Monday, April 24, 2017

Why you should buy from the publisher

I'm not sure how it works with the large publishers, but with the small press, it's always best to buy your print and e-books directly from the publisher, as opposed to buying from an online retailer like that "A" store. The simple reason for this is money. Most small press publishers are doing it out of love...the majority of them don't make enough money to keep them from needing a day job, and the retailers, especially the "A" store take a big percentage from each sale.
As an example, at Nomadic Delirium Press we're now doing a line of stories around an idea I came up with called "The Divided States of America." Most of these shorter stories are selling for 99 cents, not an amount that's going to allow us or the authors to retire, but still, we're all in this to at least make a little pocket change.  With the DSA stories, we have an agreement that we divide the profits in half. Nomadic Delirium takes half, and the author gets half. Now, if one of these stories sells through the NDP bookstore, the profit from that is usually around 66 cents. However, if one of these stories sells through a retailer, the profit is usually around 35 cents. Looking at one story, it's not a huge difference, but if 100 of these stories sell it starts to become significant, and if it's 1000 stories sold, then we're definitely talking about a big difference.
Now, if you take this up to an anthology that sells for $14.95 or a similar amount, you should suddenly be able to see the difference. Even if you just multiply 66 or 35 by 15, you can see that the publisher, and thus the author are making a lot more money when the sale goes through the publisher's store.
So, if you're thinking about buying from the small press, please think about buying directly from them...as opposed to going to one of THOSE sites...

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