Rov_Scam
15hr ago
I don't know about raspberries, but if you're looking for a kickback scheme you can do a lot better than books. People look at the nameplate advance estimates, see the bulk buys, think there's something fishy, and cry corruption, but it's really more complicated than that. Yes, Hillary Clinton got an 8 million dollar advance for Living History. I can't find any allegations that bulk buying was involved, but let's look at the economics of it anyway. She didn't get to keep the whole 8 million. An agent typically gets 15%, which takes us down to 6.8 million, plus she used a ghostwriter, and if you want a ghostwriter you have to pay them yourself. She reportedly paid hers $500,000, so we're down to 6.3 million that she collected.
But that's not a flat fee; it's an advance against royalties, meaning she can't collect any royalties until the book sells enough to recoup the 8 million advance. The list price of the book was $28. Half of that goes to the bookseller, and a typical royalty is 10% of retail. So of that $28, Hillary made $2.80 per book sold, as far as accounting against the advance. The book would need to sell a little over 2.8 million copies before she would make any money on it beyond the advance, and even when she reached that threshold, she would only be making $2.38 per book after the agent takes his cut. There are a couple caveats here: That assumes that all the sales would be of the domestic hardcover at the list price. Foreign rights are sold separately for a flat fee, so if a publisher in another country wants to pay $1 million for them then she'd get $100,000 credited towards royalties in one fell swoop. On the other hand, if there's a paperback edition the list price would be lower, and some books will be sold at below list through book clubs and publisher discounts, so she'd need to sell more books to make up for it. And then there's audiobooks, large print, etc., which has its own price.
The upshot is that if you're trying to give a politician a kickback through book sales, you're only giving them 8 1/2 cents on the dollar, and that's not until after they've recouped their advance. Most politicians aren't going to recoup their advance. Why do publishers give them if they're never recouped? Because they can still make money for the publishers. Hillary Clinton needs the book to sell 2.8 million copies (give or take the caveats) to make money beyond the advance at an effective royalty of 8.5% of retail. The publisher, however, is making 40% of retail, less fixed costs like art, editing and promotion, and marginal costs like shipping and the book itself. If we ignore those (which I will because I have no idea how much they would have cost in 2003), they're making $11.20 per book sold, meaning they only need to sell about 714,000 books to make back their investment. If I assume for the sake of argument that they're making $6/book after costs, they still only need to sell half as many books as she does to come out ahead.
The other thing about bulk buys is that it mostly isn't done as a kickback but by the author themself to their own immediate detriment. The first reason for this is similar to what you said about PACs and the like buying the book to distribute to their supporters, but politicians often buy books themselves as thank-you gifts to donors. Again, I have no idea if this happened or not, but suppose someone gives Clinton's reelection fund $1000 in 2003. They might be more inclined to donate in 2004 if they receive a signed copy of the book with a thank-you note in the mail. In this transaction, Clinton actually lost about $25, but it's worth it if it keeps a large donor on the hook. The other reason to do this is to pump the bestseller lists, particularly the NYT.
A big part of this is vanity, but there can be some financial motive. The publisher can write the best blurb in the world, but it isn't going to compare with "New York Times Bestseller" emblazoned on the cover of subsequent printings. Subsequent printings which might not happen, by the way, which extend the shelf life of a book's profitability and might not happen if the book isn't on the list. Plus it means Barnes and Noble will put it on a display in the front, and the list itself is a form of advertising. It's a risky strategy, though, because it's expensive and isn't guaranteed to work. The number of books sold required to get on the list varies by the week, and you might not have any idea of sales figures until you get royalty statements six to nine months later (and even then you can only estimate). If Hillary Clinton thinks it will take 10,000 copies sold in the first week, then she's laying out $280,000 for a shot in the dark. Plus, the NYT is a curated list, not one based on raw sales totals, and beginning in the 90s they started putting daggers next to books that they thought benefited from bulk sales. Ted Cruz was famously pissed when they refused to list his book altogether due to allegations of bulk buying. $280,000 isn't a lot when you have $6.3 million to play with, but most book advances aren't that high.
