Tag Archives: fact

Aircraft User Fees

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And why general aviation pilots and businesses should be fighting back.

There’s been a lot of talk — and fighting against — the Bush Administration’s “Next Generation Air Transportation System Financing Reform Act of 2007.” I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the details. But here are a few things that seem pretty clear to me.

Higher Fees Hurt Business

The User Fee system proposed by the Bush Administration may severely cut the activities of general aviation pilots. According to AOPA President Phil Boyer, “Nine out of 10 AOPA members have told us that this would reduce, curtail, or end their flying.” What’s that going to do for the aviation industry? As current pilots who can no longer afford to fly regularly sell off their aircraft, the used aircraft market becomes flooded. Fewer people will be buying new aircraft, so manufacturers will suffer. Suppliers to those manufacturers will suffer, as will employees all around.

As costs increase for general aviation businesses like flight schools, charter services, and tour outfits, those costs get passed along to consumers. That drives prices up, possibly making these services too costly for the marketplace. There are fewer customers. Businesses fail. This continues the cycle of used aircraft sales and unemployment.

Proposal Seems to Ask General Aviation Pilots to Bail Out Airlines

Shifting the cost of ATC services from airlines — which are responsible for hundreds of thousands of passenger hours a day — to general aviation is simply unfair. Many of these companies are failing financially because of their top-heavy management organization and unreasonable pay scales. Why is it that some airlines — Southwest comes to mind — are financially fit and offer good service to their customers while other airlines — think United — can’t stay afloat without government funds and pension rule changes? Could it be that some companies are simply managed better than others?

Do you think it would be fair for all people who use banks to pay a certain tax to the government for a fund that’ll bail out mismanaged banks that go under? Like the ones that gave out mortgages to anyone capable of writing their name on a form, no matter what their financial situation was?

Or how about a tax on drivers to be put in a fund to bail out automakers who don’t build the cars we want to buy at a price want to pay?

Or a tax on homeowners living in the desert for a fund that rebuilds oceanfront summer homes destroyed by hurricanes?

Is any of that fair?

Get Involved!

If you think the administration’s proposal is a bad one — or even if you want to learn more — get involved. If you’re an AOPA member, you can sign up to get e-mail notifications of developments, as well as instructions on how you can contact your government representatives to tell them what you think.

You can also go to this page to get more information about the funding debate.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Act now.

Royalty Statements

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What my quarterly royalty statement tells me.

I make my living as a writer. Sure, I do other stuff and bring in money doing it, but when it all gets down to dollars and cents, the money I receive from writing is what pays the mortgage and puts food on the table.

With a new royalty statement in my hands, I thought I’d take a few moments to explain to folks interested in writing how the royalty part of writing works and what can be learned from a royalty statement.

How a Typical Writer Receives Income

Money from my writing work comes in three ways:

  • Payments for articles. When I write an article for publication, I normally get a check within 2 to 4 weeks of publication. The amount is agreed upon in advance, so I know what to expect but not exactly when to expect it.
  • Advances for work in progress on books. When I sign a book contract, it includes a payment schedule for advances. I like my advance paid in three or four installments that are due when certain parts of the book are submitted to my editor(s) — in other words, when I achieve completion milestones. A typical arrangement might be 1/3 on signing, 1/3 on 1/2 completion, and 1/3 on completion. Depending on the publisher, the checks usually arrive within 2 to 4 weeks of the milestone. Again, I know how much to expect but not exactly when to expect it.
  • Royalty payments. When I sign a book contract, it also includes a royalty percentage. The percentage is applied to the wholesale price of the book. So, for example, if the royalty is 12% and the book retails for $20 (about average for my books), the 12% is applied to the amount the publisher sold the book to retailers (or book clubs or direct order customers) for. A good rule of thumb is about 50% off the cover price. So I’d get 12% of about $10 or $1.20 per book. This royalty rate is applied to all sales of a title to come up with a royalty due. The amount of advance is then subtracted — remember, that was an advance on royalties — and if the result is a positive number, the book has “earned out” and I get a royalty check. My publishers pay royalties quarterly, although not on the same schedule. I know exactly when a royalty check will come — well, within 3 days of an exact date — but I never know how much I’ll get.

