Author who appeared in one Simpsons episode revealed her royalty cheques eight years later

An author who made one appearance in The Simpsons revealed she was still getting royalty cheques years later, though not for very much money.

Royalties are generally paid to owners of a certain thing for ongoing permission to keep using the thing, such as a person's likeness and voice in an episode of a popular cartoon known for having a huge amount of characters in it.

The Simpsons has had all sorts of guest stars over the years and in the season 28 episode 'Pork and Burns' the author Joyce Carol Oates made an appearance, though the family is banned from going over and talking to her because Homer insists on bringing his pet pig Plopper (the pig from The Simpsons Movie) with him.

She'd been mentioned in a previous episode, 'Dial N For Nerder' where Lisa screamed after learning a bookmobile didn't have any of her work, but this was her proper appearance in The Simpsons.

Writer and producer Mike Reiss told the Metro guest stars got paid $400 (£305) for an appearance, but Oates has made more than that from being on the show.

Her episode aired back in 2017 but the author recently posted a trio of royalty cheques she was still receiving, though the amount she was being paid didn't add up to much.

A trio of cheques dated 19 September totalled the staggering amount of $6.99 (£5.34), with one of the cheques being for a single, solitary cent which seems rather like it cost more in paper and delivery than it was worth.

The author said she was 'thrilled' to be getting royalties from her time on the show, though given the small amount of money it's entirely possible she was joking.

Payments for this sort of thing just keep going as long as the thing they're giving their ongoing permission to be in is still around, so there are all sorts of folks who are getting money for things they were in ages ago.

For a lot of people these come in the form of residuals, so that little kid from Titanic is still getting money every so often for something he was in decades ago.

He's not the only one to be making a regular revenue from their past work, as a huge amount of residual cheques are sent out every month and the proceeds keep flowing.

Casey Margolis, who played one of the younger versions of the main characters in Superbad, said years later he still gets a cheque every three months but the amount he gets in them ranges 'from three cents to 100 bucks'.

Stars from some of the biggest shows on TV can be getting a decent sum from their past work, but it's not going to break the bank and if a show gets snapped up by streaming, that often isn't covered in the deal.

However, the Friends stars signed some lucrative deals which apparently make them a good sum of money on a regular basis, though in that case we are talking about the leading cast members of one of the biggest shows of all time.