Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Anecdotally, there are many authors who have negotiated the reversion of the rights to their own "backlist" titles who are now making good money from them through Amazon or like services.
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Plenty of indie authors are making good incomes off reverted tradpub titles and "plenty" isn't dozens, it is thousands. And many many more are making modest sums off titles that generated nothing, which is still a heck of a lot better than zero.
One thing to keep in mind is that most corporate publishing contracts come with "deep discount" clauses that pay minimal-to-zero royalties on books sold at fractions of the list price. Originally meant to cover sales of remaindered pbooks it has more recently been applied to pbook sales through Costco, B&N, and Amazon and even more recently, to ebooks on promo sales.
It is no secret thst the current per-read payouts at Scribd and Oyster are non-sustainable over the long haul but if the titles are bought under deep discount contract terms they could them at 30-40% of list or lower, which *would* be viable for them and still deliver substantial returns for the publisher. The authors? 25% of net... off a $3 net? That would be about $0.75.
Hey, they signed the contract.
Besides, that is in line with traditional mmpb payouts anyway.
http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2014/1...ou-should.html