After doing this for 15 years, I’ve come to think of advances as my “bread and butter,” payment for articles as “fun money,” and royalties earned as “icing on the cake.” I won’t write a book unless the advance is enough to cover the amount of time and effort I put into writing the book. (I turned down two low-advance projects just last year.) This way, if the book doesn’t earn out, I’ll still make enough to keep paying the bills. If it does earn out, great. And since I don’t do a lot of work on articles — it’s just too much effort to get the work lined up — I don’t rely on that income for anything. That’s kind of unfortunate, because I can usually bang out one or two articles in day, so the income would really be great if I’d get get more of that kind of work.

As you can imagine, royalty statement time is a big event at my house — especially when Peachpit royalties are due. The statement comes in a big fat envelope. The reason: there are lots of pages. But one of the first pages of the package is the royalty check. And a quick peek tells me just how much icing I’ll have to spread around for the next three months.

How Many Books are on the Books?

The reason my Peachpit royalty statement comes in a big fat envelope is because there are lots of pages. The statement sitting in front of me right now is 61 pages long. I can’t even get a staple through it for filing.

The first few pages — 4, this time around — is a summary of the ISBNs covered by the statement. This list of ISBNs — 34 of them this quarter — are the books the publisher still has in its accounting system.

I need to make a distinction here between titles and ISBNs. A good example is right on the first page. My 2004 title, Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Excel: Visual QuickProject Guide, is listed three times: the original title, the German translation, and the French translation. Sometimes translations get their own ISBN and sometimes revenue for a translation is listed for the main title. It depends on how the translation rights were sold. Also, since Peachpit is now selling PDF versions of some of my books, those versions appear on a separate line.

Still, a quick count of titles on this quarter’s statement shows 28 titles listed. Whew! Even I think that’s a lot.

In my case, the vast majority of my work these days is in revisions. So each statement might show multiple versions of the same book. This is especially true for titles that are still “alive.” For example, my America Online: Visual QuickStart Guides (a 2-part — Macintosh and Windows — nightmare completed for version 3.0 years ago) are “dead” titles. They came out, sold poorly, and were not revised. These book are dead and buried and the only reminder that I ever did them are the author copies of each book on my author copy shelf. But my Excel for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide is alive and kicking — in fact, I just finished the revision for Excel 2007 this week. Three editions appear on my royalty statement: 2000, 2002, and 2003. (2007 will appear on the next statement.) And my Mac OS: Visual QuickStart Guide takes up the most lines: seven editions going back as far as the edition covering Mac OS 9.

For a title to appear on the royalty statement, it must be either earning money or losing money (by returns) with a more recent edition to suck up the losses. This is an important clause in book contracts — one that’s important enough to discuss in a little more detail here. Commonly known as cross-accounting or cross-deductions, it means that returns on one title can be applied to net revenue on another. So, for example, if my share of returns on an old edition of my Excel book was $43.54, that amount could be deducted from or charged to royalties on a more recent edition. That’s normally why books stay on royalty statements for so long — there’s still accounting for them.

It was kind of a good thing that my AOL books didn’t have more recent editions. Neither title earned out, so the money I was overpaid for those books could be deducted from future editions, had they existed. Instead, the publisher cut their losses by not doing new editions (a wise move) and simply stopped accounting for the existing books when the numbers stopped coming through. The books “fell off” my royalty statement.

(If you’re ever given the opportunity to negotiate a book contract, do not sign a contract with a clause that says all of your books can be pooled together for cross-accounting. (I don’t know the exact wording of a clause like that because I’ve had it removed from every single draft contract it appeared in.) Agreeing to this may prevent you from ever getting a royalty check if you write multiple titles for the same publisher and any or them are dogs. If you’re really lucky, you won’t even have cross-accounting for the same edition of a book — I was lucky to have that situation with one of my Quicken titles years ago. But I think it’s fair to do cross-accounting with different editions of the same book, so I don’t mind signing for it. I just brace myself for the returns every time a new edition comes out.

And returns, in case you’re wondering, are returns from retailers/wholesalers, not consumers. If Barnes & Nobel buys 1000 copies of a book and sells 200 of them in the time they allotted to give the title shelf space, 800 copies come back. That’s a bad thing for the author.

What the Summary Numbers Mean

Still with me? Here’s a bit more that the summary pages tell me.

