Quote:
Originally Posted by wannabee
From what I've been able to grasp about the sale of eBooks through iBooks and Amazon is that you had better be the publisher.
iBooks and Amazon keep 30%, the publisher gets 70% and of that the publisher gives the author 20%. So for a $2 book you get 28 cents from a publisher or $1.40 if you publish it yourself.
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
aving a US branch with a bank account there already so that's one less hoop. |
Hi there. Whether you acquire your own publisher ISBN from your local ISBN monopoly or not, it has no bearing on the royalties you'll earn from the retailer. That's really dependent on how you reach the retailer. With the Apple example you cite, if you upload your own book to Apple, they'll pay you 70% of the list price. If you use a distributor such as Smashwords (regardless of whether you take advantage of our free ISBN or our $9.95 on, or even if you supply us your own), we'll pay you 60% of the list price. We take a 10% commission.
As J. Strnad and others here correctly pointed out, an ISBN is simply a digital identifier. It connotes no ownership rights, regardless of who's registered with the ISBN record as the publisher. ISBNs help supply chain participants keep track of your book. As Steve pointed out, only Apple and Sony require them, but for that reason alone you should have one. If Apple and Sony stopped requiring them, then the ISBN's value to ebook authors would be questionable IMHO. I'm a big believer in identifiers, though the ISBN falls short on many levels.
Here's our FAQ on ISBNs:
https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#isbn which also has links to Bowker, the US ISBN registrar which offers its own good collection of helpful online resources about ISBNs.