When numbers like eighty million copies are thrown around, they always (except for J. J. Rowling) mean mostly paperback sales. You have to sell eight to ten times as many mass-market paperbacks to equal the royalties from a hardcover.
My understanding was, he was given X free books at the start. I may be wrong, since I didn’t quiz him on what he meant by the phrase “give me a dime and I’ll give you one of my free books.” I just parsed the sentence to mean he had an allotment of free ones.
Yeah, it’s standard practice to give the author X number of free author’s copies. You can usually tell how difficult it’s going to be to pry another penny out of the publisher by the size of X.
Interesting that books are like guitars - stores also pay 50% of list price for guitars. And then they sell them for about 30% off list.
50% off list is pretty much standard for every product. However, historically books have been bought at 40% off list. It’s only recently that the huge clout of chains has driven that down. Independent bookbooks still pay 40% off list.
Exapno Mapcase (as usual in this type of thread) had an excellent answer. I’ll just amplify a few things:
YES, royalties are negotiable. They vary all over the map. The best I’ve done was 30% on a technical book written specifically for a trade association press. They knew the quantity would be low and they really wanted the book. The worst I’ve done was 5% on a book that’s mostly used as a tech reference or textbook. On the other hand, that book sells for $55, so I’m still getting a couple of bucks a copy.
As Exapno suggested, royalties can be a flat percentage, a stepped rate (e.g., 8% on the first 10,000 copies, 10% on the next 15,000, and 12% from then on), or a flat dollar amount per copy. I have several contracts that pay a flat buck a book no matter what happens to the price in the future.
Advances are also negotiable, and they vary all over the map. An advance, remember, is basically a loan against future income. If I get a $5,000 advance and my book generates a dollar per book in royalties, I won’t get a royalty check until the 5001st copy sells.
Royalties can also be negative. I’m lucky enough to have a publisher that pays royalties monthly (most pay annually, semiannually, or maybe quarterly). I was really excited to hear that Costco was picking up one of my books. They bought a PILE of them and I got a big check. Three months later, they returned half of what they bought, and my royalties went in the hole that month. No, I didn’t have to write a check to the publisher, but I stopped getting royalties on that book until they sold enough to make up for what Costco returned.
Writers can also make money in other ways. I’ve been paid for doing layout and design, for doing my own indexing, and received royalties for reprinted excerpts. It’s really quite complex.
Not so. The “standard” discount for books is 40%. There are generally incentives (free shipping, an extra 1% or 2% if you order a certain quantity…) and you can buy cheaper if you’re purchasing non-returnable books.
Distributors usually buy at somewhere in the 50% range, and then sell to stores at a markup.
Also not necessarily true. One of my publishers provides me a 50% author discount, while another only gives me 20%. It varies from publisher to publisher.
I’ve done four highly-specialized technical books. One hit the 4,000-copy mark, one broke 2,000, and the other two sold between 1,000 and 2,000.
One of my children’s books, on the other hand, is approaching the 100,000 mark. There’ll be a serious party when that happens (hopefully this summer!!!).
There are a lot of ways to handle this. First of all, editors almost never get a split. They’re paid a salary by the publishing house.
As for illustrators, there are two ways to handle it. In my technical books, I mostly did my own illustration, and the publisher paid cash to artists for cover designs and such. For the kids books, it’s handled one of two ways: a 50/50 split between the author and illustrator is quite common. With my children’s publisher, the illustrator gets a flat fee up front (usually equal to about five times my advance), but gets no royalties at all. If the books only sells a few thousand copies, he makes a lot more than me. If the book sells tens of thousands of copies, I make more than him.
Very true, and I have no idea of the hardcover/paperback split in that figure. (And, if it’s like Clive Cussler’s sales figures it may not be strictly accurate!) However, the 150,000 printrun figure I quoted does appear to be for a hardcover edition. (Amazon page I skimmed for info)
In the UK independent booksellers usually get only 35% (plus maybe a couple of percentage points in incentives) from wholesalers, although they may get more dealing direct with the publishers… Returns to wholesalers are tightly controlled as well - usually whole copies (not stripped) and they’re often only allowed to return 5% retail value based on the last 3 months sales. More books are also being sold as ‘firm sale’ too.
I don’t want to hijack, but I just wanted to mention that although Exapno makes a fair point, it is possible to do better. I self-publish, and one of my books has sold well over 20,000 copies. What’s more, the profit margin on each individual copy is quite high, and of course there are no publisher’s deductions (I am my own publisher).
For what it’s worth, from the Amazon link for one of his books quotes the Library Journal :
I’m assuming the 150K copies refers to the first run of the book Linked above (River God, my favorite of his books).