For each ISBN, the summary page has 6 numbers:

  • Previous Balance is the amount owed to me (positive number) or the publisher (negative number) for the ISBN. There usually aren’t any positive numbers; if the publisher owned me money, they paid me last quarter. So books that are earned out show zero in this column. If I owe the publisher money — for example, the book hasn’t earned out or subsequent returns have put the ISBN in the red — that number appears as a negative value. Zero is good, negative is bad.
  • Earnings/Subsidiary Rights Earnings is what the book earned me during the quarter. That’s the royalty calculation applied to net sales. Positive numbers means they sold more books than they received in returns. Negative numbers mean they got more in returns than they sold. Positive is good, negative is bad.
  • Credits/(Deductions) is the amount paid out during the quarter for advances or, if the author is paying for indexing, the amount paid to the indexer. I’ve never seen a positive number in this column.
  • Cross Deductions is where they take returns from one title and apply them to royalties earned on another title. So, for example, if the net earnings on my Word X book were -$53.47, that amount would appear as a positive value in this column for that ISBN and a negative value in that column for a later edition — perhaps my Word 2004 book. If you add up the cross-deductions column, the net amount should be zero.
  • Payment Due is the net amount owed to me for the ISBN. This number is either zero or a positive number.
  • Balance Forward is the amount that needs to be earned out to get more royalties on the ISBN. It’ll be zero if there was a payment in the previous column or a negative number if zero was in the previous column. That value is carried forward to the Previous Balance column in the next statement.

Of course, this is the format Peachpit uses. Other publishers may use other formats.

So when I get a royalty statement, the second thing I look at is the summary. (The first is the amount of the check, of course.) The summary tells me which books are earning money for me. That’s usually current editions of books. This is where I can see at a glance whether a new title has earned out. I can also see which books are earning me the most money — the titles with bright and happy futures. The bigger the payment due on a title, the more likely that title will be revised in the future. (Unless the software publisher decides to kill the software, as Adobe did to PageMill years ago. That book was doing very well when it was killed.)

Sometimes I get pleasant surprises. For example, my Excel 2002 book is still selling. That book was published five years ago and it earned $262 for me this quarter. Okay, so that isn’t enough to host a big party, but it’s a nice thing, a good thing. After all, the average life of a computer book is 18 months. So to have one that’s still bringing in a few bucks for me after five years is great.

The summary statement also tells me which titles are dead. These are the titles with previous balances that are negative numbers and no revised editions to earn more revenue. Sometimes these titles have ugly negative numbers in the Earnings column, indicating returns. My QuickBooks Pro for Mac book is in this situation. Although it’s the only title covering that software, there simply aren’t enough users interested in buying a book to make the book earn out. So when my editor says the publisher is not going to revise the title, I can look at this royalty statement and understand why. The book is dead.

Want more detail? The summary pages are also a table of contents for the 57 pages that follow them. That’s where I can find information about units sold, subsidiary rights (like translation rights), and where the books were sold: U.S., Canada, Export, etc. To be honest, I don’t look at these pages for every title. Heck, I have enough to do in a day.

What I Learned this Quarter

Looking at the royalty statement is like peering into a crystal ball. I learned that there are certain topics I probably won’t be writing again and other topics I’ll be writing about for years to come. I learned which of my books is doing best for me (still Tiger, after two years!) and which ones I might want to promote a bit more to liven up.

But with 61 pages to review, that’s about all.

Tumblelogs

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I discover a new, abbreviated form of blogging.

One of the things I’ve noticed about my blog is that a high percentage of the entries are extremely wordy, full of stories or opinions or information that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, compiling, formatting, and publishing. And it seems that most serious blogs are the same.

Enter, the tumblelog, which has apparently been around since 2005. This short-form blog is ideal for quick and dirty entry posting. In fact, that’s what it’s supposed to be for.

From Wikipedia:

A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.

I first heard of tumblelogs on either the TWIT or MacBreak Weekly podcast. Leo Laporte and other members of those two podcast teams use Tumblr to create and publish their tumblelogs. Curious, I went to check it out for myself. And, on the FAQs page there, I got a the analogy that sold me on trying it for myself:

If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

It might be nice to have an online scrapbook, I thought. I decided to sign up for a free Tumblr account and give it a try. The result is the unimaginatively named Maria’s TumbleLog, which can be found at tumblelog.aneclecticmind.com. (And yes, you can host a tumblelog on Tumblr’s site; I just got fancy and set mine up with my own custom domain name.) Since then, I’ve added entries that include photos and quotes. I’ve also set up my account to automatically create links to new articles in a number of feeds — including the one for this WebLog.

