Book Royalties - Waffle Explains It All! Mostly! (Patreon)

Sims are paid Royalties when they create Books. They are paid weekly.

For books, each Genre of book has a different potential value for Royalties. At level 2 of Writing, you can Self-Publish. At level 5, you can Sell to Publisher. And at Level 9, you can Submit to Literary Digest. From what I can tell, Self Publishing and Selling to Publisher don't make any differences, except for the Fame Level you get after doing it. You get dramatically more fame selling to a Publisher than you do Self-Publishing! Every time you publish, you'll gain fame, so keep publishing books.

Book Royalty Value is referred to in code as "Star 1", "Star 2", "Star 3", and "Bestseller". Each "Star Level" of a Book has a different Royalty value potential. Additionally, Bestsellers have their own value. Star 1 is for Poor quality books, Star 2 is for Normal, Star 3 is for Outstanding, and Star 4 is for Masterworks.

When a Book is Published, it gets a random royalty assigned within specified parameters for that book Genre, the book quality, and a hidden skill for "Book Crafting Level".

The following values I believe are the base maximum rates for a Bestseller sold to a publisher. You are not guaranteed this number, you'll get a range where this is the maximum, I believe. There is also a "Payment Deviation Percent" that applies, to further randomize the value you get. This is why sometimes two seemingly identical books sell for much different numbers.

Anyway, here's the Genres in order of most valuable to least valuable:

Biography- 370
Horror- 325
Mystery- 325
Sci-Fi- 275
Fantasy- 260
Screenplay- 175
Non-Fiction- 135
Poetry- 81
Emotion- 65
Short Story- 48
Childrens- 40

Submitting to a Literary Digest applies a blanket 1.25x increase to whatever value you get. Having the Established Name perk applies 1.5x increase. And depending on your hidden Book Crafting skill, the value is multiplied by up to 7x! Even a childrens book can get a good chunk of simoleons with these systems all in place, which isn't too bad for the lowest value book. You can write more of them faster if you want, unless your goal is maximizing royalties.

But what is the Book Crafting Skill?

Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT a skill for each individual Genre of book.

This skill uses a combination of your Writing Skill, mood, other writing bonuses, etc to boost the value of books. If your Level is 10, your Childrens Book will be a higher value than if you're Writing Level 1. But additionally, you can get bonuses to Skill from your mood and other factors- and this is what handles that. The value here is determined on completing the book- so you can write a book to almost done, and then go boost your mood and get into a very positive mood like Inspired, and THEN finish the book, and it'll be higher value than if you'd finished it while Fine or Sad or whatever.

You gain no further benefits from pumping out the same Genre repeatedly!

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