That’s an average of 2 million+ copies of each of his 23 books. (at the time that review was published). More that mid-level seller the OP indicates… I think, IANA(Librarian/Publisher), so I have no idea if that’s “a lot” or not.
Excellent!!! I’m am truly happy for you and keep up the good work and fight the good cause. I am in the process of writing a book that consist of long-short stories based on a central similar to Callahan’s Saloon by Spider Robinson. This is why I started this thread. It’s one thing to write a book, marketing it is another thing.
I don’t consider it a hijack, and was about to post a question along these lines.
There’s TONS of options for self-publishing. As I’m getting “closer” to finishing my novel, I’ve been looking around at different options. Even Amazon has self-publishing options which will get you listed with them. Many other online services offer self-publishing options which guarantee listing with Amazon.
If you’re going to self publish, do you have to have a lot of confidence in your final product? I hear that early authors are often edited heavily before they are put into print. Does that always improve the product?
As a self published author, do you pay out to an editor, or self edit? How’s the profit in self publishing compared to going through a publishing house? Do you also get on ebooks, and what’s the author’s profit there? Do you recommend a particular self publishing method? So many questions …
I don’t consider it a hijack because the question in the OP is about how much an author makes. What’s to stop a moderate or big named author from self publishing? I assume going with a big name publishing house means they get additional advertising avenues they would have to pay someone to do if self publishing… but there must be other implications.
Marketing your art seems to be one of the toughest things.
You cannot get a self-published or PoD book into Barnes & Noble or Borders and you won’t get it listed as distributors like Ingram’s. Without relentless and imaginative marketing your total sales will be 100 copies or less. Your listing on Amazon will allow your parents to buy one. There are exceptions, of course, but there are usually on a specialized subject rather than, say, a novel or short stories.
That’s why I said that the average sale of such books is 100 copies. That’s boosted by the success of a few like Ianzin’s, so most sell much less than 100 copies. There is no profit because no money comes in and the start-up costs are huge. (Cover art, printing, shipping, website, promotion, etc.) That’s why authors still strive to be commercially published. Even the small advances that are normal, say, $5000, will be $6000 more than you’d have at the end by any other route. The problem is that they accept less than 1% of what is pitched to them. The reason is that at least 95% of what they see isn’t of publishable quality. Editing won’t help. They are simply bad. If you are among the remaining 4% you can consider going it alone, but the odds of success are about equivalent to hitting the lottery.
The worst possible course is to go to places that make you pay for editing. Total waste of money. If you can’t write a readable book you have no business expecting anyone to read it. Do not pay for anything other than printing costs. Ever. That includes agents, packagers, editors, writing coaches, marketers, or whatever other scams are currently out there.
Ask yourself how many books you bought last year from unknown writers putting out their own titles instead of from mainstream publishers. Now ask yourself why anyone would buy yours. Unless you can give an answer that would satisfy a bank think twice. At least 250,000 people went ahead anyway last year. How many of those books will ever be read?
Nope. Large and respected publisher. But I got an advance, which I foolishly blew on getting illustrations and permissions, instead of taking a trip to Bermuda.
It reminds mw of Groucho’s line in A Night at the Opera, in response to Chico’s about the opera singer he’s representing:
Chico: How much money can he make in a year?
Groucho: Well, if he doesn’t sing too often, he can break even.
I’ll add that of the 95% Exapno mentions as unpublishable, it doesn’t mean they’re bad (most editors estimate that about 20% of their submissions are truly bad). It’s just that they aren’t good enough to stand out from the rest. Ultimately, there’s nothing that makes the editor want to read more than a few pages.
I’m posting this partly to answer SeanArenas’s questions, and partly to add to what Exapno Mapcase has said. I hope Jakesteele has no objections, and I apologise if he thinks this belongs in a different thread.
Traditional route: you write something and submit it to several publishers, complying with each publisher’s submission guidelines and specifications (normally, they only want to see a few pages or one chapter of the intended work plus synopsis). You hope that your manuscript will get looked at and liked, and that a publisher will want to go ahead and publish you book. Alternatively, you submit your work to a number of agents, and hope that one of them thinks your work has enough merit that they want to represent you, and then they try to sell you to a publisher.
Either way, this process is going to take years. Your chances of getting an agent to represent you are moderately high, because it doesn’t cost an agent much, if anything, to ‘represent you’ (i.e. mention you during her next boozy lunch with a publisher). Your chances of getting published are close to zero and rely on many factors other than merit. Who you know is far more important than how good your work is. Only 5% of ‘unknown’ submitted manuscripts are even glanced at by the publisher’s own ‘tasters’, and they take less then 2 minutes to arrive at a conclusion.