Although I like the ease at which entries can be added to my tumblelog, I don’t like the fact that there’s no offline composition tool. But I think that’s because I’m worried about composition — a task that simply doesn’t apply to tumblelog entries. Entries are extremely short and to the point: a photo with a caption, a quote with the name of the person being quoted, a link all by itself. While it is possible to create a standard text entry, I’m going to try hard not to — unless I can keep it to 100 words or less. That’s not an easy task for me — writing more has always been easier than writing less.

Will anyone read my tumblelog? I don’t know. Do I care? I don’t know that, either.

Right now, the idea is too new to me. I’m more interested in experimenting with this form of expression and seeing whether I can stick to it.

I’ve been blogging for 3-1/2 years now; it’ll be tough to branch some of that energy off to a similar yet very different form.

In the meantime, I’d be very interested in hearing from others with tumblelogs. Use the comments link. And be sure to include a link to your tumblelog in the form so other readers and I can check it out.

Computer Wait Speed

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Maria Speaks Episode 34: Computer Wait Speed

My current computer woes remind me of something I heard long ago.

A long time ago — ten or more years, which is the middle ages in terms of the computing industry — computers were being marketed primarily on the basis of processor speed. Every time Intel or Motorola would come out with a new processor chip, members of the geeky set hurried to the stories to buy a new computer or upgrade that would bring their machines up to speed. It was then that I heard this rather curious statement:

All computers wait at the same speed.

The statement, of course, was meant to poke fun at computer users. At least that’s how I read it. Your computer could be the fastest in the world, but if you weren’t up to speed, all that extra fast processing power would be wasted. After all, each time a computer completes an instruction — whether it’s opening a dialog box, applying a font style change to some text, or matching e-mail addresses in your address book when you type into a field in a new e-mail message form — the computer faithfully waits…for you. As long as it has to. And while computer processors are getting ever faster, computer users are simply not keeping up.

Let Me Tell You About My Mom

All this reminds me of a sort of funny story. My mother, who has been using computers for nearly as long as I have, is not what you’d call a “power user.” She pretty much knows what her computer can do for her and she can usually make it do it. But she’s not the kind of person who pushes against the boundaries of what she knows very often. And when she’s working with her computer, she spends a lot of time making the computer wait while she thinks about what’s onscreen and how she needs to proceed. That isn’t a big deal — I’d say that 95% of computer users are like her. People react to what the computer does rather than anticipate what’ll come up next and have the next task prepared in their minds when the computer is ready to accept it. And all these computers are waiting at the same speed.

Anyway, for years, my Mom used dial-up Internet services. Most of us did. But as better alternatives came around and Web sites got ever more graphic-intensive, most of us updated our Internet connection technology to take advantage of cable or DSL or some other higher bandwidth connection. (I was literally the first (and only) kid on the block to get ISDN at my home. This was back in the days before cable and DSL Internet service. It cost me a fortune — heck, they had to dig a trench to lay new telephone lines to my house — but I simply could not tolerate busy signals, dropped carriers, and slow download speeds for my work. It operated at a whopping 128 Kbps and cost me $150/month. Ouchie!) My Mom, on the other hand, didn’t upgrade. She continued to surf the Internet through AOL on a dial-up connection, right into late 2006. Worse yet, she refused to get a second phone line, so she limited her Internet access or was impossible to get on the phone.

Let me take a little side trip here to discuss why her attitude wasn’t a bad thing at all. Personally, I believe we have too much dependence on the Internet. I recently read “I Survived My Internet Vacation” by Lore Sjöberg on wired.com, which takes a comic but all-too-real look at Internet withdrawal. If you’re the kind of person who uses the Internet to check the weather, look up vocabulary words, and find obscure information throughout each day without really needing that information, you owe it to yourself to read the piece. It really hit home for me. So in the case of my Mom, the fact that her Internet use was minimal wasn’t such a bad thing. Not at least as far as I was concerned.

But it had gotten to the point with my Mom that she was spending more time waiting for her computer than her computer was waiting for her. And it had nothing to do with processor speed. It was her dial-up Internet connection that made it slow.

At first, I don’t think she understood this. I think that when she replaced her aging Macintosh with a PC about 2 years ago, she really expected everything to get faster. But the Internet got slower and slower for her, primarily because Web designers don’t design sites for dial-up connections. (Shame on them!) The Internet had become a tedious, frustrating place for her and she couldn’t understand why so many people were spending so much time using it.

