Hi everyone,
I have a question regarding royalties (no doubt I won't be the first to have asked about this!).
I know it's notoriously difficult, but does anyone know the average royalty deals for a print only publishing deal, an e-book only publishing deal, and a combined royalty deal?
Thanks for your help!
In most cases a publisher will offer the author a royalty of between 8-12% of the net price of a paperback fiction book – in other words the price they sell it at, not the cover price.
So let’s say a book has a cover price of £10. In a typical best-case-scenario the bookseller will buy it from the publisher at £5 (the net price) and the author royalty will be between 40 – 60p. Ready with the champagne yet??!!
But that is a best case scenario…. many publishers use book wholesalers to place books and the wholesaler will want to buy at a discount of up to 65% of the cover price. So using a wholesaler means the net price of a £10 book drops to £3.50 and the author royalty falls to as low as 28p!
Depressed? I’ll make things worse then! Most book sales are very small. A list of 10,000 new authors on Amazon shows an average sale of 79 copies a year – even some well known authors only sell 1,000 copies a year of some titles. In fact lots of smaller publishers would be delighted to make 1,000 sales of some titles.
(On a £10 book the author would earn about £300).
If by now you haven't slashed your wrist you might consider self-publishing.
I hope that helps.