Did Hillary get 75 publishing professionals fired?

It may be unkind to say it in one long breath, but here it is: Hillary Clinton took an $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster and then 75 people at the company were laid off. One did follow the other (by weeks) and so it's natural to wonder: If Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom, had paid a more reasonable advance for the book, would those people still have their jobs?

The layoffs were announced in a memo emailed to all staff on July 21, exactly six weeks after the June 9 publication date of Living History, when Simon & Schuster likely cut Sen. Clinton a check for the remainder of the gigantic advance. Sixty of the people axed were employed stateside. New York staffers who'd been let go were clearing the last of their personal belongings out of offices when the memo hit and were saying their good-byes when the press was getting wind of the news.

"There's no connection," a Simon & Schuster spokesman balked when asked about the timing of the layoffs and the publication of Living History. The company says the book is one of the fastest-selling nonfiction books in history?proving that the advance was justified. But the advance paid to Hillary and the mobilization of the top staff at Simon & Schuster to plan, publish and promote the book means that the company didn't make a large profit on it. The book has earned publisher Simon & Schuster a lot of attention, sure. But it hasn't earned the company a lot of money.

Here's the evidence. The advance paid to an author represents an advance on royalties based on the number of books expected to sell. The author's royalty on hardcover books is 10 to 15 percent of the sale price. The publisher gets the rest. This is industry standard. So, if Clinton's contract gave her 15 percent?the top rate?then she gets $4.20 for every $28 hardcover book sold. At a million copies sold, Clinton's cut is $4,200,000. At a million and a half copies sold, her cut is $6,300,000?still way short of the $8 million advance.

Last reports are that Living History sold 1.2 million copies, and bookstores are reporting that sales in the last couple weeks have dropped way off. It seems she could sell a million and a half by year's end?but not much more. There's really no way they could have expected it to, which means that Simon & Schuster effectively altered the ratio of publisher/author earnings for Clinton. Hillary didn't get just 15 percent, the maximum percentage that authors earn in royalties; she got a million to a million and a half more than the 15 percent would have yielded.

This is money that, under the standard ratio, Simon & Schuster would have pocketed. At the median 12.5 percent royalty, under which Clinton earns $3.50 per book, her cut is $5,250,000?and the advance of $8 million represents an overpayment of almost $3 million.

Proceeds from sales of foreign rights and paperback rights have also ratcheted up the book's total earnings, and counted against the advance. Still, it doesn't add up when Living History is compared to another bestseller by a prominent politico that spent weeks on the New York Times best-seller list a few years back (Living History has been on the list for six weeks). This author didn't take an advance at all and instead was paid royalties as the sales of the book went through. He was paid, it was assumed, at the same rate as Hillary?15 percent, though his book was a few dollars cheaper?$24, not $28.

But his total take from the book was $2.5 million, according to a source. This is almost a third of Hillary's eight million. There's no doubt about it; Simon & Schuster took a pay cut on Hillary Clinton.

Which is fine. Legal and ethical?yes and yes. Simon & Schuster can pay a billion-dollar advance to an author if it wants to, but it should be known that the result of the overpayment?or, to say it another way, the change in the percentage of the proceeds that goes to the author?is that 75 men and women no longer have jobs. Living History was Simon & Schuster's one big chance to make a boatload of money in one of the worst slumps the book industry has ever seen. They've lost money on a lot of other recent books, like Stephen Glass' weightless fiction The Fabulist. This was their ticket out of that slump. They didn't take it.

The big-six publishing houses are all suffering financially, precisely because of the size of the advances they're paying out. Smaller publishers like Encounter Books and Regnery Publishing wouldn't dream of getting in on this game of giving up a larger portion of the proceeds of a book just to get their names in the newspaper. They've both had books on the bestseller lists in the last year and are, it is estimated, making larger profits on their bestsellers than biggies like Simon & Schuster, who chose to bid up and snatch up a public relations opportunity (and help candidate Hillary) and let the worker bees take the hit.