The question came up that we need clarification of “net sales”, so here’s a quick post with some numbers.

Example Book –

Finally A Romance by Firsttime Novelist

sells for $4.99 (seems to be a common price point)

Contract #1 = author receives 35% of GROSS (or total sale price)

So…. $4.99 x 0.35 = $1.7465 (or $1.75 royalty per sale to the author)

Contract #2 = author receives 35% of NET (This is what I mean by royalty on NET sales)

Book is still $4.99

Publisher subtracts $0.37 from the price. (This fee is the fee that the credit card company charges to process the transaction. I based this amount off of a nationwide bank that does substantial amount of credit card work… and the fee I used was 2.4% of transaction plus $0.25 fee per transaction)

So, author gets…. $4.62 x 0.35 = $1.617 (or $1.62 royalty per sale)

The author loses $0.13 per sale in royalties. Now, if the book only sells a few copies, this isn’t going to make a difference. But that’s $13.00 lost for every 100 sales.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not giving anyone $13.00 without a darn good reason. That money would almost buy a bag of horse feed, or a bag of cat food, or a bucket of cat litter, or a couple of bags of horse treats. You get the picture.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.