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?
The $40K for an untried author is enough to send off warning flares that this is NOT an ordinary transaction.
Another $40,000 after he has not produced a phrase by the original deadline is beyond the bounds of comprehension.
The office and the secretary were provided by Univ of Chicago, in the expectation that he would publish. But he failed to avail himself of these facilities and he and his wife decamped to Bali -- presumably funded by his advance.