In the particular instance you quote, Mercedes Lackey would have received absolutely nothing from the sale of that hardback. It is what's known as "remaindered" - that is, the remainder of the stock of the hardback print run was sold off by the publisher to the discount book chain at 'cost' price.
Many ebooks cost more than paperbacks at the moment for a variety of reasons including:
* publishers not wanting to sell ebooks instead of paper books. They've paid for the printing of the paper books, and would rather sell them first
* publishers wanting to recoup the early investment costs in setting up ebook production
* publishers having to pay for the cost of DRM
* (in the EU) normal rate VAT on ebooks but low (or zero) on paper books
As for how much authors receive from ebooks - it obviously varies. Baen have stated that their authors receive a royalty per ebook that between the royalty received for a hardback and a paperback.
One reason baen can offer such good prices is that they have a very short supply chain - from them to webscriptions.net. None of the 'cover' price goes to distributors/wholesalers.
I have seen other figures suggesting that a 25% royalty of per-book net receipts is the 'standard' royalty, but that doesn't tell you how much discount publishers have to give the distributor/wholesaler/retailer chain. If you guess 50% I don't think you'd be far wrong. If so, eBook royalties to authors would be 12.5% of retail price from most publishers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mare of Earth
I am very curious about this, as recently I wanted to pick up an ebook copy of Foundation by Mercedes Lackey. An ebook copy costs about $19.00, vs. the local Books a Million had the hardcover marked down to $6. Often, the ebook copy costs more than the paperback copy - with the exception of Baen ebooks. I want to know why the ebook costs so much more, and I want to know how much of the purchase price gets back to the author.
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