Quote:
Originally Posted by Zedd
See one of you thinks they should get 50%, but only get like 10.
One says baen gives authors 50%, yet another has an article that says the get a handsome 20%. BTW 20% sucks and is ot handsome at all.
<<SNIP>>
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Zedd... perhaps I was unclear. I was attempting to describe the method Baen uses to split up the royalties for eBook bundles. They divide the royalty pot from a multi-author multi-title bundle in half. One half of the pot is split among the books by number of titles in the bundle. The other half is split among the books pro-rated by paper sales in that royalty period. The idea is to give all authors a fair cut while still letting the guy with the best-seller out-earn the guy whose book died on arrival. Those halves are where the 50% came from. I guess it'd have been more clear if I had written "50% of the royalty pot" the first time around.
I'm not up on the royalties Baen pays as a percentage of selling price, though. That's why I gave the qualitative comparisons with what the author would get if I bought paper in the bookstore.
And, looking at it from a different angle, David Drake wrote a few years ago that Baen was the only house whose payment to him for electronic sales (in any single 6-month royalty period) had exceeded the cost of buying himself lunch. That was a few years ago, so things may have changed.
For another qualitative (and admittedly anecdotal) data point: Lois McMaster Bujold characterized her royalties from Baen as (paraphrasing now): Royalties on paper sales are mortgage money; royalties on e-Sales are car-payment money. Nobody else's esales had (then) exceeded "pizza money."
Xenophon