Author royalties

[TomMazanec]

What percentage of the money i spend on a hardcover gets into the author's hands?
What percentage for a paperback?
How about an e-book?

 

[HareBrain]

For paper, about 5-10% of cover price if published, usually more if self-published. For e-book, higher, but I think very variable.

 

[TomMazanec]

5-10%!!!!
POODLESNAPS!! I was hoping it was higher than that! :-(

 

[Jo Zebedee]

5-10%!!!!
POODLESNAPS!! I was hoping it was higher than that! :-(

You know you can just google all this.
It depends on your contract. If you are with a big publisher and get an advance your royalties are low (and unlikely to earn out)
if you’re with an indie publisher your royalty will be higher 30 or more) but you will have no advance.
if you publish yourself you just pay the printing costs and any retailer margin if selling in a book store and take the rest

 

[autodidact]

And royalties are even less for discounted books such as those sold in supermarkets.

You also have to take into account agency fees. In the UK for fiction books, those are around 15% plus some expenses at cost for stationery, phone calls and the like. If your book is sold abroad, it's about 20% split 50-50 between your agent and the foreign agent. Anybody who thinks writing a best seller will take the author from rags to riches needs to have a good think. The vast majority of authors earn next to nothing and that nothing has been dropping quite dramatically in recent years. It's a tough game. To retire early, an author needs to write a million copies sold best seller, and the odds of that, while better than winning the lottery, are still pretty slim. Each publisher or imprint typically only publishes a handful of books each year, and only a tiny majority of those will sell well enough to make an agent love their author.

I suspect the real objective of any author/agent combination is to sell the book's rights to a production company. If they achieve the almost impossible and find a TV or film deal, then you really are in clover.

The royalties are low for many reasons:

First of all, a book shop may receive a 30 to 35% discount on the sale price of paperback fiction. At least that's how it was when I worked for a large bookshop chain back in the late eighties. Larger chains will command 50% or more, sometimes 60%. I think supermarkets are around 75%.

Ebooks are different again. From what I've read, authors keep 50% to 70% of the download price for those, but since many are free, then that's not a lot for most authors. And that is pathetic, frankly.

Then there's all the people involved in marketing the book. Designers, editors, production planning, every book is a serious project that costs a lot of money. And you'll be expected to help out, with a web presence, author signings, and so on.

I think allowing 50p per copy sold will give you a reasonable minimum estimate of what you can expect after everything is deducted, including taxes. That's not as bad as it sounds. If you're lucky enough to sell a million then that's 1/2 a million in the bank. And a long lived book will rake in royalties for years. George Orwell's 1984 is a good example of that. It sells around 1,000 copies every month. So, £500 a month, £6,000 pounds a year. Not bad for something written back in the forties.

Think of it as selling widgets. You pay your time and maybe money upfront for one copy , then you get a slice of every single copy sold after that.

That's for the UK. America is different. Perhaps somebody else can chip in on that one.

 

[JohnM]

In the US, the standard book distribution amount paid is 50% of the cover price. In other words, the distributor gets the book at half the cover price. Once the books are settled at a particular distribution point, they are then resold to individual bookstores and other retailers at whatever markup the market allows. However, if, for example, 2,000 copies are with the distributor, on average, 50% go back to the publisher as returns. The majority of these returns are usually in unsellable condition, meaning they are marked down or resold as used. This system is designed to react relatively quickly to books that sell quickly. In one case, a prolific publisher was greeted some many months later with truckloads of returns. The other issue with physical books is shelf space. In a detailed article which I cannot reference at the moment, it was pointed out that shelf space is a precious commodity that cannot be relinquished even by the physical lack of one title. In other words, if you have gained the shelf space for 10 average size books a month, you had better keep it or it will be taken by a rival.

Do ebooks solve that problem? Rarely. There was a time when the US Postal Service had an international shipping rate for books called "Surface Mail." This meant a number of pounds' worth of books could be sent to Australia for little money. It would take a month or two but that was OK. One year, this option disappeared and now shipping above four pounds could easily equal the cost of the books. A boon to book publishers? Sometimes.

The production costs do not go away. All of the people required to produce a quality book are still required. Doing it on the cheap generally results in an inferior book. And imagine increasing the number of books you read every year by a factor of 10. There are still 24 hours in a day, and badly written books offered for free does not mean anyone will download them. Ebooks flooding the market also means the odds of anyone finding your particular book go down. Standards still exist. In exchange for the imagined freedom of writing whatever you want has to be a balance against what the intended audience finds acceptable.

Back to the original question. Every publisher has their own contract terms. In general, they will pay as little as possible and in line with their competitors. Off topic a bit, but relevant, the owner of the company I work for was contacted by a few competitors because he was paying above average rates for cover art. Now those same artists wanted higher pay from our competitors. My employer told them he was not involved with their business decisions and let the matter go. I never found out if any of our competitors capitulated or simply hired other artists.

A publication I used to get regularly ran stories about five or six figure deals being cut between wealthy publishers and a relative handful of new authors. Those big money stories usually circulate quickly but go unexamined, I think by most. Those publishers know talent when they see it and they have 100 years or more worth of experience to back their decision. Much like a seasoned scout working for a sports team who spots new talent and signs that relative handful to multi-year deals, and outrageous salary amounts.

So I suggest a few polite queries of publishers in the US. And I also strongly recommend an attorney. But most writers cannot afford one. I know. But the fact is that if the publisher, for example, gets a query about the rights for a particular book, he had better hand the contract over to someone who can explain the details. I was privy to a few cases where Hollywood came calling. One would think that with millions in hand that millions would be offered. In those cases, it was not. One company signed after being advised not to and nothing further happened. The other company refused but that was based on sound information. They eventually negotiated a better deal after a long period of negotiation.