Weekly Writers: Royalties And Economics

So, how much do you get paid per sale?

Here’s the Weekly Writers Monday post. This post is for paid subscribers only.

---

Royalties And Economics

Royalties govern how much you get paid from the sale of every copy of a book.

This is useful background information, and I’ll use traditionally-published books as a way to illustrate it.

When you license the rights to a publisher (to publish your book) the contract will stipulate things such as royalty rates. They will almost certainly vary by the format the book is published in (e.g. paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook), but I’ll list some commonly used figures.

Note that all my calculations are generalisations, since every contract, vendor, publisher and book are different. Also you would probably need to deduct 10-15% from all the income figures to represent the agent’s cut.