Re: Authors and Self-Publishing
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What would happen if his book were to end up outselling the Harrington book? Would his royalty stay at 10%.
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What would happen if his book doesn't sell at all and we get massive returns and lose a lot of money on it? Do I then go back to the author and say you owe us money?
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If so, that does not seem very fair. Seems like the fair thing would be to tie royalty percentages in with actual sales. If the publisher sells X number of copies, the author (no matter who it is) gets X percentage. If the publisher sells Y number of copies, the author gets Y percentage. If the publisher sells Z number of copies, the author gets Z percentage.
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This is much more difficult than you think because returns are negative sales and they may appear a long time after books are initially sold and we receive payment for them. Plus, we don't link royalties to the suggested retail sales as some publishers do but actually link them to the wholesale price. So in our contracts the royalty rates are actually double the figures I used here. This allows us a flexibility that most publishers do not have, and if we didn't do this, our overall royalty rate would need to be lower.
But the bottom line is we don't pay royalties on a sliding scale. In fact, there's no reason for us to do something like that since our royalty rates tend to be so much higher than what is typical for the publishing business. Even our lowest royalty rate, which is actually 20 percent of wholesale price as opposed to 10 percent of retail is much higher than standard in our field.
But in cases where a book sells great and the author has a low royalty rate we do up the royalty rate on future books to a very generous amount recognizing the success of the previous book. We also may invlove that author on a new project as another way of recognizing the success of his earlier book. Finally, and this is something I recently did, I was so impressed with one of our manuscripts that I changed the contract, with authors' agreement, to a higher royalty rate. So again, it's a pretty good deal becoming a Two Plus Two author. And if your book sells well, it can be an even better one.
So all of this seems pretty fair to me. Remember, we don't force an author to sign a contract. If he thinks he can do better elsewhere, that's his decision.
MM
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