[Publisher] Ravenous Romance

BarbaraSheridan said:

I'm not sure if single title folks have also had trouble, but it seems the statements/payment trouble is mainly with the anthology authors. For some weird reason the anthology editors (who often are writers and not in-house regular editors) were responsible for statements going out.

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My understanding was that the royalty statements for anthologies got sent from RR to the antho editor, who then sent them out to the story authors. Payment was only via RR. If RR wasn't making the payments, the antho editor couldn't do anything about it. So I was getting statements but not payments.

Royalty statements were then taken over by an RR staff member, but as far as I can tell that just made things worse, as now neither statements nor payments have been forthcoming.

Yup, Cleis is gold to work with.

Just flagging that Lori Perkins has left Ravenous Romance.

Anthology payment/royalty schemes may be changing going forward, but existing contracts still do not pay out until the royalties reach $100. If this clause was negotiated differently by teh author, payments still may not have been forthcoming; it may be worth the author's while to contact Ms Holly Schmidt directly, as other staff have a poor response track record.

Have you checked www.eroticromancepublishers.com/? Emily Veinglory tracks and compares erotic epublishers' sales.

I've no idea how their novel-length works sell.

Their anthologies do pretty well, though there's a lot of variability in sales numbers. (I think het and gay male sells better than lesbian.) They used to offer short-story authors for anthologies a $10 advance plus royalties (split between the editor and then between all the authors, so I think a single copy sale nets an individual author something like nine cents). If the book sold really well and the royalties accrued to $100, RR paid the author. If the royalties never accrued to $100, the author never got paid. (I negotiated my contract for a minimum once-yearly payment, but they never showed up so it was kind of a moot point.) Some of their anthos have netted each author well over $100; others, not.

I think they're now going to a flat-fee per story for anthologies, which makes a zillion times more sense because it must be craziness to try and track the royalties for 20+ people for each single anthology title. Cleis, Circlet, and other similar publishers do the flat-fee thing.

The RR contract I was offered was not very author friendly; in fact, it was quite a rights-grab. I don't know if that's changed, but it's not a contract I'd be willing to sign again, and overall my experience with RR hasn't been hugely positive. That said, though, sales do seem reasonable, and the (external, contracted) editor for my anthology is totally awesome.

Thanks, KT, and it's great to know that your lesbian works with RR are selling so well!

Updating: after corresponding directly with Holly, RR has paid my two-years-overdue royalties. Now I have money in my PayPal account, yay! BooksOnBoard, here I come...