Bankrate: So this is the kind of stuff you'll discuss in the book?

Bret Michaels: Yes. How do you find the balance -- which is the scariest thing for a rock star to think about. It's much more exciting to say, "Look, I'm flat broke. I made $30 million, but spent $35 million." People forget that when you made $1 million, if you're in the high tax bracket, take out at least 40 percent of that. Then they spend $2 million -- forgetting they only have $600,000 -- and hope the record hits.

Bankrate: One of the reasons you've been so successful is that Poison did an incredible thing early on in keeping their publishing. How did that happen?

Bret Michaels: Very simple. First, let me defend musicians and artists. Musicians and artists, guys like me, when I started out, I was playing stuff on my turntable, and I just wanted big Marshall stacks and a Les Paul, and I thought that was how it worked -- that there were these magical managers and agents, that they were nice people, no one d***ed you over, and you just went in there and people were honest and you just got to play music for a lot of people.

Then I opened Pandora's box, and realized it doesn't work like that at all. Artists come into things fairly innocently. They're just guys who wrote a great song, then gave it to a publisher. Going in there, what happened for us was, we were writing songs, and they started to realize we had songs like "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." All these offers started coming in, and we started reading the bottom line, which is that they would lend you your own money, all recoupable, at like, a 30 (percent), 40 percent rate, which is beyond mafia. It's worse than a loan shark. Then they would charge everything they did back to your company before you saw a dollar of royalty from publishing.

Now, you have to cut an administration deal, which is like 10 percent, but everything we make is ours -- the masters, the rights to re-record our music. That was the reason we waited so long to put out the first record. We put it out ourselves. We figured if we sold 10,000 to 20,000, we'd double our money. But if it hit, we'd be rich. And then it hit.

There's so many different ways that cat gets skinned -- publishing, mechanical royalties, BMI and ASCAP royalties, or a movie like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Or, a commercial. We just did the new Xbox commercial, we make $150,000 to $200,000. That's not a bad day. Big commercials like that pay extremely well. And imagine that for 20 years.

With our band, each of us does our own thing. Bobby (Dall), C.C. (DeVille), Rikki (Rockett) and I all have our own business managers. But as a band, we go out there and cut the best deals we can cut, including for pyro, sound, lights, trucks, buses, tour managers. We cut a really fair deal. Everyone is paid. You won't find an unpaid bill by Poison. It's done very professionally. It allows me to do what I love by running the business. We never give the power of attorney away.

Bobby and I go over everything, from payroll for 45 guys on the road down to gaffer tape, and I think that's important. I stress that to bands. I'd rather be getting drunk and partying, but what's allowed me to do this for 20 years is that I didn't wake up one day and go, "Wait a minute. Didn't I just have $30 million in the bank? Now I only have 30 cents."

I never wanted that to happen. I feel I worked really hard for it, so I'd like to keep it.