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Re: The Scientific American Blog



In a message dated 3/18/11 4:03:48 PM, heinrich.mallison@googlemail.com 
writes:

<< Sorry, this a bit confusing for me! Could you please clarify how the
Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs (ed. and author GS Paul) is not
connected to Scientific American?

Maybe it isn't, but to me it sure sounds it is connected, so please
explain (if contracts allow >>

A question very pertinent to the subject. Now, I did not say it was not 
ever connected with SA, although I certainly never was connected in a way that 
I had any influence with anyone there. I said that I have no current 
contacts with SciAmer who it is hard to overemphasize could care less about me. 
Nor 
did I have any contact with anyone at SA when doing the book. 

If you look at the copyright on the copyright page it is first under Byron 
Press, and Sci Amer is secondary. A small concern, Byron Press (which I 
believe went belly up -- maybe somebody died, I can't quite recall, and it may 
have been revieved by the surviving head) was or is what is called a book 
packager. Usually it is not a good idea to go through  because they take a big 
cut of the royalities. But this was more of a courtesy editor thing so that 
was not a problem in this case. I got a couple thousand and no royalties. (I 
think I got 1 K for the Knight article in the magazine, so I used the ~3K 
total for the downpayment on the tropical island I will retire to after 
capturing the entire dinomarket -- actually the last thing I would want to do 
it 
retire to a tropical island, they are nice to visit but dull over the long 
term.). Back to the subject at hand, the people at SA probably did not have 
the staff to deal with books so they contracted with BP who was familiar on 
how to do this sort of thing. As far as I could tell no one at SA seemed to 
care how BP handled the  book, they knew BP was competent at the job and left 
them to it. All they wanted was their cut of the sales. The book is long 
out of print. The contract is long moot and there were no confidentially 
clauses -- it was just a nice book. 

Hope this answers the question. 

G Paul 
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