Accounting for Authors: Financial Analysis, Budgeting, Costs, and Margin Made Simple (Stark Publishing Solutions, #6) by D.F. Hart & Mark Leslie Lefebvre

Author:D.F. Hart & Mark Leslie Lefebvre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: finances, money, writer income
Publisher: Stark Publishing
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Understanding the Costs and Benefits of Contracts

MLL

This book is written mostly from the point of view that you’re an author who has come to the business of writing and publishing with an indie-author or self-publishing hat on.

Below I’m going to explain a few important things you need to consider when it comes to signing contracts with publishers.

However, as an indie author you need to know that when you self-publish, you are, indeed, signing a contract. Whether you publish direct to retail platforms (such as Kindle Direct Publishing, or Kobo Writing Life), or you use a third-party distributor (like Draft2Digital or StreetLib), you are signing a contract.

I’m pretty sure that you, like 95% of authors out there, never even bothered to read-through the details of the contract. If anything, the key thing you likely attended to was how much money you would get in “royalties” for the sales of your books, and then glossed over everything else.

When I was creating Kobo Writing Life, I had to read through all the contracts being offered in order to generate, in collaboration with Kobo’s legal team, a contract for use within that direct publishing platform. So I read them all.

In a nutshell, here are the high-level things you’re agreeing to in the contracts for most of the major retail platforms (Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and Nook) for eBook sales.

You, as the owner of the IP in question, confirm that you have the legal rights to sell the book(s) in question in the territories they operate within.

You are not giving up any of your rights or IP to this book and are free to also publish and sell it anywhere else (see below for an important caveat related to this)*

You are allowing the retailer to sell, to their consumers, the products you are offering for an agreed-upon value they determine which is usually based upon the book’s retail price.

You can set the retail price (sometimes with restrictions on price ranges that may affect the “royalty” rate you are paid for those sales.

You can remove (unpublish/delist) those books from retail sale under your own control at any time.

You allow the retailer the ability to host your book in their cloud-based service so that those who purchase your books may have access to them even after you remove them from retail sale.

The retailer can choose, at their own discretion, at any time, and for any reason of their choosing, whether or not they will accept what you attempt to publish (It is, after all, their retail store and they can decide what they want to sell and feature/promote on their digital retail shelves and to their customers. If you believe their unwillingness to sell certain types of books constitutes censorship, you truly don’t understand the difference between censorship and a free and open market based on capitalism)

VERY IMPORTANT FOR eBOOKS (Because so many authors do not understand this): You must not sell the eBook at a lower retail price on any other online/retail platform (including your own website for direct sales).

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