Even if your work is great, whether its greatness will be recognised is something else (go and read all those funny lists of ‘great’ works that were rejected by various publishers). And even if you work is great and seen to be so, a publisher can only afford to say ‘yes’ a few times a year.
It’s also a very slow process. Even if all goes well, publishers take forever to make a decision.
Let’s say you get lucky. The publisher offers you a contract. This says that they will pay you an advance, which for a first-time writer will not be much. They will also appoint an editor to supervise your work. You finish the book and submit it to the editor (or this is done section by section as you complete the book). You may think your book needs a lot of editing help, and welcome the editor’s involvement. Alternatively, you may not welcome the editor’s ‘interference’, but it’s not your choice. What’s more, you may or may not agree with the editor’s decisions, but if you don’t then it comes down to a battle of wills between you and the editor. If you’re a first-timer, guess who the publishing house is going to listen to most?
This is another very slow process. It’s neither an easy nor a swift gestation. But let’s say you have finished writing the book and nursed it through the editing process.
The publishers get someone to design a cover. You generally don’t get any say in this (so if you think the cover stinks, that’s tough), although it’s remotely possible you might be allowed some say in minor revisions. The publishers sort out things like giving the book an ISBN and putting all the legal stuff at the front, and deciding how to physically present your work: size of the book, typesetting and so on. Again, their decisions, not yours.
The book is physically printed. If you’re a first-timer, the print run will be low (maybe 1000 copies). You will get a small number of ‘free’ copies (except of course they aren’t really free at all… you are paying for them to be printed, whether you realise it or not).
The publisher now tries to secure retail distribution for the book. They may, or may not, succeed. The odds are against you. The distributors and retailers only want books that will fly off the shelves and sell quickly. They know they have never heard of you, and they know their customers have never heard of you. Tough sell.
Assuming a deal is done, the publisher supplies to the wholesaler/distributor, and they in turn supply to the retail chains. It’s possible each individual store will only have taken one copy, and it’s hard to find underneath all the best-sellers by more established writers. You can now go into a store and buy your own book, and glow with pride. Your book will also be available online, via Amazon and similar sites.
The publisher may appoint a publicist whose job is to try and win media exposure for you. This happens whether you want it to or not, and even if you think the publicist is a lazy twit, you get no say. This publicist will make an effort for a week or two about the time your book is actually published, but after that she will have other fish to fry. And if you’re an unknown first-timer, she will probably consider you a waste of time anyway, and prefer to concentrate on the much easier task of getting Superstar Author another TV interview, where she gets to go along, enjoy the glamour and sip the free champagne.
You may have your own brilliant ideas about how to market the book and gain more awareness for it. Tough. The publicist will routinely ignore your ideas and do things the way she thinks best. In any case, she can’t react swiftly to opportunities because most of her decisions are passing through the committee of approval, especially if they involve any expenditure.
At the end of the year, add up how many copies you have sold minus the cut taken by the distributor and the retailer. This is the gross revenue and it belongs to the publisher. Deduct all the publisher’s costs: their own time and work, administration, printing, your advance, the editor’s time, the publicist’s time, the cover designer. They work out these costs, and if you think they are exhorbitant, tough, they don’t care. This all gets deducted from the revenue whether you wanted these services or not, and whether or not you think these people did a good job. And note that ‘your advance’ is a cost: the publishers recoup this before they give you any more money.
Whatever is left over, that’s what you get a share of, depending on the agreed percentage per copy. If there’s nothing left over, you don’t get anything (your royalties are all ‘swallowed up by the costs’). If there’s something left over, congratulations, you’ll make a small amount of money per copy cold, but it could take a while before you actually get paid (royalties are usually paid once or twice a year).
You are governed by this arrangement for as long as the contract lasts, which could be years. If you don’t like the way the publishers have handled your book, or if you think you could sell more copies doing things differently, tough. They make all the decisions. You don’t.
Self-publishing route: I make all the decisions, and I can get a new book written and on sale within 6 months if I want to. No interference, no-one else getting a piece of the action. I have to bear my own up-front costs, it’s true, but there are ways to minimise these. For example, I could go the ‘print on demand’ route, so I only have to pay to physically print the book when there is an order for it. (I don’t do this, but I could. I actually pay to get books printed, 1 or 2000 copies at a time). Although I’m paying for the printing up front, I get a good deal from my printer and can sometimes spread the cost over a period of time. Besides, I’m going to recoup my costs very quickly when compared to the ‘traditional’ route, and also get into profit far more quickly.
I can’t get my book stocked by the large retail chains, but I don’t want to anyway because they would realise very few sales and are a very inefficient sales route. However, I can sell to the entire world via my own website and via Amazon. Selling directly via my own website is better, because I make more money. Amazon have far greater reach, but they require a substantial sale price discount and of course (quite rightly) take their own share of the revenue.
