Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
Sorry Im late to this thread. Is it true that Hachette pays its authors less than Amazon? Do you know the figures?
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Depends on the author.
Officially royalties are flat rate, take it or leave it: 17% on hardcovers/ 8%Mmpb, less on "deep-discount" sales to Costco and the like, and 25% of net on ebooks. (Royalty payments, if any, get sent to the Agent, who takes their 15% cut and forwards the rest to the author. Sub-dollar royalties are...not uncommon.)
"Industry standard" contract from every single publisher. No negotiation tolerated by the guardians of culture.
However, not all animals are created equal.
The Steven Kings of the world still get the same royalty rate (on the contract paper) but they get huge "advances against royalties" that both sides know exceed what the official royalty will ever add up to, but which "coincidentally" equals what the expected sales volume would generate at royalty rates of 40-50%. There is a reason why authors refer to it as "selling a manuscript"; for the vast majority of tradpub authors, the "advance" is all the money they ever see.
Amazon is different.
Their tradpub terms actually vary from author to author and thus are kept confidential but the rumor mill pegs their royalties at 35-50%. Most of their authors tend to refer to their Amazon dealings as a "real partnership". Of course, Amazon has the "unfair" advantage that they only publish a few hundred titles a year and they promote the hell out of those titles. And, since they have access to all that juicy consumer data they promote the books to people likely to buy them. As a publisher, amazon is more like Baen than any of the BPHs.
The result is documented at the AUTHOR EARNINGS website: Amazon-published titles take in 10% of the dollars spent on ebooks at Amazon but their authors receive 11% of the dollars received by authors from those sales. The tradpub titles account for 55% of reader spend (as the publishing execs out it) but their authors get only 37% of what gets to all authors.
Now, indie titles are a different beast.
Amazon doesn't pay Indie royalties at all. Zero, zilch.
Amazon *collects* hosting, promotion, and distribution fees from Indie publishers that amount to 30% of the sale price, as long as they are priced at $2.99 to $8.99. (Plus a bandwidth fee based on the size of the ebook that usually adds up to less than 1%.) For titles priced under $2.99 or over $8.99 they charge 50%. (Exceptions exist: For example, Kindle-exclusive titles priced under $2.99 during a COUNTDOWN promo sale only get charged 30%.)
If an Indie title is author-published (most but not all are) the result is that Indie titles account for 20% of the money spent on Kindle ebooks but their authors receive 42% of all the revenue generated at Kindle.
So yes, Amazon publishing pays better (and on a more timely and transparent basis) than other traditional publishers but going Indie pays significantly better than either.
Check out this:
http://authorearnings.com/reports/the-50k-report/
It's a very educational website.
Ditto for this:
http://kriswrites.com/business-rusch....2VqcO8ut.dpbs
The rest of the Business Rusch site is also very good.