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| Click the Video Below to Learn about Amazon/CreateSpace Royalties |
[00:00] I Bruce Jones here and in this video I'm going to talk about book royalties. One of the questions that comes up a lot for authors who are just jumping into the self-publishing model and selling their books on Amazon is how much does it cost, how much do I have to pay to print the book, how much does Amazon take, how much are the royalties, and I get how does all that kind of work? So in this video I'm going to try to demystify a little of that and answer some of the questions that you might have about that. So we're going to primarily just focused on paperback books and this is my newest book, I Want to Publish My Book But I Don't Know How. This is a book that's created using print on demand. Print on demand is a service offered by Amazon and lots of other companies.
A customer places an order on Amazon for this book, a single order is sent to a company called Createspace. They print the book and ship it to the customer. They take their money, Amazon takes their money and you get your piece or your royalty. So how does that work and how can I figure out what my costs are going to be and all that kind of stuff. So we're using a service called Createspace. Createspace is the print on demand side of Amazon. It's where we upload our files. It's a free service to print all these books. And I'm now the author of over 40 books. So I have coloring books like this. I have music books. This is a full color one that have cords and things.
[01:30] I have children's picture books all color. Look at that. All of this color. It's great with that beautiful, beautiful book. I have all different kinds of books. And I print all of these paperbacks with Createspace. You may never have heard of it, but it's in the sort of the back office end of Amazon and it manages all of this. You can also do this through kindle and kindle hhas traditionally been the ebook publishing side of Amazon, but they're now also offering the ability to do paperback books. So a lot of this will apply to what they do too. Createspace is a free service. It's where you manage all your book accounts, upload your files. CreateSpace moves your book over to Amazon and they pay you the royalty fees, they do the whole thing. It's all done sort of behind the scenes and they also have a lot of sort of, um, services and, and tools that you can use to kind of help get you going and understand how the process works.
So I'm just starting out, I want to of understand the royalty thing so I'd go up here to books and you're ready to publish a trade paperbacks. I click on that. You get basically a page of all kinds of resources and you can learn about your cover, the interior and all of these books. To publish a book takes two pdf files, an interior file for the inside. And then the a cover file, it gets uploaded and you can learn about the sizes and things like that. All of that's right here. So it's, it's pretty good. A black and white books color, different sizes, all different sizes, all that kind of stuff. But we're going to just focus on royalties, which is what everybody wants to know about how much money am I going to make? Um, so we're going to start here.
[03:08] This is a free tool you can kind of use to kind of do some what if scenarios and then I'll take you inside to my account and show you how that really works out. But the money is, it's up on this page. And again this is under books published and trademark and we just hit royalties right there. And you get little calculator that shows you how much money you have. So when any book is published, just like any product, this is a product. So whether I was doing a pen or paper clips or magnifying glass, anything, um, there are costs involved as the manufacturing costs. Then there's a markup that goes in there usually to your distributor. So our wholesaler, and then there's also a market that goes to the retailer, so in this case Amazon is the retailer and the manufacturer is create space, but there's costs that go in all those little steps and there's also cost they're involved in just managing the ecommerce side of Amazon.
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| https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/ |
[04:11] So I have other ecommerce things and there's a lot of costs that go in and building the shopping cart and managing the databases and all that kind of stuff. All that costs them money. So it all hell less taken out. Createspace is a free service. In other words, we can upload our files. It doesn't cost us anything to print, but the costs are taken out of the sales price. So if we have a $10 book, um, some money is taken out and it goes to Createspace for printing, some goes to Amazon for managing in, some goes to you. So those are the royalties, the part that comes to you. That's the part we care about. Um, so let's just sort of look at this, which is a couple of little what if scenarios. So you can kind of see how this works. So you just picked the black and white.
[04:51] So any color. This is the black and white book. Everything inside here is black and white. If there's any color in here, even just one page. This is a color book is regarded as a color book. Um, and that's more expensive to print even though the whole book, maybe I'll be black and white except for that one page. It's still a color book. So if you're going to put color in your book, spread it out and put it everywhere. I'm kind of like, I did find this book, so I made my head's color and make my pictures color. So you're going to put color, use color, trim size is the size. So this particular book, let's just look at this one, eight and half by 11 and every book, that'd be different. Different costs for every book. How many pages? Whereas the size, that kind of color, black and white.
