When Sidney Midney awoke that brilliant April Tuesday morning, he did not know he was going to shoot his publisher through the heart. Quite the contrary, he felt today he would make a major stride in his writing career: the first time in memory he was to be solvent. For today was the day his publisher, Bupkes House, issued royalty statements, and Sidney was expecting a bundle of money. Sidney had asked his agent to send a messenger to Bupkes for the check and statement, and after processing them, to messenger his check to him.
For fifteen years Sidney had toiled in the crushing traces of genre paperbacks, seldom earning royalties beyond the modest advances his publishers paid him, slipping a little further each year into debt and depression. Recently he had seriously contemplated bailing out of the writing profession and getting into something more rewarding like cotton chopping or coal mining.
But at last Sidney had managed to blend mastery of his craft with an inspired gimmick to produce The Bombazine Imperative, a slick, fast-paced international thriller that Bupkes House had seen fit to publish with some advertising and promotional fanfare as its second lead paperback original the previous July. It appeared as if Sidney had finally, to use the phrase popular in the book trade, broken out. Although his agent had managed to get only a middling advance for Sidney's outline--$10,000--the publishers had reacted with enormous enthusiasm when he turned the manuscript in, with such enthusiasm that they expedited payment of the delivery portion of Sidney's check, releasing it after only two months instead of the customary four. More importantly, Sidney's editor had breached company policy to tell the author how many copies were to be printed: 250,000!
In anticipation of royalties, Sidney had put several thousand dollars down on a new computer for himself and a new suite of bedroom furniture to replace the stuff he and Cynthia had been living with since they got married. The calculations precipitating this flurry of consumerism were fairly straightforward. The book retailed at $7.95, and Sidney's contract called for a straight royalty of 8% of the list price, or about 64 cents per copy sold. If all 250,000 copies were distributed and sold, Sidney could look forward to a total royalty of $160,000--less the $10,000 advance paid to him previously. Of course, Sidney had been in the business long enough to know that not all 250,000 copies printed would be distributed, and that not all copies distributed would be sold. In the book business, unlike almost any other Sidney could think of, unsold merchandise was returnable to the publisher for full, or almost full, credit, and he had heard that these days as many as 60% of all copies of any given book distributed by a publisher were returned. So he had made allowances for all that, and figured nevertheless he had about fifty-four thousand dollars coming to him: 100,000 copies at 64 cents each came to $64.000, less the $10,000 advance, and less his agent's ten percent commission, of course.
So, when the messenger arrived with the envelope bearing his agent's familiar logo on the upper left hand corner, Sidney's hands had trembled almost uncontrollably. At long last he was to be compensated for those lonely years of apprenticeship, for the struggle that had so often strained his marriage to say nothing of his relationship with the bank and the credit departments of Bloomingdale's and Saks.
So keen was Sidney's expectation that when at length he did manage to get the envelope open and removed from it a royalty statement to which no check was attached, it was impossible for him to believe no money was due. He was dead certain a mistake had occurred: his agent had misunderstood the instructions, or was holding up his remittance until the Bupkes House check cleared through the bank. Or perhaps his agent had sent him statements on some of the turkeys Sidney had written earlier.
)
