Catrin Lewis
Active Member
This could also go in What Made Me Unhappy Today? or Things I Learned Today, but it's probably more useful here.
As you've likely already heard, Draft2Digital has just announced a $20 one-time new account setup fee and a $12 annual maintenance fee for accounts whose net royalties don't hit $100 in any given year. I'm not here to weigh in on the rights or wrongs of that. If I decided to list my books on D2D. I doubt the new fees would hold me back. It's just another expense on my Schedule C.
I'm thinking listing with them might be a good idea. So I'm poking around on their site, and, oh look, here's the royalty calculator for them to do your paperback. Let's see if it'd be worthwhile to go wide with print with them.
I plug in the numbers, and what the h-e-double hockey sticks!? Only 29 US cents from a book I'm retailing at $19.95??? The print cost comes out of the 45% royalty figure? Meaning D2D and the retailers it distributes to get $11.26 of every print book of mine they sell???
Make it make sense. But there's more.
I went onto Amazon KDP and ran the figures there. And learned they do exactly the same thing! These past seven years I've had my print book available through them, and I never realized. The difference here is that KDP starts with 60% royalty, and deducts the production costs. This yields me $2.47 a copy, 8.5 times what D2D pays, even with higher print costs. How can an additional 15% make that much difference?
Yeah, yeah, I know. Because, all things being more or less equal, the print costs are coming out of the first 45 points of that 60%. And here's Amazon keeping the remaining $7.98 for its own little self.
But good grief. I always knew I make more money buying author copies and hand selling. I feel like an idiot not understanding exactly why.
As you've likely already heard, Draft2Digital has just announced a $20 one-time new account setup fee and a $12 annual maintenance fee for accounts whose net royalties don't hit $100 in any given year. I'm not here to weigh in on the rights or wrongs of that. If I decided to list my books on D2D. I doubt the new fees would hold me back. It's just another expense on my Schedule C.
I'm thinking listing with them might be a good idea. So I'm poking around on their site, and, oh look, here's the royalty calculator for them to do your paperback. Let's see if it'd be worthwhile to go wide with print with them.
I plug in the numbers, and what the h-e-double hockey sticks!? Only 29 US cents from a book I'm retailing at $19.95??? The print cost comes out of the 45% royalty figure? Meaning D2D and the retailers it distributes to get $11.26 of every print book of mine they sell???
Make it make sense. But there's more.
I went onto Amazon KDP and ran the figures there. And learned they do exactly the same thing! These past seven years I've had my print book available through them, and I never realized. The difference here is that KDP starts with 60% royalty, and deducts the production costs. This yields me $2.47 a copy, 8.5 times what D2D pays, even with higher print costs. How can an additional 15% make that much difference?
Yeah, yeah, I know. Because, all things being more or less equal, the print costs are coming out of the first 45 points of that 60%. And here's Amazon keeping the remaining $7.98 for its own little self.
But good grief. I always knew I make more money buying author copies and hand selling. I feel like an idiot not understanding exactly why.
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