[05:32] And this book, this particular one is 96 pages. So it's just your 96, the black and white, eight and half by 1196. And for easy argument sense, we're just going to make this $10. I think I actually sell this book on Amazon for nine 95. I like that. Around that $10 mark hit calculate and this tells me the royalty. This is how much money I'm going to make. So there are two channels that marked here. There's the Amazon channel and that's this general channel right here. And then there is expanded distribution which are other channels that createspace will send your book off too. So I've seen my books on Barnes and noble books a million. There are many, many other retailers that they send the book off to him because there's another company involved. You're going to have more royalties, is more fees going to everybody gets their little piece.
[06:24] So you'll notice it's a lot less of a dollar 85. I try to have my books between 2:50 to 3:50, somewhere in there and my royalties. That's where I'm usually comfortable. And that compares to traditional publishers where the royalties are seventy cents to a dollar. So just self publishing, not counting all the other benefits we get from self publishing. You make more money if you do this, especially if you're good at marketing, you make a lot more money from the royalties from your book. But this is a very decent royalty for this book. For a book like this, I'm just the coloring book. I'm never going to compete with, you know, the three 95. I can't get the book down that low, you know, Hong Kong publishers. But for me for doing this, for not having any costs, just make a book. This is fantastic so they can see that so much and make.
[07:10] Then Amazon also sells in Europe, so there's the how much you'd make there and a Great Britain for the first one in this one down here is Europe. So that's pretty cool. The three 85 is my royalty for the book. That's what I get. That's what they pay me. Now, if I wanted to switch this around a little bit, let's just try a couple other scenarios. Let's just say this was a full color book and I'm going to leave the bleed images that it doesn't really matter what the bleed is stuff. We're just going to keep this simple. So full color, eight and a half. I let him. Let's say I had this as a color book, right? What does that do it $10. So 96 pages. My calculate your notice. I'm minus a dollar 57. I'm not charging enough. There aren't enough. There's enough money in there because color is a different printing political printing process.
[07:55] So this book is more expensive to print in color than black and white, so you can. So I need to charge more money for this book and this is where part of the decisions make when you're creating your book is how does it fit in the market? What am I, what am I competitor's pricing? Where does that fit in my too expensive? Could I change something? Can I change the size? And it changed the page count, that kind of thing to get into where I want to be. So let's just raise this up. So anyways, I remember at $10 it was three 85. So it's about, so it's 38 percent is my royalty. That's pretty cool. All right. 14, nine. Let's try that. 14 95 calculate. We're going to pretend this is a color book. I'm in the plus. I got a good dollar 40 but I'm still not unexpanded distribution.
[08:43] Expensive enough. Dollar 59. I can use a turnoff. Expanded. Just don't worry about it if I don't want to get too expensive or I raised my price stray 1995 and see what that does. And now I'm in the plus on both of them. So that was a decision I made when I did this book. This was I charged most of my books are in the $10. 14 95 range. I think I try to 24, 95 for this book. It's all color, has a lot of pages and I'm at. This is where I ran into a problem. I wanted to make sure I was making enough royalties to cover the cost of the book. So. So that's just something that's a little scenario you can kind of play with this royalty calculator member. It's under, under books, right up here, publishing a trademark and then it's on the royalties right here.
[09:32] You can kind of play their scenarios and see what you can, where does your book fit in, how much money you're going to make. And am I charging enough for the book? That's a big one in my charging it up. All right, let's go inside and I'll just show you sort of a let's go and look at some of the royalty stuff. So this is my account isn't my dashboard. This is the month of July. But let's go back to June. You can see I have four nine bookstore, but I want to go into a detailed royalty here. And actually before we do that, let me just show you inside where this is. So let's just pick a book. I'm just pick my world maps regional book and this is the Dashboard for this particular book and you'll notice right over here in the district and your distribution a column, you have channels and pricing.