In any event, I don't think there's any real doubt that Simon & Schuster paid Clinton what they did for any reason other than economics, because the deal made sense at the time. She was already a bestselling author at that point; It Takes a Village was her most noteworthy work, but she had just put out a coffee table book that sold half a million copies. Add to that that it would be a memoir and was coming a few years after the Lewinsky scandal and it was reasonable for them to expect demand to be high. And they were right—it sold a half million copies in its first week. If she were juicing the demand through bulk sales she would have given far more than the advance back to the publisher. I don't know who buys them (I never saw them become a phenomenon like Michelle Obama's book was), but they apparently sell well.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
No worries on my end. I highly suspected he was using LLMs to do the heavy lifting, but I wasn't 100% certain because even I, as an AI skeptic, didn't think they were that bad. Maybe he's just not using them right, but I'd think that an AI would realize that his corruption amendment was just a poorly-written bribery statute. He then proceeded to argue based on the presumption that it said something it didn't. I almost lost it laughing when he responded for @netstack's simple question about corrupt book deals. Aside from not even trying to edit the LLM output, the most recent example he gave was from 25 years ago, and neither example would have resulted in any liability under his proposed amendment because there was never any indication that the publisher got anything in return other than a book.
In the late 90s and early 2000s I had friends, a brother and sister, whose dad worked some kind of sales job where he had access to free concert tickets. This is back when purchasing agents weren't prohibited from accepting gifts from vendors, and his company would buy tickets in bulk and occasionally get promotional ones thrown at them for free. While most of these were intended for customers, there were always shows with limited demand that he couldn't give away, so he would get his extended family together and they'd invite a bunch of friends and a huge group of us would go to these concerts for free. But there was one high demand show that he had a ton of tickets to that I went to, because it those demanding the tickets weren't the same as his customer base, and everyone in the group was really into music and had wide-ranging taste and would see anything remotely interesting if it was free.
I bring this up because you talked about how the Rior Grrrl trend was pretty much dead by 1999, and I think the concert I went to contributed to its demise and helps explain why girls of that disposition may have gravitated towards Woodstock '99 type music. For those who aren't familiar, Riot Grrrl was a short-lived movement that had greater purchase among critics than the general public, a situation which makes it seem more important in retrospect than it was at the time. The basic impetus was that there's a lot of loud, aggressive rock music made by men, but when women act like that it's taboo. The bands, whose style was derived from punk, made a political statement out of breaking that taboo. The lyrical themes were overtly feminist and intentionally controversial. However, describing them as "intentionally asexual angry-dyke-elastic-waistband-whine" is rather myopic.
This was certainly the popular perception, such that one existed, but it was not the reality. Calling them intentionally asexual is an odd position to take for a genre with song titles like "I Like Fucking", and when "Rebel Girl" by Bikini Kill, progenitors of the genre, has overt lesbian themes. This was at a time when the best known lesbian musician was Melissa Ethridge, was a conventional rock and roller who sang about love and loss but always in gender nonspecific terms. The idea that their style was dykey has been overblown in retrospect; they mostly just looked normal. And while they sang about lesbian themes, they were more "queer" in the contemporary sense. Musically speaking, it's not without interest but was very much of its time.
By the late 90s it was already dying. As I said, it had certain cultural cachet, but the fundamental problem of trying to turn music into politics is that when the music is part of the message itself, it will necessarily lack mainstream appeal, since there are no political implications in doing what everyone else is doing. So by saying that it was okay for girls to make aggressive music, there music had to actually be aggressive, too aggressive to have any appeal beyond college campuses and the independent scene. Now, there had already been some successful musicians who had made politics part of their work, most notably John Lennon, but it had always seemed like a sideshow. Lennon's most overtly political record, Some Time in New York City, is almost universally regarded as his worst record, and the agit-prop sing-a-longs were quickly, and wisely replaced with more conventional material on the follow up, Mind Games. The real danger to the Riot Grrrls was that a mainstream musician would make a credible claim to their political mantle.
