Royalty Contracts and eBooks
June 9, 2008
As book publishing consultants we have a birds-eye view of the problems that book publishers face, and one problem involves ebooks and royalty contracts.
One publisher was told that by his lawyer that his contract requires him to pay a 50% royalty on income from ebooks. This includes sales through Amazon for their Amazon Kindle and sales for the Sony eBook Reader. This a carry over from older standard contracts that called for the publisher to share 50% of their income from rights sales.
At larger publishers most new contracts address the issue of royalties on proceeds from digital publishing, (as opposed to the traditional 50% on rights sales) and show a royalty rate equal to (or much closer to) that of a standard book.
