Self-made royalty

Tuesday, we talked about the complicated side of sales and royalties. Traditional publishing is like that, sometimes, though I tend to find it the simpler of the two in most regards. Today though, we’re going to focus on self-publishing.

How do sales and royalties work, for self-published authors?

Well, that’s pretty simple. You make a sale, you get a cut of the sale price. Ta-dah! But it’s never quite that easy, is it?

All right, so let’s start at the beginning.

Unlike traditional publishing, when you sign (or agree to work with) a self-publishing company, one of two things will happen. Either you’ll pay them a sum of money to do much of the heavy lifting (generally mild editing, interior formatting, cover design, printing, formatting for eBook, etc.), or you’ll do all that yourself and primarily publish digitally (i.e. through Amazon’s KDP or Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press). So, you’ll either start out spending nothing or start out spending a lot.

Now, once your book hits shelves (whether they be literal or proverbial ones), you’ll start getting paid. And it’ll depend on what company you published with, as to how much you’ll be paid.

I’ve worked with two self-publishing companies in my day: Xlibris and Amazon.

With Xlibris, I can get royalties every three months. It works very similarly to how it does with traditional publishers. I get a cut off the net royalty (that’s the amount of profit the book makes when it’s sold, so sale price minus any production costs). So, if I haven’t made $25 in any given quarter, it rolls over to the final quarter (which usually means I only get money from them in January, since Telekinetic has been out for so long and they no longer really market it).

With Amazon, I get a percentage off the sale price of the kindle eBooks. I’m on the 70% royalty program, which is actually a fairly decent percentage of the sale price. But they do make it difficult to report for my taxes, on how much I sold when and how much I earned from those sales. Oy.

But basically, with self-publishing, you’re on easy street. You make a sale, the company pays you your cut. Depending on who you’re working with, you might not have to wait more than a couple months to start seeing money come in (Amazon sends you money two months after your sales, so any sales you made in July, you’ll be paid for in September).

Pretty easy, right?

The only thing you’re missing is the advance, which is sometimes the difference between our ability to keep writing all the time or not. Again, not lying here. Just trying to stay on the positive side.

The nice thing with getting paid in self-publishing, is that you’ll start seeing funds come in from sales fairly quickly. The amount you’ll be paid will vary, depending on the amount of marketing you do and your ability to sell the book, but you’ll be making something in royalties, right away.

It’s a decent system, certainly.

[love]

{Rani D.}