Quote:
Originally Posted by jj2me
How can £1 be enough? Is that what a writer makes from a hardcover? a paperback?
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The average paperback royalty is 7.5% of cover-price, half of which goes to the publisher of the original hardback, if there was one. So the author normally gets 3.75%, less the agent's commission, typically 15% on home sales and 20% on foreign, less VAT on the commission. Thus, from a £6.99 paperback sold in the home market, the author can expect to gross 21.7p. This was the setup when I was being published in paper; these days the author gets even less, because of discounting by supermarkets and big chains.
On hardbacks sold at full cover price, the author typically grosses 10%, so he might get £1.49 from a £17.99 sale; and again, much less on "price received" deals with discounters, book clubs, and so on.
Of course, better selling authors and their agents can negotiate better deals than this, and 15% royalty is common higher up the food-chain. Even so, many, many books have to sell before the author can contemplate writing as a profession.
By the time a £1 payment reaches me from PayPal, I get 76p, which is about half a hardback royalty and 3.6x a paperback royalty; but then the majority of downloaders (something like 98%) do not pay. What the proportion of non-paying, satisfied readers is I don't know. However there is an inbuilt expectation that stuff from the internet should be free; and with books this sense of entitlement is further reinforced by the fact that readers pay nothing to borrow from the public library.
My take on the economics of modern authorship is here:
http://www.richardherley.com/FTCebooks.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by jj2me
Feeling guilty because now that it's read I'm missing it. That tells me I loved reading it. Only a few books have made me feel that way.
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That is one of the nicest things I have ever been told by a reader --
