Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Elaborating, if you buy a full priced hardcover the author will get perhaps 15% if they have earned out. Otherwise, of course, they get nothing unless and until they do earn out. A full priced tradpub ebook the royalty rate will be about 25%. ff you buy a full price Indie e-book from Amazon the author usually gets 70%. Quite a difference in incentives. And there are wide variations. The last I looked, for instance, Bookouture, a more innovative traditional publisher now acquired by Hachette paid 50% royalty on its e-books.
But of course libraries do themselves buy the books, often in substantial numbers and at higher prices than direct sales to consumers. What a library buys is of course heavily influenced by the demand or expected demand from its patrons for particular authors and books. Simply by borrowing a book or successfully requesting that a library purchase a book a library patron is contributing to the profits of the publisher and, to a lesser extent, the author. The money is the same whether it arrives directly or indirectly.
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You do understand that the term earn out means that authors are actually paid an advance, i.e. money up front, the amount of which is dependent on how many books they are expected to sell, so it's not like the author doesn't get the money from the book I buy.
I really don't care if an author is tradition publisher or indie, I just care if I like their books. Of course, the downside to indies is that they sell mostly digital books, with little or no paper sales. Most paper sales seem to be on demand are are quite expensive. For example, a book I just purchased as an ebook cost $4 as an ebook, $25 as a hard back and $15 as a paper back. Yea, those traditional publisher prices ($7 ebook, $17 hard back, $7 paper back) don't look quite so bad in comparison.
That 70% sounds good until you realize that the indie is going to have to sell a lot more ebooks than the traditional publisher author to make the same money in total sales.
I suspect that the vast majority here buy ebooks rather than paper. Yet, digital books (both ebooks and audiobooks) is still a much lower percentage of sales than paper books overall.