Thread: Amazon announces a 70 percent royalty option
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Old 01-20-2010, 06:41 AM   #1
Nate the great
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Amazon announces a 70 percent royalty option
from the press release:
Quote:
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced details of a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. This new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010.

Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today's median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

...
  • The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99
  • This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book
  • The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights
  • The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech. This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store.
  • Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.

The 70 percent royalty option is for in-copyright works and is unavailable for works published before 1923 (a.k.a. public domain books). At launch, the 70 percent royalty option will only be available for books sold in the United States.
So if a book was listed for $9.99 and was about 1.4MB in size, then the seller should now get $6.69 instead of (about) $3.49. Looks like Amazon has switched to taking an agent's commission rather than that of a distributor & retailer.
Last edited by Nate the great; 01-20-2010 at 07:46 AM.
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