we have GOT to abolish the paperback only being released a year later scheme brother i simply am not purchasing your $40 hardcover book
I am absolutely all for this, but I’m going to need publishers to pay me more than 7% royalties on paperbacks if they do. My paperbacks are between $10 and $15, and I love that for the kids who buy them. The price needs to stay the same for them and the royalty go up for me, and capitalism is the fucking worst, because you KNOW who is going to get socked by the publishing company.
Yeah, way too many publishing deals aren’t that fabulous for the writers.
Yeah, it’s a thing.
So, I write YA, which means that for most of my contracts when the book is in hardcover, I get 10% of about $20 (YA books tend to be cheaper bc we want kids to buy them. They are going up in price, which is not ideal for kids). An author writing adult books gets the same percentage, but the books are almost twice the price, so the get a theoretical $4 every time I get a theoretical $2.
Once the paperback comes out (if it does), the percentage AND the price drops, but adult books remain higher than YA.
I got a flat fee for AHSOKA (I try not to think about what my life would look like if I got normal royalties, but…let’s just say I’d own my house, and that’s not counting the rest of my IP books, which I get 1-5% on), but we have been arguing with Disney every contract since then.
This is why we beg you not to pirate books. We need sales numbers to keep our advances (ie the original amount of money our publishers pay us) in the “livable wage” range, and even then, it’s not a regular payment, so we need to keep selling books. Publishers only buy our books if we have a sales record, and pirating torpedoes that. Corporations don’t really care if you pirate, but literally every sale is important to the author.
(Libraries buy books, so that’s great! And used books are also good because SOMEone bought it, and now we might get a new fan. Buying ARCs is not cool–it literally says so on the cover–but I can’t really blame consumers for that: it’s the bookstore that should know better.)
Tl;dr, capitalism is the death of art, but also: please buy mine bc I have a mortgage. I promise to do my best work for you.
amhrancas 