[Mason Malmuth]

When I say our authors get about five times as much, that means that in general the author recieves about five times as much in real dollars. Part of the reason for this is that we simply pay out at a much higher rate, part of the reason is that Two Plus Two books do command a top price, and part of the reason is that Two Plus Two books have very good sales.

We do target our royalty rate to our wholesale price, not retail as some other publishers do, and the exact royalty varies from book to book depending on the author(s) and how we project the book to sell. We do this because it gives us a little more flexibility in our sales.

As for the price of our books, most readers consider them a bargain due to the wealth of information they contain, and this is information that is specific, accurate, and detailed. But it has never been our goal to make every penny we can (even though we have made a lot). So we do share the revenue with our authors and everyone of them will tell you that we are very generous (and we intend to continue this tradition).

We also strive, and have worked on it for years, to get our books to snap shut very quickly. In fact, I have had many meetings with our printer trying to improve the ability for our books to snap back and shut very quickly once you let go of them. The reason for this is to reduce damage on the book shelves. Sometimes people will open a book, and then quickly shove it back to the spot on the shelf where they found it without making sure that the book is completely closed. So we try to help them as much as possible. This ability has a lot to do with exactly how our books are bound, and the fact that we use the far more expensive, and much higher quality PUR glue which is far stronger than standard hot melt and much more flexible. (It is also much more difficult to apply and there aren't many printers/binders who can handle it.) Since our books are also very thick, they have a lot of pages and we use #70 paper of the highest quality we can purchase, doing this reduces the number of book returns, and we now get very few damaged books returned.

As for the person who I've known for 25 years, I can only think of two candidates. One is certainly not a friend, and hasn't been for a very long time. The other is someone I know, but not very well.

Finally, as for us being a self-publisher, I certainly started that way, and from those small beginnings, we have now grown into a very large company. We have massive distribution and we now have significant international reach with many of our books now being translated into foreign languages. But most important of all, we couldn't have done this if we didn't have and insisted on having a superior product. Those standards will never change, and it's why we reject the vast majority of manuscripts and proposals that we receive.

But you already know all of this, for if it wasn't the case, you wouldn't be here posting.

MM