Does anyone know how much money he gets from every book / ebook? I think buying it is, at least for some people, very much a support Snowden thought.
I would also guess that even if he sold enough books to earn out the advance, his take on each incremental book is really small as the publisher took most of the financial risk with the advance itself.
Confirming, it is a Macmillan title. Metropolitan Books is a Macmillan imprint.
In that case, from what I have learned from speaking to a few NYT Best selling authors, he's getting peanuts per sale, though it's very likely he got an advance in the range of $50k.
He won't actually get a cent from sales until his share goes above whatever his advance was.
That... would not be very much for a book that can be expected to generate hundreds of thousands of sales.
One of the NYT best selling authors I spoke to over beers told me at most he can hope to get in the range of $200k in his lifetime for his book that was top of the charts for a significant amount of time, and continues to be very, very famous in it's niche.
i.e. Writing for a publisher sucks.
The publisher generally calculates the advance based on projected sales, and that's often all the money an author will see, though if an advance is "earned out" (sales exceed the projection), the author can earn additional royalty payments based on a percentage of the per-volume sales price. The usually cited figure is 10%, though this may vary.
TL;DR: Snowden is guaranteed the advance, but may earn more.
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/book-advances-and-royaltie...
To my knowledge, no and probably no. I'll inquire.
I'm aware that it's available at Kobo in EPUB format but that includes Adobe DRM.
Sad to hear that it's only available with drm. It's going to show up on torrent sites within days no matter what, so as always honest consumers are the ones that lose.
Assuming Print on Demand w/ amazon. He's not doing that but we'll just assume to keep it easy. And list price of $24
Amazon takes $5 to print Amazon takes $9.60 royalty
That leaves $9.40 or 40% available.
Of that Macmillan takes their cut to cover editing, covers, advertising, etc.
And what is left is probably $2.40 for each sale.
For Self published folks (going eBooks this time). Assuming you list for $10 and get a 70% royalty from amazon.
You'll earn $7 for each sale.
But, then once you factor in advertising (on amazon which goes to amazon), your earnings for each book drop to maybe a 5-30% royalty range. And that assumes you can sell your book for $10, which most self published cannot.
I have friends who sell $10k worth of eBooks/mo who make $2k/mo. So 80% goes to amazon and 20% goes to them.