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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3681 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

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I read a lot and find my self spending around 40$ a month buying books through Amazon for my kindle. It’s recently come to my attention that Amazon takes a whopping 70% cut for self published titles (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210) ! Does anyone know what the range is for books that come from a real publisher? I may switch back to paper backs …

The main competitor to Amazon for ebooks is Smashwords, who pay authors a bit more. We'd appreciate off-Amazon sales, if you want to give them a try.

Thank you, I’ll do that.

That's their "standard" rate, but they also have a 70% royalty rate (30% Amazon cut) that applies to most books in practice. You just need to price your book between $2.99 and $9.99 USD and allow it to be part of Kindle Unlimited.

(The reason for positioning the lower rate as the standard one is probably because a bonus for including the book in KU sounds nicer than a penalty for not including it, even when the practical effects are exactly the same)

Wow, on the one hand I am surprised that amazons margins are actually pretty fair (although still annoyed because it isn’t like they are taking any kind of a risk since they don’t give advances).

Also hadn’t really thought of publishing as basically having a VC model.

Things like this, and the fact that e-books are basically free to reproduce, help me justify pirating books. I would spend around that if not more if I bought all my books.

Typically I just pirate ebooks, then if I like it enough I'll buy a physical copy and/or donate directly to the author. A lot of times an author's website will have info on where to buy to give them the biggest cut.

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