> 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

> 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).