Sheryl, See my comments below...
How it selects the distinct items is outside my area of knowledge.(1) What is the rule that SELECT DISTINCT uses when deciding which of multiple instances to return? Does it return the first one?
I would not assume it is the first one or the last one, or anywhere in between.
If there are multiple records for one author in a table and you run a distinct, your results set will include one record for that one author, regardless of where he/she is in your table.
(2) Is there a way to write a SELECT statement to return the record for the author with the highest royalty percent (a different field in the table)? That is the one that I want.
I would try the MAX() function... see link... http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Group_by_functions.html#IDX1359
If you use ORDER BY, it will give you all the authors in order (I don't think you want that, do you?).
... but you still need to answer the question that I posed before....
Good luck.
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