“Publishers have been demanding control of ebook rights and the lion’s share of the proceeds since before there were ebooks or proceeds, and now it really is a deal breaker. Their contracts presently are giving their writers between 15% and 25% of the proceeds from ebook sales.
But Amazon and Barnes & Noble are allowing any writer, no matter if previously unpublished or blockbuster best-seller, to sell their own e-books directly on their sites and set their own prices within certain parameters. And these self-publishing writers get up to 70% of the price of every ebook sale – not the 25%, which now seems to have evolved into the so-called “industry standard.”
Compare the numbers for an ebook put on sale directly by the writer at $9.99 and the same ebook put on sale by a publisher at say $12.95. In the first instance, the writer makes $6.80 on each sale, in the second, through a publisher and the “industry standard” only $3.25 …
Read this whole article by bestseller author Norman Spinrad:
http://www.sfwa.org/2011/04/guest-post-a-viable-and-just-business-model-for-the-ebook-age/
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Savvy Writers & e-Books online 