The most common response to my question is, “Yes, book sales get royalties,” but that’s not the whole story. It turns out book sales are probably less important than we had originally thought (I should say that I’ve been wrong before). Even though book sales are certainly a major source of revenue for the industry, they aren’t the main source.
When you have a book published, authors typically expect to get somewhere between 5% of the total sales price and 10% of advertising revenue – and those percentages might change from month-to-month, or year-to-year. In other words, if you’re self-published and you’re getting royalties between 4% and 5% of your book’s sales price, that’s probably very good indeed, considering there are no other publishing services.
That doesn’t mean that publishing is a cash cow, though. For example, you do have your book made available to the general public through some online platforms like Amazon or Smashwords. That’s a great thing, but it’s not the full picture.
Publishers also have a number of other ways they generate revenue and make money – all of which depend on their business model. Publishers are increasingly embracing digital platforms like Kobo (for Kindle, as I mentioned earlier), and are even taking a slice of the ad revenues generated by apps you install through your device.
And, of course, all of those payments are paid out in full annually. If your book sells a million copies (which is certainly an ideal number), the publisher is going to make you a healthy cut of what it takes to keep publishing.
But that’s not all. The biggest and most profitable publishers in the business – Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House – generate a good chunk of their income through a combination of paid advertising and their royalty revenues. That isn’t a knock against those companies – after all, they are very talented at turning profits from small publications, and this is a great way to make up for that. But it’s another way to illustrate the enormous value that the independent publisher movement represents to the industry, and it’s worth talking about so we can make sure that the industry isn’t taking it for granted.
By David A. Price
As we enter the final six months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the president has had to do something few presidents in history have dared to do. He pulled the curtain down on the FBI’s Russia investigation.
He took the investigation in a