What percentage of the net price of an ebook should the royalty get as a royalty? This is a battleground at the moment, but here’s what the UK Society of Authors says:
“We have still not been given any persuasive reason by publishers as to why ebook royalties should not be 50%; and in the meantime urge them to offer a minumum starting royalty for unenhanced ebooks, including the academic, educational and specialist non-fiction sectors, of 30% of net receipts.
We also strongly believe that ebook royalties should be on a rising scale (increasing after a specified number of copies have been sold, when the advance has earned out, and/or when ebook sales exceed print sales).
For enhanced books the royalty rate should be negotiated on a case-by-case basis to reflect the degree of additional content, software and costs involved.”
You’ll find, of course, that publishers won’t necessarily see it this way. On one of my recent books, the best I was able to get was 25%; however, it was a book that due to its format did incur greater than typical costs on the publisher’s part when they printed the traditional version.
FOR ONCE, WE HAVE LEVERAGE
There is still a lot of variation on what publishers pay, but for once we authors have a good negotiating tool—namely that we have the option of self-publishing ebooks easily. (This applies before we give away the ebook rights, of course; if you signed a contract for the print version of a book, your contract probably will have given the publisher the electronic rights, too.)
If we self-publish, we take away something like 70% of the receipts. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say the book costs $10 (or pounds or euros).
If a publisher pays a royalty of 30%, you get about $3.30.
If you self-publish, you get about $7.
Let’s say that you are willing to invest the difference in marketing your book: $3.70 per book. That would mean that if your target is selling 1000 copies, you could invest $3700 and still make as much as if you went with a publisher.
There’s no guarantee that investing this amount would lead to selling 1000 copies, of course, but I think if you spent the money wisely it would. There’s also a good chance that selling the first 1000 would raise the profile of your book enough that you’d have to spend less to sell the next thousand.
This example assumes you charge the same price as the publisher would. As you know, many authors, especially first-time novelists, are pricing their books at 99 cents or $1.99, in hopes this will lead to much higher sales and they'll make up in volume what they're reducing per sale, and that people will like their first novel enough to buy others, perhaps at a higher price. That has been very successful for some authors. I'd love to see a study of how it works out on a broader basis.
(The second edition of Your Writing Coach has updated chapters on self-publishing and marketing your book—you can order it now from Amazon.)
