Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Anecdotally and according to many writing blogs, in the case of the Big Five all but their top bestselling authors receive a pittance per book sold, if anything. Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Joe Konrath have experience of both traditional and self-publishing and have posted extensively on the subject. Cinisajoy is quite right to say that it depends on the contract, but traditional publishing contracts were drafted when the publisher held all the power and was effectively the only realistic way for a writer to reach a mass audience. They were terrible for authors then and, somewhat surprisingly, have actually got worse since. At one stage some of them were seeking to have writers sign addendums to old publishing contracts in what was described by some at the time as a "rights grab". Now they apparently seek an authors work for the life of the copyright and all rights including electronic rights.
Outside of the Big 5 there are some good innovative publishers who at least anecdotally are offering authors much better terms. For instance Bookouture, now acquired by I think Harper Collins, was offering its authors a 50% royalty rate.
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That's somewhat misleading A typical author can expect to get 8% of the retail price of a paperback. It's more for a hardback or trade. Of course, you also have to take into account that there are several middle men before the money that the retailer pays gets to the publisher, and each gets a cut. According to some of what I read, a publisher might get $5.20 from a book that cost $16 which is a bit over 30%. The publisher only gets paid for copies that are actually sold.
https://www.alanjacobson.com/writers...of-publishing/
8% of $10 is 80 cents, so yes an author does get literally pennies per copy, but it's not as extreme as it sounds. A publisher who pays 50% of retail to the author isn't going to publish very many books.
Are there exceptions? Sure, there are authors who pay vanity publishers to publish the book. I'm sure there are naive authors, who don't hire a literary agent and thus don't know the norms and will sign whatever is put in front of them.
As far as reversion of rights go, most standard publishing contracts have reversion clauses which state that the rights revert back to the author is the book goes out of print for a period of time, or fails to sell a given number of copies in the previous 6 months. Most publishes will revert the rights of books that they aren't making any money on. Why wouldn't they?
One of the big reasons that authors have literary agents is so they can negotiate a contract that has the clauses that they care about. Just remember, it's a business.