I can and so sell via individual book shops if I want to. They sometimes contact me and ask for a few copies to sell because their customers are asking for my book, and I can reach whatever deal I want with them. They pay me a wholesale price, and I send them a few books to sell. End of deal, not complicated, and I get the money immediately.
So far, I have had customers in about 60 different countries around the world.
I can do anything I like to market my book, including any bright or fun idea I happen to have. I can exploit any opportunity that arises (for example, this year I’ll be doing a show at the Times Literary Festival, where I’ll be able to sell my books directly to the Festival-goers). I can promote and publicise my own work in any way I please, and I can sustain the effort for as long as I want.
Let’s talk about selling directly from my own website. Let’s say I sell each book for 15 pounds, and each copy cost me 2.50 to print. There are some extra costs, but they are very low. I use a web-based credit card payment facility, and they take a tiny percentage on each sale (about 1.5%) and I get paid within 1 or 2 weeks. I could do my own order fulfilment (stuffing the book in an envelope and mailing it) but I sub-contract that to someone else who gets paid £1 per packet sent out. Postage is added at cost and paid for by the customer. So about 10 or 11 pounds is pure profit.
When I started, I didn’t know anything about this business. I have had to learn how to set up my own company; how to write and edit my own work and prepare it for printing using a DTP system; how to get my work printed and how to do a good deal with a good printer; how to design a cover; how to get an ISBN number; how to set up a commercial website and take cc payments or Paypal; how to market my own work and stimulate demand for it. I have loved every second of learning all these things, and now these are all marketable skills in their own right.
I have never spent a single penny on advertising, and I expect I never will. Complete waste of money. My books got good ‘word of mouth’, which is the best advertising in the world and they only kind that really works in the long-term.
I don’t do e-books because they are too easy to copy and pirate. Anything worth reading in ‘e’ form will be on a bit torrents website within weeks.
Even so, there are people who patiently scan every page of my books and then create illegal, pirate copies and sell them on eBay and elsewhere. About 6 times per year, I have to contact websites like eBay and take the steps to get these illegal copies removed from sale.
Really? I would go with 70% were truly terrible. 25% were ok, but didn’t stand out. 4% were good, but just not right for one reason or another. 1% or less were worth publishing. I’m talking about fiction, here. Non-fiction submissions were much rarer, and tended to be of higher quality. I was submissions editor at a good literary agency.
To vaguely answer the OP I’ll get 14% of net on my guidebook sales, which will probably be 80p-£1 a copy.
ETA
Not at the agency I worked in, or any good one. They have reputations to maintain with the publishers. If we took you on it was probably 90% you’d get a deal.
guidebook. I got $1 per copy off of a $15 book. That was 20+ years ago. And I didn’t get royalty checks after the first 2 years because they were lame and it wasn’t worth the trouble. Sold 15k books.
Minor point; you won’t get PoD books into shops very easily, but Ingram do list a lot of PoD titles. If you have access to their database, anything they claim to have exactly a hundred of in stock, usually with a low discount (or none at all) will be Print on Demand. Their monthly catalogs have a special section with hundreds of new PoD books listed. I just checked and in their latest (April) one, they list over 530 titles.
As an aside, because the following doesn’t apply to new authors, some perfectly good publishers use the system, too. Chaosium, for instance, do an initial print run of their titles and then switch to PoD when that sells through. The only difference in the books is that the PoD ones have a lightning flash on their spines to denote ‘lightning source’. Wildside also have a lot of out-of-copyright older fantasy, etc. which is print on demand. Both of these company’s titles are distributed by Ingram.
I’ve often wondered why out of print books aren’t available PoD. In a way, books should never go out of print…
Unless it creates a rarity for the books already owned. But (and this is coming from someone with a decent library) screw the collectors who collect for money. I collect a library so that I can re-read truly great books, and so I can loan them out to friends. I re-sell the not-so-great books to used book stores so other people can experience them cheaply, and to free up space for more good books.
So when I’m looking to fill holes in my library, it’s not to collect for cash, but for a complete series. I also don’t want hardback books, just the softback. Thankfully, the Sweet Silver Blues series by Glen Cook recently came back in to print. Except for Red Iron Nights(?) which isn’t available and wont’ be. And except for Deadly Quicksilver Lies, which won’t be available until 12/1/2009.
So considering that they could easily make both of those books PoD and earn money on book sales … why don’t they? What’s the point of making customers who want to complete their collections wait until the end of the year for one book, and have to buy the other book used?
I recently got my girlfriend to start reading the series, and she’s up to book 3. She’ll easy get to the missing books soon, so I need to buy them used…