Well put!
As a published author myself, I recognize this kind of treatment as unusual to the extreme. As you do.
Hi Okie01,
Pleased to meet you. From what I know about advances (not from my own personal experiences), a first-time author may get between $5-10K against future royalties/sales, depending on the subject and their platform. The woman who wrote “The Jewel of Medina” received about $100K for a two-book deal from Harper Collins, simply because the proposed work was so compelling and the resulting sales would be huge, I’d expect. I don’t know much more than that.
And the $80K seems to have been advanced without taking his travel to Bali into account. Did the advance pay for the office and the assistant, or did the publisher pay for that separately?