Well I learned something about ebooks today, something your parents will never tell you.
Depending on where you sell an ebook, like Kindle or smashwords, the deal is you get 70% of the book price, which on Amazon can’t be over 9.99. Ok, I can live with seven bucks per book. But here’s the catch, and not necessarily the last one:
This 70% royalty only applies to sales in certain countries, a list of about 15 of them. Now granted, that list includes USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, etc. But it does not include India, China, Australia, or Brazil. Or Japan or Korea or Russia. For ebook sales outside this narrow list, the royalty gets cut in half. So now I am seeing royalties for some sales of just $3.50. I know to a regular author that probably seems normal, but that sure seems low to me.
Smashwords is sort of the same deal, you get 60%, but only with their “partners,” outside that network it drops to something like 30% as well.
So for now I am leaving things as they are, see what happens. More later – jl