In November 2006, I came for a visit. I had to look up something on the Internet and within 15 minutes, I was about to go mad. I asked her why she didn’t upgrade to a different service. Then she showed me a flyer that had come with her cable bill. We sat down with her phone bill and AOL bill and realized that she could upgrade to cable Internet service and actually save money. A little more research with her local phone company saved even more money.

So she was paying a premium to connect at 56Kbps or less.

I made a few phone calls and talked to people in the United States and India for her. I’ll be honest with you — the price difference between cable Internet and her local phone company’s Internet was minimal, but we went with the phone company because the person who answered the phone spoke English as her first language. (Subsequently, my Mom needed some tech support after I was gone and that person was in India. Sheesh.) The installation would happen the day after I left to go back to Arizona, but I was pretty confident that they would make everything work. And although it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped, my Mom was soon cruising the ‘Net at normal DSL speeds.

In other words, wicked fast.

My Mom was floored by the difference. I’d told her it was much faster, but I didn’t tell her it was 100 times faster. And it’s always on — all she has to do is turn on the computer and she’s online! And she can even get phone calls while she’s on the Internet! Imagine all that!

The happy ending of this story is that my mother now spends a lot more time on the Internet. (I’m not sure how happy that is.) And of course, she’s now back to the situation where the computer is waiting for her.

Who’s Waiting for What in My Office

I reported a hard disk crash here about 9 days ago. I know it was 9 days because that’s how long I’ve been waiting for the data recovery software to churn through whatever is left of my hard disk. And although it’s still progressing, it’s slowed to a crawl. I think it’s teasing me. But I’ll get the last laugh — I’m pulling the plug today.

There comes a time when you simply can’t wait anymore. I think 9 days shows a great deal of patience on my part. I know I couldn’t have waited so long if I didn’t have other computers to work with. I did get some work done this past week. I wrote up the outline for my Mac OS X book revision for Leopard. I did a lot of e-mail, fixed up a bunch of Web sites, wrote and submitted a bid for Flying M Air to dry cherries this summer in Washington State.

But what I did not do outweighed what I did do. I didn’t work on my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide. (I need the big monitor to do layout.) I did not pay my bills. (The latest version of my Quicken data files are on the sick drive.) I didn’t update Flying M AIr’s brochure. (Original files on the sick disk, need big monitor for layout.) The list does go on and on.

Now it’s time to get back to work. So I’ll pull the plug on the current data recovery attempt, put the hard disk in the freezer for a few hours, then reinstall it and try again by accessing the sick disk via Firewire from another computer. I can try multiple software solutions to fix the problem. And if that doesn’t work, I take the long drive down to the nearest Genius and let them give the computer a check up to make sure there’s no motherboard damage (again). If the mother board is still fine, I’ll leave them the disk to play with, get a new disk to replace it, and get the hell back to work.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Blogger's Block

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Sometimes there just isn’t anything you feel like blogging about.

Those of you who follow this blog or its individual categories may have noticed a dip in new entries earlier this week. I normally try to get at least one new entry out per day. But early this week, that was difficult to do. In fact, I went three consecutive days without posting anything at all.

Why? I think I was suffering from blogger’s block.

Is there such a thing? Well, apparently there is. I just Googled the phrase and got a list of blog entries that reference it. More on that in a moment.

First, I want to talk about why it’s important to blog regularly. Simply said, your regular readers expect it. When they visit your site each day (or every two or three days, perhaps), they expect to see new content. Disappoint a visitor a few times and he might not come back. If your goal is to attract and keep visitors, it’s vital that you give them something new and interesting to read each time they visit.

The problem with that — other than the problem of being interesting in the first place — is coming up with fresh topics that you want to write about. And that’s where I was earlier this week. Bummed out by my sick computer, not happy about surfing the Web for ideas on my little laptop, busy completing my office move, occupied with Web server modifications and setting up new gigs for Flying M Air. Without input from the Web or time to think of topics, I was short on inspiration and unable (or perhaps unwilling?) to write anything new.

This is something I need to cope with. Fortunately, Darren at ProBlogger has written a series of articles on the subject of blogger’s block that has lots ideas for defeating it: “Battling Bloggers Block.” As usual, Darren has a bunch of really good tips. I recommend checking them out if you find yourself short on ideas for your blog.