5 ms·
Authors apparently earn cents of royalties for every physical book purchased. That seems crazy. I wouldn't mind paying $5 more for a book if >90% of it went to
by dannyw 3y ago
Authors apparently earn cents of royalties for every physical book purchased. That seems crazy.
I wouldn't mind paying $5 more for a book if >90% of it went to the author.
- mbork_pl 3y ago> Authors apparently earn cents of royalties for every physical book purchased. That seems crazy. Agreed, but it is (somewhat) justified by the sheer length of the chain (printing house, distributors, bookstores etc.) FWIW, I wrote and self-published a book on a 99% automated platform (e-book only), and I get 80% royalties. Another (anec)datapoint: I published a book (this time not written by me) in a more "traditional" way (i.e., on paper). The book is pretty niche, had 0 marketing expenses (we basically only relied on word-of-mouth). We kept the costs low, but not too low (we paid a bit for nice typesetting, illustrations, good paper etc.). We did not even try to put it in bookstores and only sold it via Internet (using an ebay-style platform, not even a custom e-commerce solution; we didn't even had a landing page with a our own domain!). This allowed us to break even after a few months, which I think is insane comparing to the "big book" (aka publishing industry).
- Simon_ORourke 3y ago> FWIW, I wrote and self-published a book on a 99% automated platform (e-book only), and I get 80% royalties. Would you mind sharing which platform this is?
- mbork_pl 3y agoSure. While at that, let me also plug my book: https://leanpub.com/hacking-your-way-emacs https://leanpub.com/hacking-your-way-emacs
- pomian 3y agoThanks for that link! That's very interesting. I am editing two books for two authors at the present, both of whom already published, in paper, and with Amazon I believe. But this looks like a very interesting publishing model. Especially for more technical books. There are a few in progress that I know about. (Is emacs something different than the apple computer?)
- smugglerFlynn 3y agoAny book that is $5 more expensive than current market price will instantly lose to thousands of competative cheaper books where authors write about similar topics while agreeing to earn peanuts. You can try solving this by industry-wide regulations, but that would make average price of books much higher, and will likely steer readers to other medias, shift revenues to already established writers, or both.
- zer0tonin 3y agoAre books purchase really so price sensitive? It's not exactly like you're buying potatoes
- ghaff 3y agoI’m not sure it’s a continuous supply-demand curve but you get out of the “normal” discounted range—say above $15–and people will really think twice.
- falcolas 3y agoIMO, in the age of Kindle Unlimited, yes. I, myself, have a very hard time justifying purchases over $6. The reason is pretty simple, the higher priced books are not guaranteed to be better, just written by a more widely recognized author.
- EA 3y agoOP should just donate $5 to his favorite writers.
- ziddoap 3y ago>Any book that is $5 more expensive than current market price will instantly lose to thousands of competative cheaper books where authors write about similar topics while agreeing to earn peanuts. I could see this being true for non-fiction, but for fiction? I'm generally not looking at price, I'm looking at whether the story seems interesting. Two books can both be about space battles (or whatever your topic of choice is), but one can seem extremely interesting while the other doesn't. Similar topics doesn't really mean much compared to everything else (writing style, characters, etc.)
- jeffwass 3y agoA few years ago I met an author who was switching from self-pub to traditional pub for one of his books (usually this is tough to do, traditional publishers typically won't touch a book that started off as self-published). His take went from 70% on Amazon to just 7% w/ the traditional publisher. Of course the traditional publisher handles all marketing and distribution, so hopefully the slimmer percentage of a much bigger pie works out. But I was amazed at how low the final percentage was.
- ryanbigg 3y agoAbsolutely! When I wrote for Manning, a print book that sold for $45 netted me a huge $4.50 — 90/10 split. Ebooks were 50/50. Guess the print guys all gotta take their cut.
- stubish 3y agoThis was Science Fiction/Fantasy with major publishers early to mid 2000s. The 50% ebook royalty dropped to I think 10% not long after.