Amazon To Pay 70 Percent Royalties To Kindle Ebook Authors and Publishers
By Anna Johnson on January 27th, 2010Amazon will pay authors and publishers using its Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) an impressive 70 percent royalty on the list price of their Kindle ebooks.
Starting June 30, 2010, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of the list price, net of delivery costs for each Kindle ebook sold.
The delivery costs relate to file size, where $0.15 is charged per megabyte. Given the median DTP file size of 368KB per Kindle ebook, delivery costs will generally be less than $0.06 per unit sold.
So how much will an author make on an average Kindle DTP book?
Amazon reckons that on a book with a $8.99 list price, an author or publisher (whoever owns the relevant rights) will make $6.25 with the new 70 percent option, compared with $3.15 at standard royalty rates.
Not bad, considering that authors typically get around 7 to 15 percent of the list price for physical books, and 25 percent of the net for digital books.
Is there a catch?
To qualify for the 70 percent royalty rate, Kindle DTP books must meet the same requirements as apply to books receiving the standard royalty rate and must also satisfy the following criteria:
- The list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99 and be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book;
- The title must be available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights;
- The author or publisher must be okay with Amazon providing the ebook with such features as text-to-speech and other functionality that Amazon plans to add to its Kindle devices and the Kindle Store.
- The Kindle DTP book must be priced at the same or lower price than competitive titles.
Amazon will only pay the 70 percent royalty rate on in-copyright works – not public domain books – and only for books sold in the United States.
Go here for more information about the Kindle Digital Text Platform.
