Tag Archives: royalties

Macmillan raising royalties on ebooks . . .

Posted on by

. . . to 25 percent of net. (UPDATE: Link — a letter on the Macmillan website from CEO John Sargent — no longer any good.)

By which we can surmise that there’s some nervousness out there. Maybe writers are getting restless about the size of their cut?

Of course, this is still far less than the royalty you get for a Kindle ebook, which is 70 percent of gross.

Which makes me wonder a bit about this statement from the Sargent letter:

[T]he publishing industry standard for electronic book royalty rates has clearly settled 25% of net receipts

“Clearly”?

He also takes a swipe at Amazon that doubles as a way to ‘splain why Macmillan won’t match the Kindle numbers:

Amazon had been providing the e-book versions of new release hardcovers at $9.99, considerably under Amazon’s cost, making it very difficult for anyone else to prosper or even enter the market.

Okay, then.

We live in interesting times . . .

The best advice

Posted on by

. . . comes from people who have been there, done that.

A few weeks ago, I put up a post about a discussion at Booksquare on whether writers would be better off producing books as work-for-hire (as opposed to the way it’s typically done today: writers receive an advance against royalties, and then later additional royalties should the advance earn out).

Now Tess Gerritsen weighs in with her experience. After publishing nine romantic suspense novels for Harlequin, she hit the NYT bestseller list with another book, Harvest. Reprints of her old titles, she writes,

started appearing in bookstores. Not just here in the U.S., but around the world. These were titles that I thought had long since finished earning out, and would never be seen again. And suddenly, they were selling again, and selling well, and now I’m being paid royalties that add up to many times the original advances I was first paid.

That’s money she never would have seen if she’d sold her early books as work-for-hire.