In 1996, Candaian singer-songwriter Sara McLachlan noticed that concert promoters were reluctant to put two female acts on the same bill. The following year, at the peak of her career, she was able to organize a touring show that would feature an all-star lineup of female musicians. The tour, Lilith Fair, was a huge success, ran for three years, was flogged relentlessly on VH1, and was not shy about being overtly political. The problem with Lilith Fair was that whatever cultural cachet the Riot Grrrls had had been coopted by people who could sell more records. It's hard to evangelize Sleater-Kinney for political reasons when one can get the same sense of empowerment from Sheryl Crow. There was nothing particularly political about any of the artists who toured with Lilith Fair, and the political message was a milquetoast "women can make music as well as men" rather than the more controversial feminism of the riot grrrls.
If you haven't figured it out by now, Lilith Fair was the concert I attended with my friends, in the 1998 installment. If you were a college girl looking to get her freak on and indulge in feminist politics, it probably wasn't the place for you. It probably had more actual lesbians than a riot grrrl show (the Indigo Girls were there), but there were also a lot of families, older people, and yuppie couples. But to the extent that it had a political purpose it was more successful than the riot grrls could ever be, because it appealed to everyone. The 1999 installment had McLachlan, Crow, The Dixie Chicks, and Queen Latifah. Those are four very different styles with very different audiences, but it didn't matter because the kind of people who were likely to attend Lilith Fair weren't the kind of people who made musical taste a part of their identity. And the political message stuck, as it showed that a tour filled with women could make a ton of money, even without any stylistic coherence. And while the artists involved were mainstream, they were also credible; no one doubted that they would sell a ton of tickets with Celine Dion and the Spice Girls on the bill; they had to have people who relatively sophisticated listeners could like unironically.
But Lilith Fair wasn't cool. A 35-year-old systems analyst with 1000 CDs in his collection of all genres may have bought Surfacing after hearing "Adia" on the radio and agreed that it was a good album, but the kind of college girls who listened to it were the ones who majored in English and didn't party. The Lilith Fair acts were credible, but only to adults; they certainly weren't something that was going to get you anywhere in high school. It also didn't help that 1999 wasn't exactly the most divisive time politically. Bill Clinton had a massive approval rating despite having recently been impeached, nobody was excited about the 2000 election, and 9/11 hadn't happened yet. Most young people were apolitical. Lilith Fair was overtly political, yet I don't remember any particular criticism or disagreement.
So whatever else you want to say about the riot grrrls, they had a certain youth appeal that Lilith Fair couldn't replicate. The other thing about them is that they operated on the same wavelength as grunge in the early to mid 90s. While grunge had become fully mainstream by the middle of the decade, there was still a certain punk energy it retained, a certain leftist political lean, a certain don't-give-a-fuck slacker ethos. This is why the forgotten Woodstock 94' never received the same amount of attention as the '99 edition, even though it, too, was popularly considered a logistical failure at the time. Nu-metal had a certain dark rage to it that neither grunge nor riot grrrl had; even if the latter was consciously trying to be aggressive, it couldn't escape the arty subtext that came with the territory of being an indie band in the 90s. By the end of the decade, rock and roll, which had largely established its reputation on the basis of shocking your parents, had reached a terminal state of heaviness. Music can only get so aggressive; it had to end somewhere, and it's no surprise that rock would mellow out in the decades to follow. So what you end up with is people playing really aggressive music with no political subtext to appeal to, that only appeals to a college crowd and has little credibility among adult critics. Then put them in an abandoned air force base with 300,000 kids who are of prime partying age in horrible conditions, and tell them to start breaking things. The violence at Woodstock '99 may have not been inevitable, but it definitely wasn't surprising.
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