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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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