Author/publisher contracts specify royalty rates in the craziest way imaginable. This is because they consist of archaeological strata of legal boilerplate, accumulated over decades and haggled over by publishers’ lawyers and authors’ agents. Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?”
And so we have constant re-use of legal boilerplate that’s decades old. “For sales under 10,000 copies, a royalty of 10% will be assigned based on the undiscounted suggested retail price. From 10,001 to 15,000 copies, a royalty of 12% will be allocated … from 15,001 up, a royalty of 15% will be allocated … for copies sold at less than 40% discount off SRP, the full royalty will be paid; for copies sold at discount of 41-50% 80% of royalties due will be paid: from 51%-65% 50% of royalties will be paid: above 65% 40% of royalties will be paid.” You can think of it as a stack of IF () THEN () ELSE () statements switched off the number of copies sold and the discount the wholesaler extorted for taking them off the publisher’s hands.
Charles Stross, “Things publishers can’t do (yet)”, Charlie’s Diary, 2013-03-19
March 20, 2013
QotD: The mad, mad, mad world of author royalty calculation
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With the new world of electronic publishing I don’t see why more authors just use Smashwords or like sites. No muss, no fuss… and almost all profit of their own without sharing with vultures anymore. Cost of ebooks is a big sore point with me, anything over $5 is just robbery considering the cost of housing an electronic file is nearly zero.
Comment by Dwayne — March 20, 2013 @ 10:51
I suspect a lot of authors don’t use such sites because they don’t benefit sufficiently from getting the ebook online (most could do that from their own websites a la John Scalzi). What they still hope to get from the traditional publishers is exposure, advertising, and the implied quality of being signed to a major publisher. When the book reviewers who matter operate completely separate from the traditional publishing channels, this won’t matter at all.
There are some great writers out there going the self-publishing route … but there are also a lot of incompetent hacks doing exactly the same thing. Hacks aren’t as common under the umbrella of traditional publishing, so that’s a differentiating factor that may not matter as much now as it used to. For better for for worse, the traditional publishers have acted as gatekeepers separating (some of) the good writers from (most of) the hacks.
Comment by Nicholas — March 20, 2013 @ 20:10
FYI, Charles Stross posted a specific answer to the question “Why don’t you self-publish?” here.
Comment by Nicholas — March 21, 2013 @ 09:22