[10:24] So if I go to pricing, you'll see almost the identical calculator looks like this. I can put my price in, but also tells me this number right here, the minimum list price that I can go down so I can mess around with this book down to 5:38, which is a good piece of information to know. You don't really know that. You have to kind of figure that out from the other calculator. You're like, okay, you just keep moving the number down until they go, Eh, you can't go anymore. But here they tell you what that number is. So this is how low I could make this book if I wanted to. Um, I chose nine 95. It's basically the same size as business book and I get a royalty payment of three 82 expanded is a dollar 83. So that kind of tells me where this book sits.
[11:10] If I go to my channels, remember we talked a little bit about channels and channels are aware it's going to be sold out through the default are um, are these two ones right here? Amazon.com, which is this one, and then Europe, so they also sell the books in England and then they sell them in Europe and so those are just by default where they go. So those ones were always there and then you can pick the expanded distribution if you want. Now some people just shut these off and they make it seem to make a little bit more money because I kind bouncing the things, um, with their regular books. I've never really sold any books. Bookstores, bookstores don't really buy books through createspace because they're print on demand. They can't return them. Um, but they do. But online retail is, yes. I do sell books through online retailers and then I had, I don't know if I've ever sold a book through a library and I don't think they actually do the createspace direct stuff anymore.
[12:01] Um, so you can, but just select them if you want. It's a choice you make. I'm, I like having my books distributed through as many channels as I can. Um, but you can turn these on or off and that's the pricing. Okay. So that's how that works. So you can kind of see what you're getting. Now let's go back to my member dashboard. Let's just go look at some royalties for last month so we can see some here, but let's just go back in for a new nice report. And so you can look at your royalties by title and you can do some different sort of by channel. They also have channel in here. You can see where you're selling or lt by product of that kind of stuff. But I'm just going to do rotate by title or a new report I'm going to pay previous month.
[12:45] Okay. And just run my report and this will show that I ran. Blow this up a little bit. There we go. So I did for the month of June, I had um, 262 bucks across my 40 bucks. So they had. So I took the 262. Let's just organize these so you can see them highs to lows. So my role, regional calorie book has 92 bucks. Then they all go down. So some books, some books that a little. And you can see the royalty that I made right here, so for 92 bucks, $320 and I'm in Great Britain was 13 pounds and in Europe was three. You can see that this is generally often blank or maybe one or two. I don't sell very many books in Europe. Almost everything is done through Amazon, but I do sell books in Great Britain. So that's a channel that you want to keep going and if you can promote that.
[13:38] And then so there's the book and you can then go in and look at the details. I'll click on my details for this particular book in. You'll notice the royalty payments right here, $3, eighty two cents, some kind of fee. I don't know what it is, but in reality I don't really care. I'm really just concerned with this number. This is the list price with a book noticed. Here's one from England, $2, two pounds and nineteen cents. That's a fee that they put on there, but it doesn't really matter what these fees are. For me, it's the royalties that I'm paying attention to, but I want more money, I charge more for the book, raise it up, get more royalty, or make more books either way you want to go. So that's sort of how that kind of works. Let's go back to your dashboard. Let's go back here and you can look at that for, for any book you see them all down.
[14:32] So I hope that that sort of explains a little bit about the royalty and how that works. It's a, it seems a little confusing when you're starting out, but just have to remember that everybody has to make their cut book has to be manufactured. So this paper and ink and oppressed somewhere, some kind of press or some kind of printing device. The shipping that's involved in the book is the managing the ecommerce site and the money and all this. All this stuff. Somebody has to pay for that so everybody gets their piece and um, and we get our pizza. So in reality, I think it's pretty good compared to what you do through a publisher and you have full control over your book. And you can make nice little royalty out of it. Alright. So hope that helps. I'm Bruce Jones and uh, we will see you in the next video. All right. Bye.
Connection and Learning
Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 40 self-published books.
If you want to learn how to create your own book visit Publishing Mastery 101 and see my courses: https://bruce-the-book-guy.usefedora.com/
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