S. W. Raine

Times are tough.

Even though the CEO-to-worker balance has been skewed for quite some time now (actually, in 2021, CEOs received about 398.8 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers), we’re feeling it similarly in the publishing world too.

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) rates are at an all-time record low. (Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s monthly book subscription. KENP rates are the actual royalty amount per page read. I’m not part of Kindle Unlimited because I sell wide, but a lot of my author friends are in Kindle Unlimited.) Ingram Spark, one of the big self-publishing aggregators, changed their wholesale discount threshold from 30% to 40% in the US. And this is on top of all the other stuff we have to deal with.

Ever wonder how much a self-published author makes per book?

If you’re unfamiliar with publishing terms, let me first give you a few definitions.

E-book: a book in digital format
Paperback: a book with a flexible paper binding
Hardcover: a book with rigid boards for binding
Dust jacket: the detachable paper outer cover of a hardcover
Case laminate: a hardcover with the art and text directly printed onto the rigid cover

Simple enough, right? Here are a few more definitions.

Distributor: sells books directly to readers
Aggregator: distributes to a wide range of distributors and retailers
Expanded distribution/Wide: a service available to authors to get more exposure through multiple different distribution channels
Printing cost: expenses incurred through printers (ink, paper, etc.)
Royalty: the amount an author earns in exchange for the rights to publish their book

Got it? Good. Now let’s get into it. I’ll use my own books as an example.

My debut steampunk adventure, The Techno Mage, is available as an e-book for $2.99 USD, paperback for $14.99 USD, and hardcover for $24.99 USD.

Even though I sell my e-book wide via Draft2Digital (aggregator), I don’t use Draft2Digital to sell to Amazon (distributor). Instead, I sell it through Amazon directly because Amazon is its own beast with complicated rules.

My paperback is also sold wide through Draft2Digital and direct through Amazon, but this time, I have Draft2Digital also sell to Amazon because Amazon direct doesn’t do paperback pre-orders (thanks, Jeff Bezos!). Thankfully, Draft2Digital does.

My hardcover is sold wide via IngramSpark (aggregator). As much as I hate IngramSpark, they offer dust jacket options for their hardcovers. Amazon only offers case laminate options so far as they are still new to the hardcover world, and Draft2Digital doesn’t yet offer hardcover options because they’re still new to the paperback world.

So what do I earn (royalties) per sale at Amazon, Draft2Digital, and IngramSpark?

E-book (priced at $2.99):
Amazon: $1.96
Draft2Digital: $1.78

Paperback (priced at $14.99):
Amazon: $3.60
Draft2Digital: $0.15 (yes, you read that right)

Hardcover (priced at $24.99):
IngramSpark: $4.72 (for now…)

Yikes, right? Let me break it down for you (keep in mind I’m a wordsmith. I’m not good with numbers!).

My e-book is priced at $2.99 as a “first in series” even though it’s currently a standalone, to make it enticing to new readers to take a chance on the book, with a possibility of buying the others in the series (like Rise of the Sky Pirate, the spin-off prequel).

So at Amazon, I earn 70% in royalties, at the cost of having a delivery fee (yep, a delivery fee for a digital product) and limited sales territories. If I wanted no delivery fee and no limits, I’d only earn 35% in royalties.

At Draft2Digital, they don’t break it down like Amazon does (or if they do, I don’t know where to find it), but I earn around 60% in royalties.

My paperback is priced at $14.99 and is kind of an “oops” for me. I couldn’t price it any lower, else I wouldn’t be making any royalties, but I didn’t realize what the issue was until it was almost time to publish my third book, when my friend and fellow author, Holly Ash, compared her books and my books together. Royalties earned also depend on the size of the book and how many pages are contained inside. Though we had approximately the same word count (around 80k words), Holly was earning much more in royalties because her books have less pages with a slightly bigger size (5.5″ x 8″, I think? Versus my 5″ x 8″) and because her font is a size 11, while mine is a size 12. Unfortunately, I can’t just change everything in the middle of a “series,” so I’ll continue making peanuts until I make the second editions.

At Amazon, I earn 60% after printing cost (which currently sits at almost $6 per book) by selling direct. This includes all of Amazon’s markets, like Amazon.ca, Amazon.fr, etc. If I were to go wide, I’d only earn 40% after printing cost and strangely wouldn’t be able to access any of Amazon’s markets except for Amazon.co.uk.

At Draft2Digital, again without breaking it down like Amazon, I earn around 55% after printing cost (which currently sits at almost $7 per book).

My hardcover is priced at $24.99. I learned my lesson with the paperbacks, so I made sure to increase the size of the book and reduce my font size to give me the best royalties possible.

At IngramSpark, they also don’t break it down like Amazon. What I earn ($4.72) is after print cost (almost $14!), after IngramSpark’s take (whatever that is; I’m not good in math), and after a forced 30% wholesale discount, even if the author doesn’t care about getting into retailers. And unlike the KENP rate changes from earlier that don’t affect me, IngramSpark’s wholesale discount change does affect me. It’ll be a 40% discount, which means I’ll earn around $2.22.

So, am I saying don’t buy from Amazon or any other retailer? No, of course not.

CEOs have to CEO. They have to make a profit just as much as an indie bookstore does. It’s just unfortunate that the author—the one who wrote the book to which the CEOs and retailers distribute/sell—makes the least amount of money out of the whole process.

Also unfortunate is the increased cost of, well, everything. And in order to keep up with inflation and consumable price hikes from supply-chain disruptions, authors are forced to raise their prices—including yours truly (after the new year).

In the end, buy however is more convenient to you, whether that’s through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your favorite local indie bookstore, borrowing from the library (yes, libraries have to purchase it from somewhere, so it counts!) or even, if possible, purchasing directly from the authors themselves.

I hope you learned something new from this little breakdown. Your favorite self-published authors could use some cheering up with everything going on. Messaging them with encouraging notes and leaving reviews if you’ve read their books costs nothing!

Want to know of another way to cheer me up? Leaving me pics of cute animals in the comments. 😉

Raine