Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
I know people who work in the publishing industry. I've asked them how much they think an author should gain from the sale of their work, and it always boils down to less than ten percent of the sale price.
That's just not good enough.
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Depends... is the book being printed on-demand with profit on each copy sold (not considering the cost of preparing the book), or did the publisher shell out thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on huge print runs and promotion?
If the former, depending on the price, perhaps the author should get more than 10%... there might not be much more profit than that though. If the latter, less than 10% is probably perfectly reasonable
until the publisher's expenses have been recovered along with some profit. But, I'll grant you, there should definitely be a point (or volume of sales) after which the author's share should come to approximate an equal share of the profits with the publisher. Probably not more... given that the author can basically sit pretty and do nothing if the sales are that good, whereas the publisher keeps printing/supplying/shipping/receiving books, doing accounting, doing promotion (at least for books that sell so well/so consistently), et cetera.
Authors definitely get screwed over by publishers... but let's not pretend most authors have either the money or the knowledge or the competence (at those things) to do all the things their publisher does for them. (Things that may amount little for a small time author who isn't particularly successful, a category writers are less likely to put themselves in than they are to put their publishers in the "evil publisher" category.)
- Ahi