizing the rest.
Why would you want to be fair to Verso? They're notorious for not paying authors. A reliable source tells me that Perry Anderson owns their building in London and charges them market rent for it. They publish lots of wonderful stuff, but the place is run by aristocrats with inherited fortunes, and it shows.
The contract for Wall Street treated UK sales as domestic and all other, including U.S., as exports. Royalties on export sales were figured on the wholesale, not the retail, price. On domestic sales, meaning the handful of copies sold in the UK, royalties were computed on the retail price. This is a deeply shitty arrangement for an American author writing mostly about the U.S. In 1990, I was so happy that someone offered me a book contract that I didn't think about it. But they knew it was a shitty deal and thrust it on me anyway. Yeah, you might say, that's just business. Which is true enough, but Verso is supposed to be some radical enterprise.
At a Marxist Literary Group meeting long ago, Mike Sprinker said something cutting about the bourgeoisie. People laughed, and he said, "You laugh, but everything I learned about the bourgeoisie I learned at Verso/NLR."
Oh, and they asked me to do an updated edition of Wall Street - which means essentially a rewrite - for $1,000. Fuck that.
Doug