There were some perverse incentives - people wanted to work on bestsellers, there was jockeying for credit for carryover work from previous editions, but in general it promoted a creative energy around trying to publish hit books, editors had a good deal of direct ownership that could actually impact the product they were shipping, and the scheme even helped align you on the same team as authors, whose compensation is also royalty driven - where for many other publishers author royalties are almost in conflict with what the publisher wants from the deal.
Such a direct unit sales driven profit share is hard to imagine engineering into many other businesses but it’s always stood out to me as a remarkably powerful model.
What Wrox did, though, was very clearly assign editors to book projects. You worked on one book at a time - each book was a little startup venture that shipped a product at the end.
As opposed to IT work where sure, if the editors computer doesn't work, it's hard for them to do their editing, but there's not much connection to a specific item.
That's pretty much what every finance department in every company on earth large enough to have one does (with notable exceptions maybe of hyper-growth start-ups).
I've seen this work well at a small software company. It paid out once a quarter for anyone who had been there a year.
> we have to measure what your individual contribution to the company's profits was
> But we have to make a decision.
Besides that, there weren't many discussions on the "fairness" of either system, people just went with it