Traditional publisher royalty statements

[beatrice_otter]

If you're interested in the business end of publishing, ebook, traditional, or other, you need to check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog. (AKA Kristine Grayson and Kris Nelscott.)  She has two very interesting posts up on the number of sales of ebooks the Big Six are reporting vs. the number that are actually being sold, and how writers are getting screwed on their royalties.

Royalty Statements
Royalty Statements Update

Apparently, some of the Big Six publishers are significantly underreporting the actual number of e-books sold on writers’ royalty statements.

I heard from dozens upon dozens of traditionally published writers last week, and to a person without exception, they had all looked at their royalty statements and found discrepancies like the ones I found. Some—and I find this terrifying—had the exact same numbers reported on their statement as were on my statement.

That’s not possible, folks. In a six-month period, each individual book title sells a different number of copies than another individual book title, even if the titles are in the same genre.

But within one company at least, the one I was most familiar with, several of us had identical e-book sales for the same period. Some writers in that company who had published books in a series had identical e-book numbers for each book in that series. Again, not possible.

Because of my blog post, at least a dozen writers sat down with numbers and calculators in hand. These writers compared the sales of their self-published e-book titles to the sales of their traditionally published e-book titles, and found startling discrepancies. Even adjusting for price differences (Big Six e-books were priced higher than the self-published books), these writers discovered that their Big Six publishers reported e-book sales of one-tenth to one-one-hundredth of their indie-published titles.

Some of these writers are bestsellers. Their bestselling frontlist novels (released in the past year)—with full advertising and company wide support—sold significantly fewer copies than their self-published e-books, books that had been out for years, books that had no promotion at all.

As I said in last week’s post, the reported sales numbers from some of the Big Six publishers do not pass the sniff test.  I still stand by last week’s statement that this comes not from malice, but from an unwillingness to improve accounting systems to accommodate the new technology.

I hope this all leads to changes in the way they do accounting in the industry.