The new chair of the UK-based Society of Authors, Lindsey Davis, has said that she is going to focus on pressing for a better e-book royalty rate during her two-year term, the Bookseller reports.
Davis said: "Naturally I follow the well-warmed footsteps of my King Wenceslas predecessor Tom Holland and believe we should claim 30% e-book royalties, and that higher than that would be right. It is important that we remember that when we signed our e-books away it was with a review period of two years—and those two years are now up. We must make the publishers review it."
She also believes authors should become more involved with the publishing process as a whole, educating themselves on how the system works so they can look out for their own interests instead of relying on an agent to do it for them. She urged more authors to join the 9,000-member Society of Authors.
I had thought authors were pressing for 25% royalties on e-books, but 30% does sound even better, doesn’t it? Of course, publishers will continue to insist that e-books have very nearly the same production costs as printed books—which means as printed books fall off in popularity, publishers will undoubtedly become more reluctant to commit to giving away that big a chunk of their primary income.
Thirty per cent of what?
Average selling price? Average advertised price? Individual copy sale net? List price minus allocated expenses?
Beware creative bookkeeping, Hollywood style. To obviate that, go for a fixed percentage of list price. Perhaps that’s what she’s trying to say, but she doesn’t seem to come out and say it.
Is this lady awake ? The royalty on Amazon is 70% ! not 30%. Does she really think that authors should push for more ? I am amazed.
I would also love to know what percentage of writers really succeeded in including a 2 year review in their contracts … I am very sceptical.
She is right however to urge writers to become more involved. She should also be advising them to be far far more attentive to their contracts and go far beyond the advice than writer organisations have been suggesting for years.
She’s talking about the royalty from publishers, which is traditionally 15-20%.
Thank you Chris – but Amazon is a publisher, and all of those authors are free to publish themselves on Amazon for an increase of more than 50% ! She is amazingly poor at making her point and if I were to consider joining her Society, I would think again after reading her article.
No, the royalty rate from NY CONGLOMERATE publishers for ebooks is anywhere from matching paper royalty (what are they running now? 8-12%) to 20%. A rare few give more than that, most notably Harlequin’s Carina Press, which offers indie-style royalties. It is a broad brush and not at all accurate to say that “ebook royalties” in general fall that way. Like most people that make this argument, Ms. Davis is focused ONLY on CONGLOMERATE press and not on the industry as a whole. Certainly not on the indies that forged it.
The average royalty rate from INDIE/E publishers is 30-60% of net. I’ve seen as high as 75%, for name authors in certain circumstances. Net is specifically the amount received on the book from a third person distribution channel, so if the book sells from a channel that gives 50%, the author would get the applicable percentage of the 50% remitted to the publisher from the distribution channel. There’s a reason indie authors try to focus sales on the publisher site when they can.
Amazon is BOTH a distribution channel and a publisher. VERY FEW people use it as a publisher. Howard is confusing that process with using them as a distribution channel, it seems, since he thinks using them as a publisher is an easy thing. Both self-publishing authors and publishing houses use Amazon as a distribution channel. Those partnering with them as a publisher are the rare few using the new Amazon publishing lines. Anyone going in through KDP to Kindle is using them as a distribution channel. No offense. Just correcting the verbiage and the misconception about Amazon.
While it’s nice to tout the Amazon line, they don’t really give 70% to us. They give us that minus their nickle and diming (which they don’t publicly announce, of course). In the end, we get about 60% on a “70%” royalty rate. It’s not a horrid percentage, but I really wish people would stop acting like we actually get 70%.
Beyond that, the vast majority of authors find using a publisher boosts their sales significantly. Remember, you have to build an audience. Unless you already have that audience and know how to tap it for the change to self-publishing, self-publishing on Amazon (or anywhere else) is UNLIKELY to be highly successful. It happens. Those few individuals hit the proverbial jackpot. And if you come in with an established audience, you have a better chance of making it work well for you. Anyone else… You just get lost in the rush of books published, and you lose out on the benefits having a publisher brings you, besides their audience, including their cover artists, their editors, their ISBNs, and the ability to reach distribution channels you cannot reach as a self-publishing author.
It’s all well and good for people to blithely say “Authors should just self-publish.” It’s rare that such individuals know either what is involved in doing it correctly or how few authors are as successful at it as they are with a publisher’s backing.
Brenna wrote:
“Amazon is BOTH a distribution channel and a publisher. VERY FEW people use it as a publisher. Howard is confusing that process with using them as a distribution channel, it seems, since he thinks using them as a publisher is an easy thing.”
Brenna, please read what I write more carefully. I wrote:
“all of those authors are free to publish themselves on Amazon for an increase of more than 50% ! ”
So I was clearly referring to those who self publish.
“the vast majority of authors find using a publisher boosts their sales significantly”
I would like to see some stats on that because I simply don’t believe it.
“They give us that minus their nickle and diming (which they don’t publicly announce, of course). In the end, we get about 60% on a “70%” royalty rate. It’s not a horrid percentage, but I really wish people would stop acting like we actually get 70%.”
I would be genuinely interested if you would breakdown what they withhold, or refer us to somewhere ?