Torn A-Tsundere

“hey don’t use eugenics language to describe a thing you don’t like”

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

Jetzt reagiert auch Dolmetscher Frank Deja, der für den Fauxpas gesorgt hatte. "Ich war überzeugt, ich hätte mich stumm geschaltet. Ich habe aber im Eifer des Gefechts die falsche Taste gedrückt. Wir haben als Dolmetscher sogenannte Räusper-Tasten, mit denen wir uns stummschalten können. Dann geht das eben nicht über den Sender – und meine Aussage sollte natürlich auch nicht über den Sender gehen", erklärt er "n-tv". Seinen Zwischenruf solle man nicht als politisches Statement deuten. "Nein, das wäre ganz verfehlt. Die politischen Inhalte sind nicht das Problem", meint Deja und fügt hinzu: "Ich dolmetsche ständig Leute, mit deren politischen Inhalten ich nicht einverstanden bin. Das Problem bei Trump war, dass er auf einmal anfing, frei zu assoziieren oder dreimal hintereinander dasselbe zu sagen. Diesen wirren Gedankensprüngen zu folgen, ist die Schwierigkeit beim Dolmetschen." Er erklärt: "Wenn ein Redner mit geordneten Gedanken redet, dann kann man, sobald der Satz angefangen hat, schon ungefähr erahnen, wie es weitergeht. Man kann auf dieser Welle weiter surfen. Aber bei Trump ist das unmöglich."

Background for the non-Germans: a German professional interpreter was live-interpreting the TV broadcast of the Trump inauguration when he suddenly broke off in the middle of his interpreting and said loudly, "Tell me, how long do we have to watch this shit?!"

Of course they immediately cut his mic after that, but it was too late :D

Anyway here's my rough translation of the article excerpt above: