The Kindle bestseller list on Amazon, as of a few mins ago:
1, 2 & 4- Stieg Larsson – £2.68
3 – Dan Brown – £2.79
5 – David Nichols – £2.70
6. Carole Smailes – £0.36
7. William Shakespere – £0.75
8 – P G Woodhouse – £0.75
9 – Kathryn Stockett – £2.76
10 – Stephen King – £2.70
For all those who continue to get their journalist friends to write articles where they can whine about E-book royalties being far too low and they should be 75% or something like that, look at the prices above. This is how people like Amazon think they should sell e-books.
Now I don’t have exact figures on material costs, but if memory serves a decent enough sized printrun for a paperback will mean the manufacture costs are less than a pound per book. If you remove one pound from the price of a book, the price isn’t as low as £2.70, and that’s not even taking into account the VAT that is due on e-books but not physical ones. My point is, if all books are sold at this price, a typical discount of 62% using the Stieg Larsson prices, the publisher makes bugger-all money.
That money is spent on several things, the most important of which is advances where I’m concerned, because I like to eat and not live in poverty for the time it takes to write and publish a book, and secondly editing (which has two distinct functions at present, one to make my books better and the second to act as a quality filter, so Waterstones etc know which books were read by at least half-a-dozen folk who know what they’re talking about, and which ones someone paid to publish because they believe in their own genius). There’s also the marketing and publicity teams (because word-of-mouth success is much harder than people realise and doesn’t produce results for many folk) plus sales to ensure shops have books to sell, and accounts to run everything in a way that means you get sent cheques. These things don’t happen by magic, they get paid for and a company needs to make more than negligible money to do so.
So please, for a while stop whining that these books don’t cost anything and the author should earn three quarters of the income. The second book doesn’t cost anything really, the first one costs a whole damn lot and publishing isn’t a charity – what it is is an industry where anyone coming in to look at the books tends to ask why the hell people bother with companies that earn so little. If you want to complain about something, do so about the supermarkets and online retailers who think books should be half the price, the majority of the population who don’t read because it requires concentration, and the part of the human brain that mostly only cares about getting a big discount. I have my complaints about publishing of course, but trying to grab headlines isn’t going to help those, and talking crap even less so.
I always wondered how many percents from the price of the book goes actually to the writer. I’ve heard, that it’s not really much, but I guess it depends on the contract he/she and the publisher have.
it does vary massively, but a UK paperback pay 7.5 or 10% if sold at full price. mostly, these days it’s sold to the shop at 50% discount at least and will pay 4/5 of that royalty. think mine tend to pay half at full rate, half at 4/5 rate, just depends on specific company agreements
I always wondered how many percents from the price of the book goes actually to the writer. I’ve heard, that it’s not really much, but I guess it depends on the contract he/she and the publisher have.
it does vary massively, but a UK paperback pay 7.5 or 10% if sold at full price. mostly, these days it’s sold to the shop at 50% discount at least and will pay 4/5 of that royalty. think mine tend to pay half at full rate, half at 4/5 rate, just depends on specific company agreements
I always wondered how many percents from the price of the book goes actually to the writer. I’ve heard, that it’s not really much, but I guess it depends on the contract he/she and the publisher have. TomTom
Been a while since I worked it out actually. Can’t remember what a hardback earned, i think a trade paperback was likely to earn 70p and a mmpb 45p, but that’s probably assuming some sort of discount involved, since the bulk of sales these days go at discount.
by contrast a full price £7.99 e-book, after 20% vat, should earn about £1.50 royalty i think. one sold at 50% discount would earn 80p very roughly.
Basic royalty structure on UK books is:
Hardback – 10% published price to 3000 copies sold, 12.5% to 6k copies, 15% thereafter.
TPB – either a flat 10% published price, or 7.5% to 5k, 10% thereafter
MMPB – 7.5% to 25k sold, 10% thereafter
High discounts vary quite a lot, with some agents claiming things I suspect are outright lies to get a better deal from my company, but royalties are when discounts go over 50%, which they do much of the time.
hi Tom,i would like to know what is the logic/reason behind why e-books r priced either at the same or even higher price than paperbacks ? i just bought The Ragged Man for my kindle @ 11.99 US $ ,while the paperback costs 10.88 $.
Well various reasons, the first of which being that the discount granted on the Pyr paperback is deeper than on the kindle.
Secondly, the e-book is a UK one that’s being sold in the US, and that’s been priced to be closer to the UK trade edition, which is selling for £12.99, about four dollars higher than the US edition is being sold. Basically, Pyr are selling a slightly cheaper format but that’s all they’re selling, while Orion are doing a more traditional two steps of publishing, trade format then a cheaper mass market later on, and since they control all e-book rights they’re probably ignoring the US price as it’s out of their control.
ah,i see,thanks for the prompt reply.i personally think e-book pricing between 7-10 $ would really draw more people towards buying e-books.what r ur thoughts on this? do u think e-books should be more competitively priced in comparison to paperbacks?do u think it possible in the foreseeable future?
I always wondered how many percents from the price of the book goes actually to the writer. I’ve heard, that it’s not really much, but I guess it depends on the contract he/she and the publisher have. TomTom
Been a while since I worked it out actually. Can’t remember what a hardback earned, i think a trade paperback was likely to earn 70p and a mmpb 45p, but that’s probably assuming some sort of discount involved, since the bulk of sales these days go at discount.
by contrast a full price £7.99 e-book, after 20% vat, should earn about £1.50 royalty i think. one sold at 50% discount would earn 80p very roughly.
Basic royalty structure on UK books is:
Hardback – 10% published price to 3000 copies sold, 12.5% to 6k copies, 15% thereafter.
TPB – either a flat 10% published price, or 7.5% to 5k, 10% thereafter
MMPB – 7.5% to 25k sold, 10% thereafter
High discounts vary quite a lot, with some agents claiming things I suspect are outright lies to get a better deal from my company, but royalties are when discounts go over 50%, which they do much of the time.
hi Tom,i would like to know what is the logic/reason behind why e-books r priced either at the same or even higher price than paperbacks ? i just bought The Ragged Man for my kindle @ 11.99 US $ ,while the paperback costs 10.88 $.
Well various reasons, the first of which being that the discount granted on the Pyr paperback is deeper than on the kindle.
Secondly, the e-book is a UK one that’s being sold in the US, and that’s been priced to be closer to the UK trade edition, which is selling for £12.99, about four dollars higher than the US edition is being sold. Basically, Pyr are selling a slightly cheaper format but that’s all they’re selling, while Orion are doing a more traditional two steps of publishing, trade format then a cheaper mass market later on, and since they control all e-book rights they’re probably ignoring the US price as it’s out of their control.
ah,i see,thanks for the prompt reply.i personally think e-book pricing between 7-10 $ would really draw more people towards buying e-books.what r ur thoughts on this? do u think e-books should be more competitively priced in comparison to paperbacks?do u think it possible in the foreseeable future?