That’s what Publishing Perspectives is reporting. Macmillan is the parent of Tor, St. Martin’s, Farrar Strauss, Henry Holt and others. The article states that the “usual” ebook royalty is 25%, and the reduced royalty is applicable to “all exploitation of the content of the book in digital form”.
Quick note: Macmillan lowers ebook royalties to 20%
AMAZON
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That’s twenty percent of Net, not twenty percent of Gross or twenty percent of List.
This is not very good for authors.
In the eBook industry, standard seems to be 40% of net. When I read the headline, I assumed it was 20% of gross which would be fair. 20% of net does seem a bit puny (and remember, I’m on the publisher side of this one). At BooksForABuck.com, we pay 50%, but I don’t know of any others who pay that much.
Rob Preece
Publisher
Smashwords pays 85% net.
Between their fixation with DRM and geographic restrictions and now reducing royalties, it seems that some publishers are actively lobbying to drive authors away.
Indy publishing is getting to be an easier choice by the day.
NY Times best-selling author Mike Stackpole has been speaking quite a bit lately about how authors can be much more successful going directly to readers: http://www.DragonPage.com
Did the buggy whip manufacturers actively undermine their own business, too?
Unless I’m missing something, this is a completely absurd move.
Clint Brauer
http://www.cyberread.com
The move is twisted but it has its own kind of “logic”.
Basically, Macmillan is betting that ebooks will be making a bigger and bigger portion of the business in the future so they’re premptively lowering their content-acquisition costs now when they make a small fraction of sales and thus of authors’ revenue so that they’ll have lower costs when ebooks make up the majority of their sales.
This is the kind of thing that comes from considering your authors as a cost center. Worse, since a lot of their other costs are fixed (those glass towers and treeware warehouses aren’t cheap) as sales move from print to ebooks their margins will suffer on pbooks so their looking to subsidize that decine off ebooks.
It is a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts; they see themselves with lower sales in the future because of the lowered barriers to entry for digital publishing competitors who aren’t burdened by large fixed costs in the shrinking treeware business so they seek to maintain their margins by ripping off the authors. This, of course, guarantees that they *will* have a shrinking share of the business in times to come.
Just another example of Harvard MBA beancounter think.
Also a great example of Evolution-in-action and a good candidate for the corporae Darwin Awards.