And of course no one from NatWest is facing a long spell in a Singapore jail

And, of course, no one from NatWest is facing a long spell in a Singapore jail. It began in 1979, when Robin Leigh Pemberton, then NatWest chairman, decided the bank needed more American exposure. But barely a thought - either within the bank or outside it - has been devoted to what the American episode has cost and how similar errors might be avoided in future. THE STOCK market is so busy future-gazing that it rarely stands back to assess past decisions and learn something from them. NatWest's decision to pull out of retail banking in America by selling its Bancorp division has triggered massive speculation about what it will do with the proceeds. That leaves a profit of about 40p per book.How does the advance fit into this equation? Say the author has been paid pounds 120,000 The publisher will have re-. A further 50p also has to be deducted to allow for the fact that 20 per cent of books sold are returned. At a circulation of 200,000, the publisher has to pay 30p per book for printing, paper, binding and origination costs, 60p for the author's royalty, 20p for advertising, freight and packaging, and about 60p to cover overheads.

Very roughly, the retailer and wholesaler take about pounds 3.40, leaving about pounds 2.60 for the publisher. But do they lift sales sufficiently to enable the publisher to make a profit? A typical 400-page paperback blockbuster novel retails at pounds 5.99. He could not find an American publisher until his own edition hit the bestseller lists at the end of last year.High advances undoubtedly generate publicity. The best marketing ploy will be to rely on the story of how Simon & Schuster paid such large amounts of money for a book which was just 87 pages long when it was first published by Richard Paul Evans himself in America.

In return, he knows that these stores will give the book good displays within their shops.However, even he admits there is no guarantee of success in spite of all the in-store publicity material and magazine advertisements he has lined up. Simon & Schuster has agreed to pay Richard Paul Evans pounds 250,000 for the book and its prequel, even though no-one in Britain has ever heard of the author.To get round this problem Mr Kelly is using part of his pounds 50,000 publicity budget to pay for it to appear in book catalogues produced by shops such as WH Smith and Dillons. Getting the books well displayed in their bookshops is three quarters of the battle.''Simon & Schuster's marketing director Bob Kelly, who is in the process of finalising his strategy prior to the publication of The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans at the end of this month, says you can buy space on store shelves. "They are all logged on to computers and can see how publishers' predictions have worked in the past.