Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.

The line is a wry, self-deprecating joke about the economics of authorship and the social habit of giving away one’s own work. Darrow frames “success” not as wealth or fame but as reaching a modest break-even point: earning enough in royalties to cover the author’s generosity (or the expectation of generosity) in distributing free copies. The humor depends on a familiar reality—royalties are often small, while requests for complimentary copies are plentiful—so the aspiration is simultaneously practical and faintly impossible. It also hints at a tension between public-minded dissemination of ideas and the market mechanisms that rarely reward it proportionately.