I'm a missionary in Japan. The name of my mission agency is WEC International. That's supposedly Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ, but I think I have a better idea about what it stands for...
2006-04-23
Cooking the, uh, books?
Dear lazyweb: Do we know anyone who would be capable at looking at some book royalty statements and work out whether a certain publisher - which is not O'Reilly, nor is it Manning - is stiffing me?
The trick appears to be moving the goalposts by adjusting the amount that gets paid into the "reserve for returns" account to keep royalties under the 25%-of-reserve threshold (which is itself a new one on me) so that they never have to pay me. But I don't know whether the "amount applied to recoupment" and the "reserve" and the "royalty earned" are meant to follow some logical relationship to sales, or if it's all voodoo economics that I shouldn't be able to figure anyway.
They aren't replying to my emails for clarification, which doesn't help the impression. Hell, they didn't even agree to pay me a royalty until I complained about it here, so let's see what happens this time. :)
Update: OK, a flash of inspiration and a bit of quality time with Excel means I now know that Beginning Perl needs to sell another 815 copies before I see any cash from it. Go to it!
Meanwhile, reverse-engineering spreadsheets is fun. :) I seem to recall Jocelyn wrote something to do it...
Update 2: More quality time suggests that they are actually stiffing me; if they had applied the royalty rate that they claim appliess, it should only need to sell 75 copies before I get royalties. But their calculations say 815. Oops.
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lathos: Heading down to Oookayama. The おおお joke never gets old.
