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We believe 35% should go to the author, 35% to the publisher and 30% to Amazon.
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What's this percent business? Most big publisher authors get a fixed amount from the advance.
I think that if we consider Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing as an entity under the same corporate umbrella, Amazon may be considered the sixth big publisher. And that number six is number one for chintzyness when it comes to paying advances. Instead of taking on the risk of the book flopping, as the big five do*, Amazon usually forces author incomes to depend wholly on a percentage of the sales figures. Not too subtly, Amazon is pressuring Hachette to follow their lead of putting more risk on the author.
Do some authors prosper while taking on all the risk themselves? Yes. Most of these authors spent months rather than years writing the book, somewhat moderating their risk. Good novels have been written that way, but I don't think you can do it with, say, Chinese history.
As a reader who will never write a book, I'm not posting here out of altruism. Most of the books I read are non-fiction titles that would never have been as thoroughly researched, or even written, if a big publisher hadn't paid an advance against the book proposal.
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* Penguin Random House threatens to become another low/no advance publisher due to their ownership of
Author Solutions.