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eBook Royalty Calculator Tells You When You’ll Get Paid And How Much

Indie authorsebook royalty calculator are used to making back of the envelope calculations on when and how much they’ll be paid, but thanks to a nifty new royalty calculator a lot of the guesswork is over.

Software engineer and author Deirdre Saoirse Moen has built a handy web-based royalty calculator that can tell you when each of the major ebook distributors and ebookstores will pay and how much they’ll pay based on the number of titles sold.

An author can select a retail price from $01 to $19.99, a sales quantity from1 to 10,000 copies, and then choose which of 7 ebookstores and distributors sold what percentage of the titles.

ebook royalty calculator

The bottom of the page shows how much each of the 7 sources will pay, and when you can expect that payment.

It doesn’t cover the compete market (Ingram, Createspace, and the specific Kindle Stores aren’t mentioned, for example), and it doesn’t take into account the delivery fee that Amazon charges or the intricacies of which Kindle Stores offer the 70% royalty option in which markets.

But in spite of the issues I think this tool is still a useful way to double check which ebookstore pays how much. I think it’s worth book marking and coming back to.

Have you tried it yet?

eBook Royalty Calcumatic

 

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Comments


Deirdre Saoirse Moen December 26, 2013 um 12:34 pm

Thanks for the shout-out! It was intended to be a back-of-the-envelope calculation. In part, you can’t pick where your book buyers are going to buy your work, so it was never intended to be the be-all, end-all.

My plan is to add the other vendors you’ve mentioned.

The delivery fee’s hard because it’s based on file size. One person’s novel may be under 1 meg, but another person’s may be 3 meg if they haven’t pared the file down as much. And another person’s book may have a lot of photos and illustrations and be much, much larger.

I’d been intending to figure out a UI that wasn’t as unwieldy for foreign sales, but there’s also more research on the amounts, too.

And Google with its opaque royalties. ::rolls eyes::

FWIW, I just received two European Amazon payments for $0.49 and $1.11 respectively, both for sales from 2011. So, another nuance is that, for Amazon, you’ll need to make the payment thresholds for each store. I’m not sure that’s true for other vendors.

Nate Hoffelder December 26, 2013 um 1:00 pm

FYI: Amazon dropped the payment thresholds for all the Kindle Stores except Brazil:
http://ebookne.ws/19joIxD

Deirdre Saoirse Moen December 26, 2013 um 3:10 pm

You know, thank you for mentioning that. I had it in my head that there was a $1 threshold. I’ve fixed the Notes page accordingly.


Jay Jackson January 6, 2014 um 5:38 am

This software is very handy to monitor royalty payments. It will make calculations much easier. It could have been better if it covers a wider range of markets for better monitoring.


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