Time to take a close look

According to this column, which is admittedly biased, Hilliary Clinton received a $14 million advance for her book "Hard Choices", but overall sales so far are only 280,000 copies, and the original hardcover price appears to have been $35.  So I'm calculating a maximum possible revenue, including the cut of the publisher and the bookseller, of only $9.8 million.  Realistically, the publisher's net is less than half of that, and Mrs. Clinton's cut should have been a maximum of $1 million.


In similar news, the advance provided to President Obama for his memoirs is said to be about $65 million.  Given a usual royalty of $1-2/book for this kind of work, that would mean that the publisher is expecting to sell a copy to most of those who voted for him.  Similarly, Bill Clinton's memoir earned him a $15 million advance, but sold only 2.25 million copies. 


Now I don't have a complete picture of what's going on--I couldn't find information on advances for books by George W. Bush, for example--but it strikes me that at least inasmuch as prominent politicians of the left are writing, they're getting compensated far in excess of what a smart businessman would give them--say by a factor of ten or more.


I'm guessing that if a smart detective looked around--say he had friends working at the publishers--he'd find that these huge advances given to liberals are not in fact business decisions, but bribes.   The question is what is being bought, and inquiring minds might like to know.


Update: I found a source that said that George W. Bush had gotten a $7 million advance on a book of his that sold about two million copies, which is firmly in the generous range, but not yet in the ludicrous range.  Somehow it seems that, whether by error or bias or bribe, Democrats are getting richer deals than are Republicans.