I did retain all the rights, but other companies published it under their branding. I ended up getting somewhere between 20-30% all up. I'm not rich, I still have to work for a living. They burnt through all the revenue. The main company that was publishing it moved to San Francisco, hired offices and staff, and burnt through all the capital almost instantly. I just banked mine and used it for travel (for a decade).
It was 25 years ago, so I don't remember. However, even if today I could get all my rights back -- indeed, if I could get compensated for a reasonable author's royalty going back to the start -- the amount of money would not be worth noticing.
If you didn't get paid for writing the book, how did the copyright transfer to someone else (so that they could sell it)? Or the transferable rights to print/distribute it, if that's what we're talking about here.
The author probably got paid an amount for writing the book and then hands all rights over to the publisher. The publisher then prints it forever and takes the income from that. This is a guess based on working with other publishers though. Individual companies may differ.
Do you know how you and the publisher are compensated in this situation? I'm assuming there is some sort of royalty stream coming back to you? (I'm not asking for details, just generalities).
~$1000 a month. Designed, edited and published a book of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders (see http://amzn.com/1595910778). An opportunity I stumbled into. But I suppose "get publication rights from Warren Buffett" isn't a repeatable business model :)
Interesting deductions! I just wanted to pipe in here to confirm that your math and your stated assumptions are correct. My take is the standard 10%. My "top tier" status, as you flatteringly put it, bought me the freedom to simultaneously publish the book online under a Creative Commons Attribution license. I negotiated for licensing, not money. I have no regrets.
Not including anything from the company I co-founded:
$10-$20 a month from publishing Hypersphere (a book written by the 4chan /lit/ board) which sells a few copies a month spread between Lulu and Amazon.
5% from translations... ha! I remember getting told by a foreign publisher that they were publishing a version in their native language. No royalties, they just thought I'd like to know. They did, however, send me a free copy, which was nice.
I have a question for you both (drakonka and turkeygizzard): Would you ever sell all or a portion of the rights to future earnings for your already published books to a third party? We've seen in the music industry PE firms basically acquiring known catalogues for the residuals and I'm wondering why that doesn't seem to happen in the publishing industry.
My startup (FiFoBooks.com) offers another possibility: authors retain all the rights to their work, have full editorial control, set their own prices, and also keep the majority of the sales proceeds, with no "ifs".
FWIW I got a $6000 advance for the book. I earn a 10% royalty on sales which varies a lot but is around a couple hundred bucks a month on average. So not bad, but since it took me a year to write I don't think it's ever going to recoup minimum wage for that period.
No complaints though! O'Reilly is a brilliant publisher and I never had any expectation of making money from it. It was just a thrill to be able to get the bloody thing off my chest at last.
I have little money but I write an amazing book and it sells to millions. Each books takes, say, $5 to print, and yet I sell it for $15. Therefore I end up wealthy from this endeavor.
Did I exploit the people who chose to buy my book? The people who printed it?
I give my stuff away for free (and sell paper copies for profit).
Publishers really help with marketing, editing, typesetting, cover design, fronting cash, and other things, which is why people go with them.
But they also tend to take the rights to the book, and I didn't want that for my books. As such, I make about $100/year in donations, and paper book sales are in the hundreds of dollars per month range. My day job subsidizes this work.
And all books are DRM-free once you remove the DRM from them (which is trivial to do). I try to make a product people want to pay for, not one they have to pay for.
But that's just me. Jack London famously hated writing and only did it to support his lifestyle.
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