Persian Translation Copyright Issues

Ryan Holiday shares a story about the challenges of international book publishing and copyright issues.

"Someone sent me a copy of one of my books from Iran recently and I emailed my agent and said 'Oh I didn't know we did a Persian translation.' He said 'We didn't - Iran doesn't recognize copyright, they just do whatever they want. You'll never see a penny from these books.'

The economics are like this: if you sell a million books in Russia, you're not getting your standard royalty rate. You may never see a penny of that. You might get an initial advance but that's it. As you start to get into less transparency in the accounting as you sell internationally, you can't simply calculate total copies sold times a number - you're probably going to be overstating the cash they have on hand."