> Professors who write textbooks receive 15-40% royalties off the cover price. I'd like to know where to get that kind of deal! I have only one experience publ

> Professors who write textbooks receive 15-40% royalties off the cover price. I'd like to know where to get that kind of deal! I have only one experience publishing a textbook (currently in progress, with Springer), but we get 6% total, split between the authors (so 2% of the cover price each). That seems to be a fairly common rate at least for niche stuff. I guess if you're writing a "blockbuster" textbook and are a Famous Name you can probably negotiate something better. In our case we're also putting the book free online. The main issue in getting that through wasn't our own worry about losing royalties, but difficulty convincing the publisher, who I think are in turn worried more about precedent and the way the market is shifting than this one book. If it were up to us, the whole thing would be open-access, and also the cover price for a print copy would be considerably lower than whatever they're likely to price it at. In the end we did a sort of "take it or leave it" ultimatum where we put a draft manuscript online to teach last fall's version of the course, before we'd signed a deal, and told the rep that we would only sign a deal if we could leave an author-formatted manuscript version online, which the publisher (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to. It helped that the rep is part of our research community and we have a good working relationship to explain what our goals are. In our case the competing incentives are: 1) institutionally it doesn't "count" as a published book unless it's with a recognized publisher, and having it with a recognized publisher also makes it easier to get it into libraries and get other researchers and teachers to take it seriously; but 2) we want people to actually read it, and a €100 Springer book massively cuts down on potential audience, especially non-academic audiences, who we think the subject matter might appeal to if it weren't for the price. Hence the arrangement where Springer publishes it but you can also get the penultimate "author's manuscript" PDF (which will be identical except for formatting) for free online seems ideal for us [1]. We will also not be requiring our students to buy the paper version; the PDF version will be fine for the course. [1] Well ideal from the perspective that both audiences are served: non-academics, autodidacts, hobbyists, and students who want a free-or-cheap book can get a free book through the PDF channel; academics, administrators, library acquisitions people, and methodologically conservative educators can get a Traditionally Published book through the publisher channel. This is probably not an ideal arrangement from the point of view of royalties, though: if we just self-published for €20 and put some effort into advertising, we would probably sell many more paper copies, and get more money (and also get to keep all the money, not 6% of it). But ultimately writing this book is not our day job or expected to be a significant source of income, so getting it into The System of libraries and official approval was worth the tradeoff of (probably) not making any money from it.