It was confirmed
to me a few days ago by Cambridge University Press (CUP) that my royalties on
the e-versions of my Cambridge English Reader titles would be 20% rather than
15% of receipts, as originally agreed.
This feels very
much like a step in the right direction, though a few more steps would be
welcome! My other publisher, Trifolium Books UK, pays me a much larger
percentage of the receipts from e-books, and I hope that, as publishers come to
grips with new e-markets, this practice will become more widespread.
Long ago (!), when books were
only paper, I worked in publishing and experienced all the steps in the procedure as a commissioning
editor, a publisher, and a writer. I know that book budgets were then based on the estimated
sales receipts. Development costs of the content had to be within a certain
proportion of the overall projected receipts. This budgeting model must by now
have changed, as the number of e-copies grows and the number of paper copies,
upon whose price the budget was based, shrinks.
And yet many
e-books cost the same as the paper version. The development section of any
book budget will still be necessary, but the paper, printing, transport and
warehousing of the paper books must be a far lower part of the overall costs for
most books by now. With this in mind, it is strange that the e-version of so
many novels is the same price to the consumer as the paper version, and that
the authors are still getting such low royalties.
From my experience
in the independent publishing sector, this is unjust. If the e-book is priced
logically (i.e. lower), far more copies sell. The receipts rise and the profits with them.
There’s more for the publisher and more for the author. Why are so many
mainstream publishers still not adjusting their prices to the e-book market?
It seems that, as
part of their huge internal re-organisation, CUP and their collaborators have in
fact been working on this and begun to adjust. I thank all those concerned for
this, and hope it is just the beginning of a general trend…
