Typical scenario for a published book with a traditional publisher
Cost of you book in stores-Retail $13.99The bookstore pays 60%(typically) for your book. You pay your publisher and agent from that amount. $8.39
Your publisher takes 65% of that for advertising, distributing and printing. $5.45 (65%)
Your agent takes 15% for selling your book to the publisher-I'm not sure if that 15% is taken from the $8.39 or the $2.94. So, I've color coded them.
You pay Uncle Sam about 1/3 of that $1.13/1.67 (13%,20%) profit
If your experience with traditional publishing was different than this, I'd love to hear about it. Please comment.
Indie Publishing
Cost of your book in retail stores $13.99
Bookstores pay 60% of retail for your book that leaves $8.39
Your distributor takes 25% of that 60% They earn $2.10. That leaves $6.29
Subtract the cost to print your book $1.25(15%)-$3.50 (42%) for a 350 page book depending
on how many you print.
What you get $3.04 (36%) to $4.79 (57%) if you do all free advertising
Good luck with that
Uncle Sam takes about 1/3 $2.12 (25%)-3.16 (38%)
POD (Print on Demand) Publisher I will use Createspace as the example
Cost of your book $13.99
You get $6.24 from sales at Createspace
$3.44 from sales on Amazon
$.64 from all other .coms
Your book is not in stores
Ebooks
Smashwords takes about 19%. That is about $.18 per dollar your book sells for
If you let Smashwords distribute to Barnes and Noble, Diesel, Kobe and others, you end up with 60%. That means that if you sell your book for $2.99 you'll get $1.81.
Amazon.com (KDP)
If you price your book between $2 and $9.98, you will earn 65%
If you price your book less than $1.99 or over $9.99, you will earn 35%.
Happy earning
2 comments:
Thanks for the info and all your research.
Great info. I had an agent and almost went the traditional route, but got the typical rejections. Now I'm an indie publisher and lovin' it! Ebooks has really opened up the playing field so now us indies don't have to watch from the sidelines. We can play in the game, too, and be serious competitors!
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